 All right. Good afternoon, everyone. If I could please ask you to take your seats and get started. Hopefully, somebody will close the doors in the back. There they go. There go the doors. Oh, welcome. Thank you for coming to today's session. Obviously, day two of the RIC in the last technical session of the day. So, we stand between you and some perhaps interesting and fun social activities. My name is Scott Morris. I am the Deputy Executive Director for Operations, specifically for all reactor safety and security and preparedness programs. And it's my pleasure to be here today. I just came into this position a little over a month ago. I previously served, as many of you know, as the regional administrator out in Arlington, Texas for Region 4. This session today is going to be 100% Q&A except for my opening monologue and a quick intro. So, we have some prepared questions already that we thought would be good conversation starters. But we strongly, strongly encourage questions coming to us from the audience. And so, please take advantage of the QR code and use that mechanism to submit your questions. And we'll try to get to all of them. For those of you joining virtually, the process for asking a question to the panel is the same for the last two regulatory information conferences using the Conventus Virtual Platform. And it's on the RIC website. Once you've logged in and joined the session, there will be a tab for electronic question and answer submittal. So, please take advantage of that as well. For those of you in the room, you'll have the opportunity to participate in Q&A, but again, only through the app. So, let me start, first of all, today by introducing today's panel. And I'm going to start, obviously, here with Mr. Ray Lorsen. Thank you, Scott. Good afternoon and welcome to everybody. I'm Ray Lorsen. I'm the Regional Administrator for NRC's Region 1 office. I've been with NRC about 31 years. Most of it in Region 1 have spent a couple years also in NRC headquarters. I've been in this position since the beginning of the year. Thank you. Thanks, Ray. Good afternoon, everyone. So, we do get to do a fun fact. I was just in a previous session, the Tay Talks, and the speakers got to do a fun fact, and so I will. My name is Laura Dudes. I'm the Regional Administrator in Region 2. I've been with the agency about 29 years. Started in headquarters, spent a good chunk of time in Region 1 as an inspector, resident and senior, came back to headquarters and did a little bit of work in new reactors, and then I've been in Region 2 for about eight years, and as many of you know, and it's been mentioned in the plenaries, and as I look at our senior resident inspector out at the Vogel Construction Project, on March 6th at 1537, not that it's too specific, Unit 3 did go critical, and as I look at our inspectors, I just want to thank them because of their work and dedication. Thank you. Laura? Good afternoon. I'm Mohamed Shuaibi. I'm the Deputy Regional Administrator in Region 3. I've been with the agency for 31 years. 20 of those years were in headquarters doing licensing and other activities in headquarters, and since 2014 I've been out in Region 3 to get various positions in that region. I'll keep it short, so thanks for coming and welcome. Good afternoon. I'm John Monninger. I'm the Deputy Regional Administrator for NRC's Region 4 office in Arlington, Texas. Been with the NRC for 34 years, joining back in January of 1989. VASVAS, vast majority of my career has been with a new and advanced reactor, so it's wonderful to hear the significant accomplishments down at the Vogel sites. Spent 31 plus years up here in headquarters and been down in Region 4 for the past two and a half years, so I'll turn it over to Shane. Good afternoon, so I am Shane Lees. I am the Chief Nuclear Officer for American Electric Power's DC Cook Nuclear Plant in Southwest Michigan. I asked to use the broken microphone, but I was overruled, so we'll keep sharing. And online, virtually joining us today is Dr. Ed Lyman. Hi, I'm Ed Lyman. I'm Director of Nuclear Power Safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, and I've never worked for the NRC, but I've spent so much time in public meetings. Sometimes I feel like I do, so thank you. Thanks, Dr. All right, so let's just jump right in. I said it was gonna be 100% Q&A, so we'll start a little bit light here. So I'll start with Region 4. John, the question that I have is, there seems to be a sudden increase in the improvement in the performance of Region 4 in the last six weeks. So what do you attribute that? Well, hopefully it will continue, but it has a lot to do with our previous RA, so. All right, but on a serious note, thanks for being a good sport. So this one I'm gonna pose to Ray and to John, a serious question. The NRC's current strategic plan differs markedly from prior years by including organizational goals that go beyond the agency's traditional, mission-based focus on safety and security. This new strategic plan also includes goals of fostering organizational health and inspiring stakeholder confidence. I'd like to hear from Ray and John to start us off on how they are helping the agency to meet these new goals. Thank you, Scott. Those are two very important topics that are really critical to our success as a regulator. Starting off with the organizational health, I view that as it's important that we have high levels of teamwork, trust, and employee engagement. It's an active focus area for us in region one is to establish all three of those attributes. Teamwork starts with recognizing that we're one NRC and that it's important that we collaborate with our peers, both in headquarters and the other regions to do the work and the mission of the agency. In terms of trust, high-performing organizations that have high levels of trust generally perform better. Employees perform better and it's something that we keep a close eye on and it's really systematically something that we try to achieve through frequent interactions with employees, communications, and also making sure that we listen and explain the why behind decisions in addition to just explaining the decision. The last thing I talked about was employee engagement. And I would define employee engagement. When we see high levels of employee engagement, employees are willing to expend discretionary effort to help us achieve the overall mission of the agency. So those are just three very, very important topics. I don't see them as something that's less important than any of the technical topics, but rather central to our success as an agency, not only today, but also to prepare us for the future. That's right. John. So yeah, maybe I'll just chime in a little bit. So really to me, as Scott had mentioned and Ray had mentioned, the big difference to me is organizational health. We've always had the mission where safety security in there and for years, be it increasing public confidence or enhancing stakeholder confidence, but it's really about the organizational health. If you look at the NRC, we've been really successful in our mission. Recent results, such as the government-wide Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey and other assessments internally, have really highlighted some significant challenges internally. So I think that focus when organizational health is very, very important to make sure we can make, we can meet our mission in the future. You really need that engaged workforce focused on the mission. So we really have to address the cultural issues within the NRC. You know, one of the things I'd say within Region 4, probably four years ago, they developed a vision statement that we've been significantly leaning into for the past couple of years. It has three elements, fostering a culture of high trust, having staff work on their employee growth and development and is inspiring our leadership at all levels. So we developed a detailed plan to achieve our vision. We adopted objectives and key results that were aligned with each of those things and certain things that we've been doing is significantly investing in Stephen Covey's speed of trust program, monthly huddles, discussion about the various behaviors and how we'll use them in interactions internally, how we use those in interactions with the regulated community and how we'll use those in interactions with the external community. In addition to that, you know, doubling down with the staff and the development of individual development plans and reaching out in terms of mentors. The NRC has an aspiring leadership program and leadership at all levels program. So we've been pushing and guiding our staff to really engage in those activities. We've established a leadership book club in which we all delve together in some type of reading of a leadership book and coming together in multiple sessions to discuss those lessons learned and how we'll use them within the region to improve. So with that, maybe I'll turn it back over to Scott. Thanks, John, I appreciate that. Next question, because of retirements and attrition, the NRC has a stated goal of hiring 400 new staff this year, this fiscal year, with such a high amount of turnover. What measures are the regional office is taking to ensure that new inspectors are qualified and trained and qualified to implement the reactor oversight process efficiently and effectively. So let me start that one with Laura. Yeah, so I love this question and I'm sorry, if you work in region two or if you have a utility in region two, you have heard me say this, you will continue to hear me say this. It is our highest priority, right? We're talking about hiring 400 this year. I know in region two, we hired in 2022 about 37 people and so that's close to 20%. We're gonna continue to do that. You heard the EDO talk about in a couple of years, the turnover's 30, 40%, right? And so great, we're hiring them. How do we train them? How do we develop them? How do we retain them and keep them engaged? And to me, that's one of the highest