 Good afternoon and welcome back to the first we apologize for the slight delay in getting started here for this session. I am Daryl Roberts, the Deputy Executive Director for Reactor Programs at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and I am truly honored to serve as the Chair for this technical session on licensing and oversight lessons learned from the pandemic. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve worldwide, I believe this is an opportune time to discuss our experiences and lessons learned as regulators during the pandemic. Throughout these past two and now going on three years, communities across the United States and around the world have experienced insurmountable losses and been forced to reorient the way they interact and how nuclear regulators and nuclear regulators are no exception. Despite these challenges, the responsibility to continue the licensing and oversight activities of our nuclear programs has remained our professional mission. Over time, we've adapted and transformed our programs in ways that have enabled us to meet our respective missions. I am confident that the lessons learned we've had throughout the past two years will continue to inform how we operate as regulators and I look forward to sharing the NRC's experiences as well as hearing from my three distinguished international colleagues on their unique perspectives on this topic. Before we begin, I would like to take this time to introduce our three highly esteemed panelists, starting with Mr. Krister Victrosen, who is the Director General at the United Arab Emirates Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation, or FANR. Mr. Victrosen has over 35 years of experience in nuclear regulation and safety. Additionally, he has extensive experience in nuclear policies and in the preparation and application of national regulations, international standards, and peer reviews. He has held central positions at the Swedish Nuclear Safety Authority, OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Next, we have Bismarck Kobyka, who is the Chief Executive Officer of South Africa's National Nuclear Regulator. Dr. Kobyka has more than 19 years of experience in the nuclear field. He has held positions with the IAEA and ESCOM, just to name a few. He has served as a visiting scholar at the Netherlands Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group and worked as an international research associate here in the United States at Idaho National Laboratory. Dr. Kobyka is also an internationally acclaimed nuclear engineering expert and has served as a member of the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group since 2016. And then next, we have Mr. Toshiyoki Koganaya, he is the Director of Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authorities, or NRAs, Oversight Planning and Coordination Division. He has worked in the field of nuclear regulation since 2011 and was responsible for the response to and the investigation of the Fukushima Daiichi accident from 2011 to 2013 in the Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency of the Ministry of Economy, Technology, and Industry, or METI, and the NRA. Mr. Koganaya has also served as an international assignee within the United States NRC for one year where he and I first met in NRC's Region 3 office and has since incorporated that experience into Japan's oversight program. Currently, he is responsible for the implementation of Japan's oversight program responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. So again, I want to thank you all for being here to support this session, especially considering the very large time differences between the United States and your respective countries. And before I begin, I will note that there will be a question and answer session following all of the panelist's presentations. So please feel free to enter your questions in the chat box provided on the screen and we will get to as many of those questions as possible at the end of the session. I will now begin with a presentation of my presentation about the NRC's licensing and oversight lessons learned from the COVID pandemic. So if you can pull up my slides, there they go. Thank you. Okay, so I'll start with the next slide actually. So I'm sorry, go back. Okay, there we go. Stay there. Yep, sorry. I'm sorry, go back to the next slide again. Got a little confused. All right. So following the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the NRC began taking all necessary steps to protect public health and safety, including the identification of regulatory requirements that could pose challenges during the pandemic and the areas where the staff believe that temporary flexibilities, such as exemptions, would not compromise the ability of licensees to maintain the safe and secure operation of NRC licensed facilities. Regarding the first bullet you see, organizational agility, the COVID-19 public health emergency had the potential to challenge the NRC's ability to maintain its mission. To ensure our organizational agility was maintained, we stood up an internal group, the NRR COVID-19 communication team, or NCCT, which was led by division management to respond to key challenges and priorities such as oversight, operator licensing, and fatigue rule exemptions, just to name a few. For public health, excuse me, for public and industry engagement, the NRC hosted 10 public meetings with industry to understand licensing needs and support licensees mitigation of COVID-19. Regarding the use of public webpages, COVID-19 specific webpages were established to answer frequently asked questions in specific topical areas and to communicate to the public what actions the agency had taken both generically and plan specifically. For focused workload management tool for related licensing