 Almost three years after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, a delegation from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission traveled to Japan. NRC experts assisted the Japanese government after the accident, but this was the first time many of the NRC officials responsible for reactor safety in this country had been able to talk to those involved and see firsthand the lingering effects of the accident. Despite the passage of time and the amount of cleanup work completed, many reminders of the earthquake and tsunami remain, but the starkest images for the NRC delegation were the deserted areas nearby. Tens of thousands of people displaced by this accident, and that picture in my mind, I don't think it'll ever go away, and it just drives home to me how important our jobs are. You know, it's tough to go up there and to see the homes that won't be inhabited again, to see the businesses that have stock inside of them and inventory inside of them that won't be used anymore, to see the farms that won't be cultivated again. Going through these little towns that were evacuated, never going to be able to return again, or maybe decades before people can return. And so it really struck in me, we not only need to prevent accidents from happening, but we need to be prepared should the unexpected happen. The NRC group spent many hours discussing their impressions with many different perspectives, but they all agreed that the trip was memorable and important. I don't know of any other way I could have achieved the same level of understanding of what happened here and what the people on site and the people in the surrounding communities went through. Today the Fukushima Daiichi site is home to many large tanks filled with contaminated water and bags filled with contaminated soil and debris. Although the radiation levels have dropped, workers and those touring the site still wear respirators and protective clothing. It is impossible to imagine what it must have been like in March 2011 when the earthquake and tsunami hit the site, but the NRC officials saw a simulation that came eerily close. And the NRC group also heard firsthand accounts from those who had been working during the accident. He said we frequently conducted drills, but what I saw on that day was totally bigger than what I had trained for. I was convinced I would never see anything worse. This was an event that was beyond anything that they had prepared for, that they had trained for, that they expected. Quite frankly it was something beyond their imagination. The experiences that they had at Daiichi with respect to no indications, not knowing what the explosion was or was not. There were staff that went over two weeks without knowing the status of their families in terms of were they safe, how had they been impacted by the natural event, the earthquake and the tsunami. The feeling of helplessness in the face of natural events was a strong message for some on the trip. This happened because of a natural disaster and I don't care how smart we are and I don't care how advanced we are. We don't control natural disasters. For more than two and a half years the NRC has used that unpredictability of natural events magnified by the experiences in Japan to develop a list of lessons learned from the accident. This trip provided even more focus on that area because many of those involved are the very people responsible for ensuring that the lessons make U.S. nuclear plants safer. Seeing the damage from the tsunami and the earthquake really brought home the challenges they were facing and the importance of the work that we're doing now in terms of examining what we need to do for U.S. plants. I think what we tried to do with the lessons learned as we were trying to implement those shortly after the event was to ensure that we gave the operators, the people at the plant the better tools to deal with something that's unexpected when it goes beyond what you are normally expected to face with accidents. We need to make sure that we as a regulator and the industry that we regulate has the capabilities to deal with events that we don't anticipate. I have some pretty high confidence that the things that we have instituted and are instituting in the United States are the right primary things that we should be doing to improve and enhance safety. Safety is not a stagnant end point. You always have to keep looking, stay active, don't ever think that it can't happen. It can happen. It has happened. Don't allow it to happen again.