priorities as the regional administrator. If you look at our sites, our resident inspectors and our senior resident inspectors will be out there and they will have less experience than perhaps the current cadre of inspectors that have been out for 15 to 20, in some cases, 30 years. So I think it's really important that we innovate and try different ways to make sure we have these folks trained and training is not just classroom, right? I was a resident, senior resident for a long time. The best learning I ever got was walking around with a qualified inspector and it didn't have to be a resident, walking around with a security inspector and engineering inspector. So one of the things that we've done, we had two senior residents collectively with probably 60 years of experience that we're about to retire. And so we asked them, we said, hey, will you stay? Right, will you stay? You don't have to be a senior resident, you don't have to go respond to the plant at 2 a.m., but we're gonna put you in this position for two years and your job is to work with all of our new inspectors to go out to the sites with them, to walk with them, to help develop them, not just the things that you read in the book, not just the qualification program, but that intentional individual talent development that is needed not only to train you to be a good engineer, to have good eyes on the plant, but also to understand the things that aren't necessarily written in a book in terms of how you actually execute the job. So we're really happy with these two, is two the right number? We're not sure, we might go to three or four as we bring new people on. And so it gives us that OJT, that intentional touch point with people that have collectively 60 years worth of experience, but you also have to think that as you are bringing a third or 30 to 40% turnover in your staff, you know, you need someone to train them, right? And if you're taking that out of the time away from the people who are actually doing the job, the senior inspectors, we have to also stay focused on baseline. So I think it's really important that you don't let your knowledge walk out the door, but they may not wanna walk around with a beeper, beeper. Sorry. Dating yourself. I had a beeper, 24 seven, but they would love to stick around and train the next generation of nuclear professionals. That's great, thanks. Mo, did you wanna add anything to that? Yeah, if I may. So I think our numbers are probably similar. We hired 26, we're hiring 26 people this year. Make sure you speak right into that thing. You good? Pro tip. Yep. We're hiring 26 people this year and we hired 30 people last year. So when you look at our budget of 170 people, it's about a third of our staff. So you can imagine the load that that has on our existing staff and supervisors in terms of training the individuals and get them qualified and ready to go out in the field and implement the agency's mission. But on the other side, we're hiring some very bright, high quality people. And so I am very optimistic about them being able to get through the process, them being able to get out there in a year or two, in some cases, to have that qualification and actually engage in our important activities. For training, I don't think it's a secret. We use the agency's training program. The training and qualification program includes classroom training. It includes on-the-job training. It includes simulator training for those on the reactor side of the house. And at the end of all of that, once they do all those things that are required, then they sit through an oral board and a rigorous one at that. So what we're doing in the region is we're trying to facilitate that. Some of the ideas we actually stole from region two. For example, we have a new position in our organization, a staff person that's dedicated to come up with thoughts and ideas on how best to help the new staff get trained and qualified. Somebody sitting in the audience here came up with the idea. She was one of our region two folks that we took from region two. But essentially this person, like Laura said, goes out on inspection with the new hires as an additional person that is there to work one-on-one with them to help them understand better the scope of the inspection, the purpose of the inspection, and how we execute the inspection, how we disposition issues when they come up. It helps the individual, they get the one-on-one time. It also helps the team. Like Laura said, they can focus on the agency's mission. They can focus on the inspection that they're doing. That's one of the examples that we're using. In addition, what we do and we've done this historically in region three is when we get new hires, and this is probably more important today than it's ever been with the number of new people, we assign each new hire a coach and an ambassador, our coach, works with the individuals to make sure that they're doing well in relation to their training and qualification. The ambassador, the purpose of that person is to really help them acclimate what the region, to the region and to the agency. So we've been doing that for a while, and I think all of these things are very important and become even more and more important as we have turnover in staff. We've also instituted a forum, a knowledge transfer forum within the region, and we did this probably a couple of years ago. I don't remember exactly which year, but we would discuss current and past issues that come up in events, allow for the staff to collaboratively discuss issues, share their knowledge, share their experiences, challenge each other sometimes. This has been very helpful for our new staff as well as our existing staff in terms of when issues come up, how they can challenge each other and share their experiences. Our branch chiefs got together and looked at the qualification process, the board process that I mentioned earlier. They streamlined it a little bit. Our board process covers a lot of, the oral board process that I mentioned covers a lot of material, so they decided that really the focus should be, for that test, should be on the technical and regulatory matters that these individuals will be engaged in when they get qualified. So they refocused it and streamlined it. They eliminated the administrative things that used to be covered as part of the oral board process. So that gave us some efficiency. Now, the administrative functions are still important. They'll cover that outside of the qualification process, though, so it helps us in making sure that the individuals and new staff that we're hiring are actually getting through the qualification process in a timely manner. On an as needed basis, our branch chiefs also implemented a group where they would call the new hires together and they would sit and engage with them and talk to them about what sorts of things are on their minds, what sorts of questions they may have, what sorts of qualification type questions, training type questions, agency type questions, whatever they may be. Get together with them and answer those questions, share some of their experiences. And in one case, we had a branch that had a lot of new hires. I think half of the branch was new hires. Within the staff, one of the senior staff members in that branch actually created a forum for the staff to get together. Without the supervisors. They wanted to build their relationships so that the staff felt comfortable coming to them. They knew who they were, especially in the environment that we're in today where there's a lot of remote work. Come together, get to know each other, build those relationships so that we could feel comfortable engaging on those topics. So I'll sum it up, I'll say, and overall, I'm very confident, very comfortable with all that we're doing to get our people ready. I think they're gonna be ready. I think, like I said earlier, we have very capable staff with experience. We have very capable supervisors. We're bringing in a lot of bright people very optimistic and very confident that we'll be ready for the task. Great. Thank you. A very comprehensive answer. I'm gonna turn to a question from the audience. What are your thoughts on oversight of risk-informed initiatives and specifically oversight of licensee probabilistic risk assessments? And I'm gonna turn this, I'm gonna ask Shane to answer that first. And I'm gonna ask you to repeat the question. Sure, sure. I'll just get to the meat of it. What are your thoughts on the oversight of NRC's oversight of licensee PRAs, probabilistic risk assessments? So to me, it all feeds into being risk-informed. And there have been a lot of the sessions that I have gone to where we've heard about different aspects of risk-informed, whether it's be risk smart or rhythm. V-LISR is another one, the very low safety significant issue resolution. And so I do commend the NRC on their efforts to develop and use processes that rely upon risk-informed decision-making. And a very big part of that is the probabilistic risk assessment. You know what it does is it primarily allows us to respond to issues in a manner that is absolutely commensurate with the safety significance of the item. And in the absence of such processes, we'll continue to see resources, whether that's within the NRC or within the industry, that are devoted to resolving issues that both the industry and the NRC agree have very low safety significance. So moreover, the resolution issues, whether they fall into the scope of rhythm or V-LISR, for us, those low-level items in the absence of processes, those tend to be the most difficult problems to solve. And before we talked and discussed about risk-informed decision-making, I can think of two specific items that we had to address at the Cook plant. And because we weren't able to appropriately address safety significance, we spent man months, if not man years, of engineering time coming up with solutions and modifications. That was followed up by man months of construction resources, not to mention all of the dollars