actions, a focused workload tracking tool maintained on the NRC's internal SharePoint site was created to track all COVID-19 licensing actions for both power and non-power reactors. This list was used to inform management of the status of licensing actions and used for resource planning considerations. Regarding the framework for expedited reviews, the staff issued letters in various topical areas describing the criteria and the conditions under which it would be able to expedite review of licensees requests for relief or exemption from certain regulatory requirements. The letters conveyed the information that licensees would need to provide to us to facilitate the expedited review. For internal temporary staff review guides, NRC also issued temporary staff guides documenting expectations for reviewing and issuing COVID-19 related exemptions that supplemented the routine exemption review processes. They were intended to enhance efficiency in responding to the needs of the licensees and the public. The temporary staff guides will sunset once the COVID-19 pandemic emergency ends. Next slide. For our initial response, NRC developed new guidance to perform oversight activities during COVID-19. The guidance addressed completing inspection samples by establishing a hybrid teams and conducting remote samples where needed and maximizing telework while still maintaining some reduced on-site presence. Now, NRC continued performing the baseline inspection program and initial operator licensing examinations. However, certain inspections were either delayed or deferred, including security force on force inspections, some radiation safety inspections, emergency preparedness, and plant outage inspections. Now, without counting security and EP inspections, NRC inspectors completed about 88 percent of nominal samples required in the NRC's baseline inspection program. Nevertheless, the NRC performed activities to ensure reasonable assurance of safe plant operation. In the area of recovery, as the situation involved, the staff continued updating inspection guidance to accommodate for surges and changes due to COVID. In November of 2021, for example, the NRC returned the inspection program protocol to the pre-pandemic status and determined that additional inspection activities were not necessary as a result of the pandemic. For lessons learned, the NRC staff captured lessons learned during the first year of COVID and is currently taking a broader look at lessons learned as the pandemic continues. So far, the staff found that there is no remote substitution for some of the on-site functions performed by inspectors. Throughout the public health emergency and associated lessons learned efforts, it was acknowledged by NRC and licensee staff that the ROP inspection procedures include multiple provisions for in-person or on-site inspection activities that cannot be sufficiently performed remotely. For example, security performance observations, NRC review of licensee in-service inspection exams, safety culture interviews during problem identification and resolution inspections, and plant equipment walkdowns during engineering inspections and resident plant status are all examples of things that need to be done in person. However, the inspection activities during the public health emergency have provided some insight into activities that can be performed effectively from any location provided licensee support is sufficient. For example, review of licensee's records and documents by inspectors can be performed off-site effectively and efficiently. Additionally, video conferencing and file sharing technologies have been used successfully during inspection interviews with licensee's technical experts. Current and recent NRC lessons learned efforts are exploring the expansion of inspection activities during routine periods to include off-site review of records alongside on-site verification and observation of licensee personnel and equipment. However, the extent of large-scale NRC adoption of expanded inspection practices will likely be limited by the industry's willingness to develop and adopt a consensus standard on information sharing with the NRC. Next slide please. So 2020 started off as a normal inspection year as anyone could imagine with one force-on-force inspection completed at the BC summer station and then in March of 2020 in response to the declaration of the COVID-19 public health emergency, force-on-force inspections were suspended while the staff developed a temporary force-on-force inspection framework. Now this framework would adopt the necessary conditions to maintain effective regulatory oversight while ensuring the health and safety of both licensee and NRC inspection staff. And by August of 2020, a modified force-on-force inspection procedure resumed that would focus on some selected elements of a licensee's protective strategy as opposed to the full strategy in normal force-on-force exercises. Additional modifications to the force-on-force program were completed in February of 2021 that allowed the inspectors to evaluate the full licensee strategy utilizing the minimum number of participants possible. This effort allowed the NRC to resume its oversight role while still maintaining a balance of safety to licensee and NRC personnel. Additionally in 2021, the staff developed the temporary staff guidance document that outlined a process for licensees to submit a hardship request based on established criteria that would prevent them from safely conducting an NRC-evaluated force-on-force exercise. These licensees would be inspected under the procedure that was developed in 2020. For calendar year 2022, the staff's inspection plan is a tiered approach that includes reverting back to full force-on-force inspections with some allowances to use the other two modified