that go on with that. So it's clear to us that there are regions that do value processes like V-LISR and risk-informed decision-making, and we believe the staff should encourage and empower, continue improvement and development of those processes, again, so that we disposition issues, commensurate with their safety significance. You know, there was some discussion, a lot of discussion in these early questions about culture. And when I think about risk-informed decision-making, I know that it has a direct impact on culture. The employees who work for me, the employees that work for the NRC, the employees that work for you, they're smart individuals, they're highly qualified individuals, and they generally know when something is important and when something is not important. And so when we assign resources to issues that have low value, they, above everybody else, they know it. And it's very difficult to feel fulfillment in your job if you are working on something that is of low value. And within our industry, low value means it doesn't significantly add to safety and it doesn't add to reliability. So individually, if we don't utilize risk-informed processes, it will negatively impact the willingness of our employees, you mentioned discretionary effort, it will impact that discretionary effort that's offered up. And more broadly, then you'll see negative impacts on the overall culture. So in my opinion, and I heard the words used also at this conference, the appropriate application of risk-informed thinking, the appropriate application is for us a force multiplier because it increases, it encourages that active engagement of the workforce. And so for me, all this discussion about risk, I do wanna highlight and it's been made in several other, the panel discussions is, risk-informed processes, they do just that, they inform the decision making. But I do wanna highlight that it's called a risk-informed process, it's not a risk-based process. And so as much value as can come from using well-developed probabilistic risk, it still has to be paired with that deterministic aspect. There still has to be engineering judgment. There still has to be an allowance to use the insights that are provided and there are gonna be cases where in addition to the risk argument, all of those other factors may change the decision that is made. So long answer to say I'm in strong favor of the appropriate use of risk-informed, which PRA supports. Sure. Part of the question, thanks Shane, part of the question I inferred was there may be some challenge associated with the manner in which the agency provides oversight of the actual PRA model itself that's in use at the sites. Maybe one of the, what you all wanna comment on that. No, thanks Scott. The question really relates to, when you use the term be risk smart, what does be risk smart means? And I would offer, you start by understanding what's important to risk. And that requires that first off, you understand what is in the licensee's PRA model. What are the contributors and drivers of risk and how do they interact with each other? Second question you get into is, does the model that the plants developed or maybe modified is a consistent with the actual plant configuration? And so we've had some examples where changes will be made to a PRA model that put the model in a configuration where it's not consistent with the actual operating plant. And the last area you get into relative to adequacy of PRA models is the methodology used in the PRA is a consistent with that of peer reviewed science. So those are three critical aspects that need to be understood. If you look at the history of PRA models, they were developed at a time where there was less use of them to perform certain regulatory functions, but now they're used very broadly. They're used to support things such as tech spec, allowed outage time extensions. They're used to support risk informed arguments or licensing application perhaps. They might be used to provide a basis for a notice of enforcement discretion. And so they're being used broadly to help maintain and establish the risk profile of the plant as various configuration changes are being considered. And so I think it's just gonna be as they're being used more frequently in the plants to perform these types of functions, it's more incumbent upon us as a regulator providing oversight to ensure we really do have a good solid understanding when we say something is low risk. Do we understand why it's low risk and how that assertion or how that conclusion was reached? And so I do believe we have to provide some level of oversight into the PRA models. I'm not sure exactly what that looks like, but it all starts with understanding what's in the model, is it consistent with the plant configuration or are they following generally accepted practices? Having said that, we do have our own independent sparm models that we use quite often to do a wide range of risk assessments and applications in the plant. So that provides an independent check, if you will, for the NRC. So just a couple of thoughts to think about. Thanks. Ed, would you like to weigh in on this topic? Yes, and I guess just on that last point, I know in the past that there are sometimes differences in the results of the sparm model analysis and the licensee PRA analysis and that's gonna lead to lengthy disputes or dialogues on how you classify this. Spirited discussions. Of various findings. So can you hear me well? Yes, yes. So I just want to put that out there because from the public point of view, if the NRC's independent models are not giving the same results as a licensee, it's hard for us to judge who's right. And whether the answer is gonna come out in the right place. Thanks for that, Ed. Thanks for that. Yeah, you wanna add one quickly? Okay, go ahead. Well, I just, I think that this is a great topic and it's a timely topic because I know we're starting to discuss this with the program office in terms of what this looks like. People are, the senior reactor analysts are going out working through issues with various utilities to see what would we do? And I was grateful enough to get a briefing on this because I missed the one with these guys. But I think it's something that we should all be thinking about. Ray's point that the things that are now relied upon using the PRA are a lot different today and there's a lot more flexibility which improves reliability and safety. And so what is the appropriate touch point? And I don't think we've actually landed on an answer but I think this is the time for us to begin the dialogue about what would be the appropriate touch point going forward on this important, on the importance of the PRA and the configuration control. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, everybody. Ed, I wanna stay with you if that's okay. The next topic is about trends in NRC inspection findings. And we've talked about this a lot. It's certainly been a subject that's been discussed at a recent regulatory information conference session. So this is just staying with that theme. At last year's RIC, we discussed the fact that there had been an overall decline in the number of inspection findings from about 2015 to 2021. And we were still evaluating and refining our analysis of the data and we're certainly doing that again with the 2022 inspection cycle now having been complete. And in the most recent cycle, the number of findings has actually gone up slightly. And there are a lot of factors in play here during the period that could be influencing our data. So the question really is, do you have any thoughts about the trend in inspection finding and what it was and what it looks like it is now? Yes, and I'd like to point out that again from the public perspective, from my perspective, it's the ROP and the findings and the action matrix are the main conduit or the main source of information for how the public has a sense of the safety of the fleet. So it's very important that those findings and the processes by which they're determined are consistent and accurate. And as we heard from the commissioner at Caputo this morning, it should be transparent so the public should at least have some ability to see how the sausage is being made although we may not always understand it. But in this case, I don't wanna say that I'm glad to see the number of findings going up, but it could be that things are returning to a more normal level of inspection oversight. Again, you point out there are many different factors in place so it's pretty hard for some on the outside to determine what's going on. You have, in addition to the decrease which preceded COVID, you have the impact of COVID which had an impact not only on the inspections themselves but also all the exemptions that were granted for various security and for maintenance and licensee inspection procedures that could have had an impact on some of the safety equipment of the plant and that may be showing up now, the return of more visual or onsite inspections or returning a normal situation there could be revealing more findings that were not accessible when inspections were remote. And then there's the other layer of how the decisions being made as to whether a particular inspection finding is minor or more than minor and is there a political context or an organizational context that tips the balance whether something is disposed of one way or another and how much leeway is there for making those kinds of decisions. It's not just the grain findings but it's also the white findings and that ties in also to what we're just talking about and whether risk, how risk information is being applied in those decisions. For instance, I did hear a year or two ago that the number of white findings are one significant reason why the number of white findings have decreased and now they are increasing again but what was the application of flex credit to that affects the safety significance of various findings and that troubles me because that introduces inherent uncertainties into these determinations because of just the questions about how effective flex will actually be in various situations and how well that can be modeled in PRA. And also a kind of loop of how well are the inspections ensuring the flex equipment will be available so that if they were called upon to address a safety incident that they would be actually affected and you don't wanna get into a loop where because flex equipment is beyond design basis that you're not inspecting it that much yet you're giving credit to findings for flex availability and then concluding that there are low safety significance because of the flex. So there are a lot of things going on. I look forward, I certainly hope that the agency is parsing out of these different effects and may be able to say something about these trends on clearly the public to help us understand better. Thank you. There's a lot packed into that answer and I obviously don't wanna resist the opportunity to have perhaps one of our regional administrators weigh in on that. Ray, you wanna go first? Your point at yourself, so. I would love to go first, thanks. Now that was a great, great answer, Ed. And I'll just stay off by the beginning. We're aligned 100%, right? Our findings need to be absolutely crystal clear in terms of our basis for arriving at whatever determination we make whether it's a green finding, a white finding or something else. And I think the public goes that and the public are key stakeholders and our success to be viewed as a technically credible competent regulator rests on our ability to make timely decisions, make well thought out decisions and communicate them effectively to the public. So we're 100% aligned. You did mention the idea that sometimes there's differences between our assessment of a finding versus the licensees assessment of a finding and then we engage in what Scott has referred to as a spirited discussion. In my experience, it's typically less the PRA models that are being used. It's more the underlying engineering assumptions that go into the model that you're using as an input. In terms of flex, we will look at flex as a potential mitigating strategy, but we're very careful how we do that. We look at it from a standpoint of considering margins and understanding kind of nuances. If flex credits increase by your percentage amount, it doesn't make a significant difference or not. In cases where it might make a color change or typically in cases where you're in a sort of a range where you're close to a boundary anyhow. But getting back to the question of inspection finding trends, I would just start by saying that I don't focus in terms of how many inspection findings. That's not how I describe success for the inspectors going out there. The expectations that I provide the inspectors, I want them to be thorough. I want them to probe. I want them to look factually at the information that's out there, make assessments. If they find there's a gap in a licensee performance, then let's evaluate those facts. Let's put in the right safety and risk perspective, regulatory perspective, make a determination, and then communicate effectively. That's how I define success, not necessarily by any particular number. During a period of time that does in question, the 2016 through maybe 2020 timeframe, there was an awful lot of variables that were contributing to just overall things that we were doing in the agency. First off, their inspection program continues to evolve. We make changes to our inspection procedures, including the procedures that we use to determine where is the threshold of significance for calling an inspection finding minor, or possibly more than minor. We had COVID as something that Ed had mentioned. We had new initiatives that we were reaching for across the agency. Some of the things we've talked about, the be risk smart approach. Backfit was a big initiative for us. So it was a very complicated time in terms of just lots of things going on. I would not look at any particular trend and I can't say, hey, here's one causal factor. I do think it's kind of one of these all the above type approaches. At the end of the day, our focus is looking forward. What do we need to do to remain effective at the plants we oversee? Thank you, John. Yeah, and maybe just a few more comments or our thoughts. So I mean, a trend can be increasing, decreasing, or it can be flat. Honestly, I mean, when you think about the program and all the factors that go into it, to me, you should expect variations. You should see it going up. You should see it going down. I think to me, the most discomforting thing would be if it was flat. I think it would be discomforting if the number of findings were the same across all regions. I think it would be discomforting if the number of findings per site were the same. I mean, you think about the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry is not a monolith. There are variations in performance from site to site. There are variations in senior management at the site. Senior management comes and goes. Staff at the sites comes and goes. Programs are implemented. Programs are implemented to correct things and fix things and to improve performance. So if a program is implemented to improve performance at a site, you would expect over time that site findings would go down. Ray hit it pretty strongly on changes in the program driven by Mike King. I mean, if, well, I'm sorry. Driven by our office of nuclear reactor regulation and Mike King is the, so Mike, yeah, so you threw me off there. So, yeah, so it makes no sense to change the program if the result of those changes aren't going to have an impact. We're trying to take lessons learned. Those lessons learned should either identify new things or things should disappear. So incorporation of program changes, lessons learned, should have an impact on the curve. Ray talked about changes in our staff. So, and Laura did, you know, with the expertise walking out the door. Hey, so you're worried about the expertise walking out the door, but you have a lot of these bright new students, kids coming in that have phenomenal observations. So there's just many, many things that really play into this. And just maybe five more seconds. You know, one of the things we've observed within Region 4 just last year, ENSIR, the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response implemented and NRR implemented the Cyber Security Inspection Program. So that is a new procedure. That's a new program starting brand new 2022. You see some trends potentially going up. I know within Region 4, we've completed, you know, a handful of our first cyber inspections and there's a handful of findings, you know, coming out of that. So you can expect changes in programs, new findings, improved performance, findings to go down, people come in. So it's a very, very dynamic and I really do believe what we have to be worried about is convergence across all the sites, convergence across the regions, et cetera. There should be variations out there. So anyway, that's it. That was more than five seconds extra. But okay, I sense the passion on it. So I let you go. I think that was really well said, though. It was, it was very well said. That was a really good job and you've given us an out-to-blame, Mike King. Yeah, I know. We'll get to you, King. Shane, I'm gonna turn to you on this one, that's okay. As part of last year's RIC, we also talked about the very low, I'm gonna see if I can get this, very low safety significance issue resolution process, off-fictionally known as V-LISR. And that process was used, let's see, six times in 2020, four times in 2021, six times last year and currently two times this year. The NRC recently expanded the scope of the V-LISR process to include non-reactor oversight process related issues. And so now, and V-LISR can now be used for generic industry issues to resolution. This expansion of V-LISR would allow NRC to close a generic issue to another process so that we wouldn't have unresolved open or potentially to another process and hopefully would result in not having unresolved items just hanging out there for long periods of time. So I guess all that is to say, and again I'll start with Shane. What insights would you, do you have relative to the implementation of V-LISR over these past few years and its potential in the future? Yeah, sure, so since I have the mic, I wanna go back to the last question for a second. You know, so the whole discussion about significance determination, you don't get to that discussion if you don't have a finding in the first place. And that is the focus of the industry is to achieve zero findings. And I agree with you, there is, when you have fluctuations in the number of findings at low levels, to me that is an indicator of health. Health that the industry is responsive to the regulation, to adhering to the regulation, and health that the regulator is appropriately regulating. I just wanna go back to the fact that the only right answer is to have no findings. And we work pretty hard as an industry when, and I know it is spread across the industry, but when one station, when one utility has a finding, we all learn from it. That's part of the operating experience that we share. And so that's where, as an industry, that's where our focus needs to be. Maintain zero findings, maximize the leverage of operating experience so that we all learn once as an industry. So then going to the V-LISR question, you know what, I pretty well answered that in my first discussion. The only thing I would highlight is that we did, DC Cook was one of the first utilities to exercise the V-LISR process. And again, without that availability of that process to evaluate the safety significance of the issue, it was an issue that came upon us in a refueling outage. And there was no clear path out of it other than spending an inordinate amount of time, an inordinate amount of money that clearly was not commensurate with the safety significance of the issue presented. And