approaches established during 2020 and 2021. Next slide please. And in the area of materials, the Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards recently completed an evaluation of the Nuclear Materials and Waste Safety Inspection Program during the COVID-19 pandemic. This effort assessed the various practices, adjustments, processes, and inspection techniques utilized to implement the Nuclear Materials and Waste Safety Oversight programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the feedback received externally and internally, this effort gathered best practices and documented how each business line and NMSS implemented the inspection programs and developed recommendations to enhance certain aspects in the implementation of these inspection programs during their routine implementation and beyond. The outreach included a series of surveys and interviews in all levels of the organization, meetings with agreement states, and public meetings. In November of 2021, the working group that took on this effort issued its report and concluded that the NMSS oversight programs remained effective in accomplishing its important oversight mission since the agency implemented mandatory telework two years ago and concluded that the staff continued to demonstrate creativity, innovation, flexibility, and resiliency to best accomplish the objectives of the inspection programs in NMSS. As a result of this assessment, the working group provided recommendations that are detailed in the report to enhance the implementation of these programs during the COVID pandemic, any future pandemics or public health emergencies, and to enhance aspects of the current framework for the oversight programs based on what we experienced the recent months. And as you can see here, this slide provides the key aspects of those recommendations, and I won't read them. They're pretty apparent to you there regarding on-site inspections, the option to employ flexibilities, and specific inspection guidance that is warranted for pandemic preparedness. NMSS management is considering these recommendations, and they already have had their first set of alignment meetings and will soon direct action as appropriate. And this is not a once and done effort for assessment. We continue to monitor the implementation of these programs during the evolving conditions of this pandemic, and we will continue to adapt, assess, and enhance any aspects of the program as needed. And with that, I will now turn over to our second speaker, Director General Vickerson from the UAE Spanner. Director General Vickerson, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Daryl. So I can have the slides, please. So I will walk you through our response. There they come. So let me give you a brief overview of the licensing and regulatory oversight activities that we focused on during this pandemic, mainly 2020, 2021, and now starting in 2022. Next slide, please. Which give me an opportunity to brief you about the completion status of the Barak-Anupyrabar plan project, which comprises four reactors, and our journey of licensing and regulatory oversight, and then some challenges and opportunities during this pandemic. Next slide, please. So you can see the four reactors on this picture, and there are two reactors now in operation, and number of Unit 3 and Unit 4 are still under construction, but are completing essentially all the construction. So we are presently reviewing the operating license application for Unit 3. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. So this is the timeline of this entire Baraka project that started in 2010, essentially, with the cycling activities, and then we continued to get the license application construction at the end of 2010. We issued the construction license in July of 2012 for Units 1 and 2, and Unit 3 and 4, two years later. And inside this square are the essential things that have happened during these pandemic years. We have issued the operating license for Unit 1, in February, when some other licenses related to the storage and handling of the pressure fuel. And then reactor number two, and the operating license was issued one year later, and the corresponding pressure fuel licenses also. And then at the end of the right-hand side of this timeline is where we are now. We are reviewing the license application for Unit 3. Next slide, please. So I just wanted to show you some interesting facts about the efficiency gains when you have reactors that are almost identical. So, for example, the request for additional information for Unit 1, we had almost 2,000 such requests from our staff. We used also technical outside technical support organizations. We did 267 inspections. We had findings, more than 400, and the process took us five years. If we look at Unit 2, first of all, we did all the work with our internal staff, without the need to engage external technical support organizations. We had much less request for additional information. We conducted almost a similar number of inspections, with less findings, and we did this operation in about eight months. Next slide, please. So this is just... I'm not going through this. This is our Regulator of State program, and the various elements that are the basis of decision making. And we can study this afterwards, but we worked hard on this matter during the pandemic. That's why I included it. Next slide, please. We showed the various modules of this oversight model or system. We have a module for inspection, one for events that happens, one for license change requests, one for the plan status, and one for operational experience. So this is all helping us to document and keep track of all the information, inspection reports, and evaluation of various events from operating experience, etc. Next slide. So it is just to show that even during the pandemic, the regulatory framework needs to be updated. So we worked continuously during 2020, 2021, and we will continue 2022 on updating various regulations and regulatory guides. For example, emergency preparedness for accidents, on the safe transport of radioactive material, and also on other topics, so we are presently, for example, reviewing the safe transport regulation, but also certification of that instrument based on experience. We do this a lot of frequency of time use, and we continue during the pandemic for this work, and relying largely on IEA status standards, but also including the specific experience that we got from the operation, construction oversight. Next slide, please. So this is just the four squares or quadrants, just show that the inspections continued in 2019, 2021, but we have continued roughly the same amount of inspections. We have benefited from the resident office, we have in Barakkan. We started with five experts to supervise the day-to-day operation. We have increased to seven, and we will increase to eight staff in the near future when all the reactors are in operation or close to operation. Next one, please. So this is also to show a little bit, in the gray to the left, there are the licenses that we issued, which I already talked about, and we continue to participate as much as possible in various activities. So, yes, the gender equality group that has been created, we arranged some webinars ourselves on the impact of COVID-19. We continue to participate as much as possible in the General Conference and in the Fukushima Conference. We hosted an IAEA workshop on regulatory practices for newcomer countries in particular, where we have many countries from the region taking part, and that was face-to-face meeting, etc. And we have arranged also, which I will come back to, the IAEA convex three exercise last year. Next one, please. So, the convex three exercise was a particular challenge, of course, considering the large amount of participants that we wanted to have in order for the exercise to be effective, as we managed to get a very successful exercise at the end with international and national participation. So, we have had various emergency centers nationally involved. We have human resources, we have many, many, many staff or people taking part in the exercise, and we had many international laboratories, more than 100 taking part. We had participation from the IAEA. We had field monitoring teams coming from France, Korea, from the US, and IAEA. And we had also international observers in our offices, but also in Barak. Next slide, please. So, this is yet to show how resource-intensive the arrangement of such a big international exercise is. The decision was made to organize this in the middle of 2019, and we had preparations and discussions with the IAEA about scenarios and other details. But the most intensive work started in June of last year, and then it continued along this line up to the actual exercise, which was in October last year. And now we are evaluating the lessons learned, and the IAEA report will also come soon. It was particularly what's interesting for me was that the field troops that came from outside country, according to the assistance convention, worked very well together with our own monitoring team. The compatibility of the instruments was great, and we could get fantastically sense thanks to the effort of all of these international and national teams. Next slide, please. So, some of the lessons learned, which is that we need to further detail the arrangements that we have with neighboring countries. And we started such cooperation already with the Saudi Arabia, and we have also an emergency center in Kuwait, the Gulf Cooperation Center in Kuwait, and we need to discuss further and to harmonize various procedures and other stuff. And also to harmonize the approach behind the protection of emergency workers, where we had a different appoint from the different entities. And we need to improve further the various monitoring procedures that we have. And inside the panel is the same. There are programs that we need to improve, and there are instructions that we need to improve. And the INS rating, for example, was not very straightforward. But in general, in summary I would say it worked very well, but there are details to improve. Next slide, please. Next slide. So, this is just a picture from the emergencies, already the exercise itself, and it shows some snapshots from it. And it was a very extensive exercise involving many many parties in the national team. And you see a lot of team troops, they are monitoring in the environment, they are sampling, they are taking samples to laboratories, and all this was that we were tested. So we can probably move on to the next slide. So, the roadmap that we have, we developed for our entire COVID-19 response, was that we had before the pandemic started, a business continuity plan, and health and safety and environment policy in place, and the interaction between these two is very, very important and showed to be very, very beneficial. And then when the pandemic started in the beginning of 2020, we established a working group in order to give advice to the leadership of the panel on what type of decisions we are needed and what should be the direction of our oversight. We developed this further into a command center that we thought it directed to me. This has now been formed, if we call it a team, that follows and monitoring the pandemic and its influence on our regulatory work. And it feeds into the strategic planning for the next years to come. Next slide. Next please. So, next please. So as I said, there are many challenges, but also opportunities. So we, as I said, we established this business continuity working group, and we had a work