I do want to thank Region Three because we worked through this. It was relatively new in the process and we worked through it together. And I think came to a healthy outcome, which for me shows the absolute value of the V-LISR process and other risk informed decision making because that avoided time, those avoided resources, the avoided money was able to be applied to things that had substantially more safety value. Thanks, Shane. Moe, did you want to comment on that? Yeah. Since she just got complimented by Shane. I appreciate that. Yeah, I would. Your question is about V-LISR process and what we think of it. I actually very much support the V-LISR process. Should I thank NLR, Andrea Vail versus Mike, I don't know. So there you go. Thank you. Yeah, no, I think we worked it together. I think we came up with it together. In fact, Jack Geisner, the regional administrator for Region Three was one of the champions for it. And we had a brand chief on the task force and then we worked it together as an organization. It's a very good tool. In my mind, it's one of the tools that, this is an example of a tool that we used to become a modern and risk informed regulator. He's absolutely, Shane, you're absolutely right. This is about a deliberate decision that the agency makes. You say, you exercised it at DC Cook, we exercised it at DC Cook. This is an NRC decision to exercise this process. But we do it together, like get information from you and make sure that we understand what's happened in there, the significance of it, the regulatory basis of it, et cetera. But we use it to make a deliberate decision as to how much to spend in terms of resources on issues that aren't very clear. It is a tool for us to smartly manage resource expenditures of the agency. And I very much appreciate having that process. For background, just to give you a little bit of background, I think Dan Dorman, our EDO actually explained it at a high level in an earlier session. It applies in cases where questions come up during inspections that if found to be violations, and that's key, if found to be violations, because we haven't determined whether they are or aren't yet, they would be of very low safety significance, that's where the title comes from, or green, or their severity level four, which is the lowest safety significant violation in a traditional enforcement space. Again, if found to be violation is critical, because we don't know, we haven't determined that yet. It really gets to the clarity of the licensing basis associated with the issue. And if it's unclear, and it's very low safety significance, we're gonna move on. That's right. And a lot of times that is exactly where the debate centers is around, is it in the licensing basis, or not in the licensing basis of the plan? And sometimes we could spend a lot of time, like Shane said, trying to figure that out. So it helps us do that. It's also important, and I'll note this, is we document this in our inspection reports to say we found this issue, we exercised it through the, we exercised our VLISR process, we put it out there so it's available, it's public, and we reserve the right to go back in the future if some information comes to light that gives us that certainty about the licensing basis. We find out sometime in the future that in fact it is part of the licensing basis. It should have been a violation. We could pick that up again and disposition it. In region three, we've used it five times. One of the examples is the one that Shane talked about. Most recently we used it in a Clinton case. There were questions regarding undervoltage and the impact of undervoltage conditions on safety related motors. And I'll be honest, that one was a very strong debate within the regions. We had very strong views, I want to say both ways, but three ways on this one, views that it's a violation, views that it's not a violation, views that the best approach for this is to actually use the VLISR process. We landed on this as a VLISR process type of issue. And even then, this was challenged by our own staff. A staff and a couple of supervisors in the region formally challenged us on this through our non-concurrents process, which is a differing views process that we exercise in the agency to make sure that we vet alternative views. And we were fortunate enough to have a manager from region one working with us, Paul's here in the audience. He actually evaluated that non-concurrents. And just to make sure that he was comfortable with the decision he was gonna make, he reached out and sought out expertise from region four to make him feel comfortable. And ultimately, he landed on its, the best approach is actually to exercise the VLISR process. So on this one, we may not have saved a lot of resources, but I do think it was a good use of the process. We have three other examples in the region. We exercised it once at Prairie Island for a longstanding URI that was related to tornado missile issues and impacts on class one structure systems and components. We exercised it once at Lisell for questions related to the scoping of some valves into the IST program. Shane talked about DC Cook and then we exercised it at Fermi for questions regarding the application of tech spec LCOs to mechanical draft cooling tower break system. So it would exercise it successfully on a number of occasions and we're very pleased with the process and how it helps us manage our resources. Thank you. Thanks, Mo. Lord, did you have a comment on that? Yeah. So I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna say I agree with what Mo was talking about. It is a great, it's a useful process. I think a couple of points I just wanna highlight is that, again, the first thing we do is we have to be convinced, right? And we have to convince ourselves very low safety significance, right? It, that's the first part of this process. So it's not like we're shying away from work that's hard. We say, all right, very low safety significance. Even if we put two years of work on this, it's not going to move the needle on the safety of the plants. And I think you asked a bit, Scott, like how do we feel about it? And I pulse our inspectors every once in a while. We've used it nine times for various issues. Most recently, we expanded it beyond the ROP traditional findings because we had an issue with an espacy loading campaign and I was really impressed with the way the staff went through the process. As regional administrator, I mean, we have inspectors, we have branch chiefs, we have division leads. They are the decision makers, right? I'm listening and I'm aware, but it's, you know, I don't, for lack of a better word, you just don't wanna be all that heavy handed. You wanna let them go through their process, talk to their peers, get as much information as they can. And then when the inspector was done, she was briefing me and just really thoughtful approach to I think that this, you know, and she had to work with the program office, not my king, NMSS because that's the espacy and, you know, get some consensus there. And so that's really the first use of it outside of the ROP. And it really, in my mind at the end of the day, was a good decision made by the staff to truncate any more resources on this issue for now. But the other really powerful thing, as Moe said, is that the staff can then document this position, right? They don't, we have high integrity, great capacity intelligent inspectors that I think we all agree how much we respect and support them. And so to give them the ability to write down, here's what I did, here's what we concluded, and they have that ability to reach back if new information becomes available. I think that's really important to show that we're supporting our inspectors. Thanks. Thanks, Laura. Ed, do you have any different perspectives you might wanna share? Yeah, just a bit. I guess I would ask the agency to think about how this process might look to the outside in sort of the most unfavorable view. You could see it as, well, you know, it's too confusing and we don't even understand what the legal requirements are for this particular site. It's too hard to figure that out. And hell, it doesn't matter anyway, so let's throw out this safety concern. And, you know, I'm being a little facetious but not entirely, because we don't wanna see a process where, you know, difficult issues are perhaps just disposition, because they're too difficult. And I know the other piece is whether or not it's very low safety significance that ties into what we're just discussing is how good are the PRAs and how well is it understood that these are actually very low? But I think it does raise a number of procedural questions and to my mind, the fundamental thing is, is there a safety problem here that the inspector's uncovered that really does need to be fixed? And why, you know, was it hanging out there for so long just because the licensees are pushing back and saying, you know, we don't accept this? That's not a good enough reason to just throw it away. So, and as far as documenting it, you know, I tried to make my way through the non-concurrence process on the Clinton undervoltage. And, you know, obviously it's pretty hard for your mortals to understand. But it sounds, you know, on the surface, it sounds like a pretty serious safety issue if a number of important emergency core cooling system functions simply don't work under these circumstances and they require operator interactions and aren't part of the procedures. If I'm mischaracterizing, let me know. But that sounds like a big problem potentially. And if it weren't so hard for anything to be elevated to a generic issue and eventually make it through the back of the process and end up with strengthening requirements, then maybe it wouldn't, you know, be so bad if you left an unresolved plant level. But I mean, it seems like any, you know, almost every generic issue these days is ending up with no new requirements. And I'm not sure that that's always the right outcome for some of the serious problems that have been revealed. Just take the Dwayne Arnold Duret show that I guess we talked about last year that ended up, even though an issue was identified with these single unit plants and it was, again, just disposition with no new requirements. The high energy arc and faults again. So I'm just not sure that when you're being risk smart that you aren't going overboard in some of these circumstances. And again, for the public to really understand that basis is heavily lit. I really appreciate that. Everybody's perspective on this is very important. So thank you. Very, very interesting and I think enlightening. Let me go to an audience question here. Let's see. All right, how about this one? And it is touched on this a little bit. John did in a very passionate way, but we'll go, we'll keep going. Cyber security inspections. Recently the pilot inspections of cybersecurity milestones one through seven that we now ultimately, as John mentioned, incorporated a new full implementation inspection procedure into the ROP which is now conducted biennially. And we've only implemented this inspection a handful of times since we've institutionalized this new procedure. Just maybe expand on this a little bit. Can the panel members share their perspectives on this new inspection procedure and perhaps how it's being implemented and what are the implications? John certainly teed that up earlier, but. So thanks, Scott. And this is John Montanger from Region 4. Maybe I'll start out. And as Scott had mentioned, the new cyber procedure was implemented January 1st last year, 2022. It's a small team inspection, typically encompassing two NRC inspectors and two contractors for a week, approximately 77 hours in direct inspection hours, et cetera. With that said, there is a pretty robust, intensive effort in preparation for the inspection. I guess some of the experiences we've been hearing back from our team and from the licensees is it's quite, quite challenging that week on site in terms of the material to go through. So far within Region 4, we have 12 sites. We've completed inspections of seven of the 12. And we have a range of I guess outcomes for those sites. Some sites have a robust program and they continue to maintain a very seasoned cyber staff and following through on those inspection beliefs essentially had zero findings at those other sites while they may have had mature programs, they've had a significant turnover in their staffing. And there's been anywhere from two to six findings at those very sites, green findings. So the experience has really arranged for those seven sites within Region 4 and even more recently I guess one site informed us and their self-assessment in advance of the inspection that they're not quite ready for the NRC to come out and complete the inspection. So we're working with that licensee. So lessons learned are great. We're working with the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response and Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. We're collecting lessons learned. I think it's fair to envision changes coming out of it but we have to run through at least one cycle through that whether it's changes in documentation require, whether it's changes in the minor or more than minor, we still have to work through that. But I did look through the various findings other than issues with staffing. There isn't really a thread in terms of the aspect of the cyber programs that the findings have come through. So maybe I'll just stop there. Laura, did you want to comment on this? So I agree with John. And we're having a very similar experience in Region 2. I would just say that this is an area as we continue to move forward with digital I&C upgrades. And as we go into extended operation, we have the Vogel Plant in Region 2, which is a digital plant. I think we've just got to keep working on it. We've gone through milestone eight. We're now implementing the new procedure. I've heard some of the same challenges that John has but this is an area that's not going to go away. It's going to continue to challenge us and we're going to have to keep working through that. The other thing is the staffing and expertise. I've been on a, I've shadowed a cyber inspection in the past and I talked to the contractors and I would say, I know we have our own unique language here at the NRC and you've heard about our acronyms but then I start talking to somebody about cybersecurity and I've been doing this for almost 30 years. And I'm following but I'm starting to glaze over at some point and so that is, I mean, because you have to stay on top of your game and on top of what is the latest and greatest because if you don't just go get a degree in cyber and then execute, I mean, this is an ever changing environment and I think it's something, and I am leaning forward. I know that's not exactly the question but it's something that's really important that we all stay focused on, continue that dialogue and as we expand our use of digital, we have to continue to think about what this oversight might look like in the future. Thanks. Thank you. So let's stick with the staff and the development and the skills needed piece. Shane, I'll start with you. This is a question from the audience. What does DC Cook and industry as a whole doing to ensure a knowledgeable and capable staff in light of the turnovers and retirements and just overall attrition? Yeah, so when I was sitting here listening to the challenges of the regions, it's the very same challenges that we have in first retaining the talent that we have and two, bringing in new talent. And so with respect to retaining talent, we work very hard on culture just like the my NRC counterparts have talked about. It needs to be a place where the employees feel that they're valued, feel that they have an opportunity to actively engage and significantly contribute to the high performance of the organization. And so we spend a lot of time talking about culture. Every year we do a Gallup culture survey. Every supervisor is responsible when they receive the results of the culture survey to come up with an action or two. What are we gonna do? What is the one action or two actions that we're gonna take this year so that the next time we take this culture survey we've eliminated this area of lower performance? And we put a tremendous amount of energy in that. And I am proud to report that over the last five years we have seen significant improvement in the number of actively engaged employees. And more importantly, we've seen the corresponding decrease in the number of actively disengaged employees. So culture is important, looking for things that can make the workplace better for the employees so that they wanna stay. With respect to bringing in new talent, we're out there beating the bushes just like you guys are. And it's been a bit difficult. There are some areas where we don't have trouble. We just posted to fill the next operating license class, we have 15 utility operator positions we wanna fill and there were 200 applicants. So there's areas security. Anytime we want to fill security positions, we post six to 12 and we get tens and hundreds of applicants where we struggle are more of those technical, primarily engineering. And I think one of the detractors for us is who wants to come after you've just graduated who wants to come to work at a 40 year old facility who wants to maintain 40 year old equipment. And so that's the challenges to show the new employees the potential hires and what is the value of working at a nuclear plant. We can leverage the societal value, the contribution that we make, significant contribution that we make to clean air, clean environment. That goes a long ways. We had some discussion among the CNOs is that we haven't done a very good job of communicating the nuclear industry to the public. And meaningfully affecting the perception. We have a lot of great opportunities at the nuclear power plant and there are very few people that know it. Case in point, so my daughter's a sophomore. She had a class. Yes, she had, it was nepotism. I was able to get her class into the facility. But when they came in, we talked about the craft level jobs and every student that was there was amazed that you could be employed at a nuclear facility without having a four year degree. They just made that assumption. So a lot of what we're trying to do, our efforts in the industry are to encourage those craft level, the trades and do more of a direct reach, outreach to the community so that they truly understand the opportunities. There are many amazing opportunities. We just haven't done a good job of communicating them. Right, thank you. I'm curious, Ed, if you had any thoughts on, you know, this is obviously a conversation that's a theme I should say that's prevailed throughout the entire RIC and it's certainly a priority for the NRC and the industry. I'm curious from your perspective, what are your views on these challenges? Do you have any insights you may wanna share? Particularly when it comes to skills that are needed, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually unhappy to hear that the operating fleet is having trouble recruiting because clearly that's the generating capacity we have now. I can see why newly, new graduates are being attracted to the whole advanced reactor space, but frankly, that's a lot less concrete and probably not as good an employment opportunity in the long run. So, you know, we're not sure what we can do to help, but obviously we need good people to run the operating fleet and I sympathize with those challenges. Thank you. Let's see here. How about, so last July, the commission approved the staff's recommendation to transition the quadrennial inspection cycle to two quadrennial inspection cycles for the engineering inspection program, part of the baseline inspection program that's part of the ROP. This new engineering inspection program would be comprised of comprehensive engineering team inspections and three different focused engineering inspections conducted over a four year cycle. I'm curious to hear from all of you actually, but I'd like to start with Shane. On this change of the RP, as well as any insights for your insights, and then obviously I'll ask Ed and then the regional administrators. So Shane. Yeah, thank you, Scott. So as an industry overall, you know, we view this transition as a definite improvement and we appreciate that the NRC staff applied lessons learned, recognize that the inspect inspection frequency could be extended based largely on the maturity of the industry processes that we use to maintain design and licensing basis. And furthermore, we appreciate the unanimous approval of this transition by all of the commissioners because it makes clear their support for risk informed adjustments when they're appropriate. So engineering for us, engineering inspections, we talked about cyber inspections, they're just engineering inspections are just as intensive and require a lot of resources and resources that could otherwise be focused on system health improvements, system reliability improvements. So the extension from three to four years might not seem significant to some, but with respect to giving us the opportunity of focusing on the right things, it definitely will have an impact on our ability to do that. And we appreciate the combination of the four inspections, the DBA, the Mod 5059 Ultimate Heat Sync because by the nature of those inspections, all of them touched on design and licensing basis. And because of that, there was significant overlap in scope, which simply meant that we were answering the same question multiple times when these inspections were conducted. And so this revision to the process certainly eliminates that inefficiency. And I'd also like to emphasize, yes, that one went from three years to four years, but I do wanna highlight the addition of the other three inspections, specifically commercial grade dedication, age related degradation, and fire protection. So even though the engineering inspection is being extended, the number of touch points between us and the NRC has not gone down. So we've got limited runtime on this approach. We look forward to sharing our experience and the lessons learned from these inspections so that we both have complete confidence that these changes result in the improvements in efficiency and effectiveness that we're looking for. Ed, can I ask you to weigh in on this? Yeah, I think since this cycle hasn't really started yet in earnest, the jury's still out, but I think our priority, it looks like it was probably a sensible decision as long as the agency and the inspectors are not doing less, just for the sake of doing less. And I think I'm paraphrasing Commissioner Barron on that point, doing things more efficiently or better, but not just doing less for the sake of reducing inspection hours. And I think the increased focus on these focus areas looks valuable, in particular age related degradation. And it's not scientific, but my impression just looking through LERs associated with unplanned scramps, for example, that a lot of those are actually related to undetected age related degradation issues. So I think that is an important focus. With regard to, and the other thing is, as long as the essential elements of the design basis assurance inspection are preserved, because that's also, I think, very important. I think the public would want to know that emergency equipment is going to be available in work if it's needed. And so that assurance, I think, is very important. And with regard to heat sink inspections, I was reviewing the issues associated with Zaporizia and the potential loss of heat sink with the lowering water level and the Khovka dam that had pressed on me, how big a problem that could be. And certainly there's, the fleet has the flex equipment and flex procedures that are supposed to cope with a long-term loss of heat sink, but you still need the water in the long-term. And so I think I wouldn't, I would hope that the agency is not going to drop its focus on those issues as well. Okay, thank you, Rick. Okay, thanks. I generally agree with a lot of what I've heard to this point. First off, I just want to make the point that we view engineering inspection as an indispensable part of our oversight program. When you inspect engineering activities, you're looking at the aspects that are used to maintain the plant, to ensure that equipment will work to perform its wide range of requirements, safety functions, door and design-based actions, which you may not test, typically don't test, as part of other routine testing or surveillance activities. And so we think that it's just important to maintain this component. And so the revised program, again, it's just recently implemented. We started it in January, so I don't have a lot of runtime at this point, but we'll hope to share more runtime in the future. But we did focus in on the areas of engineering that we thought were very important. And the whole thing to consider is with this four-year cycle, retain a component where we do look at design, the component engineering design inspection. We retain a fire inspection, which we all know the importance of fire and it's contributing to risk at the plant. Internal fires are very, very important from a risk perspective. We kept that component of our inspection activities. And then we added two functional engineering inspections. And those who I expect will modify after we complete this cycle, will pick additional or new focused engineering inspections in the future. So for this current cycle, we're looking at component commercial grade dedication and age-related degradation of components. Two very, very important topics to ensure that the systems and components that are in the plants will function properly when they're called upon. And that's the overall goal and objective from the inspection. Key point was something like this. If you roll out these activities, and what we found, if you look back at our recent history, we had prior efforts to look in some engineering areas that we hadn't looked at recently, one of which was the environmental qualification of equipment, EQ. And one of the things we learned from that activity is as we went to look at these programs systematically in a way that we hadn't done for a period of time, it took time for both us and the industry to really ensure that they had a clear understanding of what the requirements were. And we found some very valuable insights from looking at that area. So I would imagine with this commercial grade dedication, we'll go through this cycle, we'll see what the data tells us. And in the next cycle, we'll either expand or go into a different area. But the whole idea is to be continuously learning and improving the program as we get experience. And so with that, I'll see if anybody else has a comment. Yeah, I'll add. First, I'll go back to something that Shane said. We found, we have limited experience as well. We've had one comprehensive engineering team inspection. So I'm not up here to tell you, here's our lessons learned, right? We're just starting. But we have some things that we did learn on that first one. We implemented an approach where we picked the components, the modifications, the 50-59 screenings, the 50-59 evaluations, kind of in a way that they relate to each other. I think that's what Shane was talking about at our first inspection. And that worked out very well for us. We were able to have deep, thorough discussions among the team around those issues because they're looking at similar things or the same things a lot of times in that inspection. So that was very helpful for us. It was a very good approach by the team and the group that went out there for our first comprehensive engineering team inspection. I want to highlight that, emphasize that. So I'm not here telling you, here's how to do it kind of thing. But I want to add another aspect to all of these inspections that we're talked about. I agree with everything that's been said so far. An important component of these inspections is our engagement with the program office, with NLR, in the development of these inspections and coming up with the training of our staff for these inspections. And even after you do the inspections, coming together when you identify issues and doing the cross-regional panels, which I've been a fan of for a long time. Anytime we enter into new inspection space, whether it's EQ, whether it's commercial grade dedication, it's always good for the engineers that are doing these inspections after they go out and identify things at the plants to come together and talk about them. Sometimes an issue that may not be an issue, somebody will say, wait a second, here's some thoughts about why this should be considered a little further. Sometimes it goes the other way. It's the conversation that happens, post-inspection when we come together before making a final decision that to me is very valuable on that. So everything else has been said already. Thank you. Thank you. Change topics a little bit. So we've talked a lot about where we are, this perhaps inflection point in the industry with social license and political will and investment and vendor readiness and desire and energy security, climate change, et cetera. And we're at this sort of inflection point and we've become increasingly aware of the fact that this is a global community, nuclear safety and security is a global issue. And you've heard in certain plenaries that we've been working, I know the industry, but certainly the NRC has been working hard to maintain a strong engagement in the international community to share our regulatory expertise and learn from them and help provide resources, et cetera. So with all that being said, and I'll just add this, we as an agency, I am very aware that we have provided a number of opportunities for some of our foreign regulatory peers to spend some time working here inside the NRC walls, but it seems to me the vast majority of that has been in the headquarters arena, looking at programs and are focused on programs or perhaps licensing or things like that. What have we done or what are we planning to do to continue to develop and assist other countries and learn from other countries, quite frankly, in the oversight realm? And that really largely falls to the regions. So if I could maybe, Mo, I'll just stick with you. Maybe you could offer your thoughts on the types of foreign opportunities for foreign. You can go first if you want. That's all right, go ahead. He called on you. All right. Actually, no, no, no. Well, any of us can offer comments on this. I'll tell you, I think the regional engagement, at least from my perspective, where I sit in region three has been very strong, so I'll go ahead and offer some specific examples. I think I've been talking specifics for a while, so I'll give you some specific examples of the areas that we've been involved in. And I did hear the conversation yesterday, the talk yesterday about encouraging more engagement in this area, so I'm proud to report on some of the engagements that we've had. So one of our health physicists, Luis Neves-Folt, has been providing technical expertise as a subject matter expert to IAEA in the area of radiopharmacies. He's been working this for the last four years, and he's getting ready to go out to IAEA headquarters to work on finalizing guidance in this area and prepare a final report on this topic. One of our public affairs officers sitting right here in second row, not in the front row, Prima Shantetel, has been engaged in another IAEA activity related to communications, external communications related to routine and emergency response situations, exchanging information on how best to communicate and learn from each other. One of our senior managers, Julio Lara, participated in two sessions to deliver the IAEA Regional School of Nuclear and Radiological Leadership for Safety. I had to write that one down to make sure I get it right. He participated in a session that was held in Cairo, Egypt for the members of the Arab network of nuclear regulators as well as one in Mexico City, Mexico for Latin American countries. We have one of our senior reactor analysts, Darius Schwartz, who's actually gonna go out here next month or in May, I believe, to do one of these classes as well with IAEA, and he'll be, that class will be focused on the nuclear regulatory bodies in Africa. We had one of our senior managers, David Curtis. He participated in IAEA, our S mission. Please don't ask me to tell you what that is. International Regulatory Review Service. Thank you. I'm sorry, integrated. Thank you, Laura, for the correct. I'm glad I didn't. Integrated Regulatory Review Service. With other countries with IAEA in Turkey to look at their programs. And over the last several years, we've hosted a couple of cohorts from the Japan Nuclear Regulatory Authority in Region III to discuss how we implement the Reactor Oversight Program in the regions. And coming up this summer, we and Region IV will be hosting another cohort for the Japanese to come and see how we do things in the region. So, we've had our fair share. I think we're doing pretty good in this area. And honestly, I'm very proud of that work and look forward to more engagement with the international community as we both learn and share our own kind of experiences with them. It goes both ways when we interact with the international community. We get and we give. So, there you go, Laura. Thank you. So, we've done quite a bit too with the international community. I myself actually went to Australia a few years ago on an integrated regulatory review service mission. We have some of our inspectors. A few years ago, we did quite an extensive exchange program with China, obviously getting folks out to watch the AP1000 being built there. And I'm looking at Brian Kempker. And I know he was in China. And we're really grateful that Brian was in the control room a couple of weeks ago because he was also in China watching the first AP1000, as well as Scott Egley, who's now a part of our startup team down there. So, there is some great work also in our materials accounting and control and our fuels division. We have an expert, Michelle Romano, who does quite a bit of work with IAEA. And I know she was an expert over there for a while, but one of the things that's more recent, and it really resonated maybe when Director General Grossi mentioned, you can't say you don't have time. It's critical to help these countries where there's issues and they want to develop programs. They want energy independence, energy security, and they want to make nuclear part of the mix. And so, working with Andrea Veil in NRR and, of course, the Training Center, we've had quite the experience in 2022 working with our peers in the Polish regulator. Now, prior to that, a few folks, one at a time, may have come down to the region and learned some inspection. But this was a really intensive agency effort. And again, to do our part to help the world, to help people who want this energy, independence, and security. And so we developed an extensive program for them. We had two cohorts in April and September of 2022, six inspectors from Poland in each cohort. We had them at our Training Center doing training on the AP1000. I believe the first cohort may have spent a week or so up here in headquarters learning about licensing. And I saw this implemented. I went out to the site a few times, six weeks on site. And so I extend a lot of gratitude to Southern as well for helping us make that possible. And you can imagine when you're trying to finish construction inspection, you don't know as the schedule is moving. We wanted to keep our resident staff focused on the work they had to do every day. So how do you host six individuals at a site? And that's where the whole agency stepped up to support. And we had folks from other regions volunteer. They came, they were escorts for this group. And I got to see their days. And I think we tired them out a little bit. I think that the second cohort said, we don't need six weeks on site, four will be okay. Because, and I saw it. So they would do training in the morning and then they would just walk the plant. They would do that intentional OJT with the folks. So that was a really great effort. And we'll try and do more of that. We had a discussion with them yesterday. And I said, well, got about, and I don't know, maybe nine more months to have a construction site here in the US. And we'd be happy to host another cohort. We also were, it was an honor to host the president of their regulatory authority down in region two as well. And meet with some of his staff and hear some of the challenges they have to develop their regulatory body and train their staff. So a lot of times we are really focused on implementing our baseline program, our fuels program, our construction program. But again, thanks to all the support from the regions, we were able to say we had time to help a fellow regulator out. Thanks for that. So we have three minutes and 50 seconds left. And I'm gonna try to squeeze one quick when I'm gonna give each of the four RAs 30 seconds to provide a response. So, and this is my question. This doesn't come from the audience. So what do you do as regional administrators to ensure that you remain aware of issues that are occurring in others' regions and from a staffing, technical, whatever it is, how do you all stay sort of on the same page given the fact that you're running four organizations in different parts of the country. Any order, pick one. Okay, I'll make this simple. We talk to each other. I worked with these guys forever. They're like my brothers. So we have routine meetings that we talk but I have no problem calling anyone up. We talk about issues that are on our plate in any given week and we have bi-weekly meetings to chat. We also talk with the program offices routinely. So it's just a heavy degree of communication. I would echo what Laura says. I spend a lot of time looking at what's going on across the industry. Look at event reports that come out on a daily basis. Look at perhaps maybe a vote where an enforcement action is taken and then I get the benefit to drive my folks crazy by asking them, hey, what's happening here in this plant in region two and how does it apply to us? Thanks. Great. I'll say the same thing but since my title is actually deputy regional administrator, we do the same thing at the deputy level. We actually meet on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and we have our colleagues from headquarters meet with us and we do the same thing. And just to give you a sense, the division directors do the same thing. Brand chiefs over certain areas do the same thing. So I believe we're well connected Scott which you probably already knew that. Maybe. I'd also add that, you know, there's much more spontaneous interactions. An issue will come up in any region. There'll be reach outright like that and a response. It's a fabulous network to work with in addition to our, you know, our headquarters organization, NRR and SIR. So yeah, it's really nice to work in that environment. And for my part, we just had an opportunity up in region one where all of us, all myself and my direct reports had an opportunity to talk about common issues and challenges and solutions and how we want to operate going forward to make sure that we're all staying aligned. For my part, I also have weekly planned meetings, interactions with each of the four regions. And so it's, we have, I guess the point is there's a very robust conversation and communication that happens amongst the regional offices and with the program offices in particular, and SIR and NRR. So with 40 seconds left, I think it's best that we close the session. It's about time for dinner and social hour. So I want to thank everybody for coming and joining us today here and online. And I want to thank our panelists for joining us today. Thank you.