from home system, which was implemented very quickly. In about two weeks, we could move our staff to work from home and give them their VPN access. And we also had to frame a culture of how to cope with this new norm. And so we have many workshops with the staff and making sure that it was understood. And also awareness session about mental health and ergonomics by working from home is very important. And it continues and will continue. Particularly the mental health part is a long lasting issue that we will continue to work on. Next slide please. So to summarize, we had the regulatory oversight continued. We kept the health and safety of our staff. We had a proactive response. We worked remotely. We followed all government directions. And essentially we could follow the operational plan. Of course, the international work, for example, was very influenced, but essentially for the oversight, it could continue. Next please. So we also took the opportunity to establish a stronger infrastructure at fun and capacity building. So we have introduced an operational safety simulator in our headquarters. We had quite intense internal training programs and our experts. And we have been cooperating with the industry with the now management. And we have now presently eight staff taking part in the senior reactor operator certification training. And we will graduate this week at the end of this week. Next one. So the group to the left, those are the ones that are joining the reactor operator and senior reactor operations training program. We have also two female Emirati female working as the resident inspector together with our experts, experts from various countries. We sent our first female to join the safe parts leadership program at the IEA. And we have quite good gender balance in the management. We have 21 males and 19 females as director and manager levels. And next one, please, which is the thank you slide. And I hope this gave an overview of how we reacted to the pandemic in the from family in the UAE. So thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Director General Victrocin for your very comprehensive presentation. Fanner has certainly risen to the challenges your organization has faced during the pandemic, most notably overseeing the commission commissioning of new reactors in your country. And I look forward to hearing questions from the audience on your very informative presentation. I will now turn to our third speaker, Dr. Chobeka, CEO of South Africa's National Nuclear Regulator. Dr. Chobeka, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Daro. And good day, good afternoon, good evening to my colleagues, Krista and Mr. Koganea san. It's a pleasure to be here. And I look forward to an engaging session. You will drive the slides for me from that side, but we'll move straight to the next slide, which is the table of contents. I'm going to give you an introduction on how we got here. As far as the evolution of the pandemic is concerned, I'm going to give also a brief account of the operator's response, initial responses by the operator. Then our regulatory response. Look at the current status in as far as infections at the nuclear power plants are concerned. And generally, the lessons learned. Now just for background to our audience, we may not be aware, South Africa operates a two unit PWR, which is the only nuclear power plant in Africa. And this is a French design, which produces almost 2,000 megawatts of electricity for both units combined. Next slide. So like any other country at some point, we had to declare the pandemic a national disaster. And the country government introduced a package of extraordinary measures to combat public health emergency. The goal, of course, was to flatten the curve of its infections. And cabinet introduced and developed what they called the National Coronavirus Command Council, which enforced a national lockdown for an initial period of 21 days from midnight of the 26th of March 2020. This lockdown was subsequently extended for a number of times and I will show in the subsequent slides. Currently, the national state of disaster is still in force. And it is hoped and the president has promised in his state of the nation address week ago that this will be lifted come the 15th of March 2022. From the first of May in 2020, a new approach was initiated that includes easing of lockdown restrictions based on what was called risk adjusted strategy to allow some opening up of the economy. This new strategy consisted of and still consists of an alert level with five levels. This would allow for flexibility and responsiveness and to reduce the need to amend regulations in future. We are currently as of first of October 2021 at level one. Next slide. As you can see from this slide, the top left, you see the waves that we've gone through. We've gone through four waves and you can tell that the most aggressive wave was the one inflicted was the third wave inflicted by the delta variant. The peak of this wave was approximately at about the 29th of maybe let's say August of 2021. Subsequent to that, you can see the Omnicron peak which resulted around the 25th of January 2022. Now on the bigger table to your right, you see that the levels that I spoke about, the alert levels level one to level five. Now we started off with level five in March of 2020 for 25 days. This was adjusted subsequently to level four and then in May and level three from June to August and that sustained for about 77 days and level two for 33 days from 18 August 20th of September 2020 and level one stretched the whole of September part of September until after Christmas of 2020 where we experienced another spike in the pandemic so for 98 days. You can see how it evolved all the way until now where we are in level one for a record more than 158 days. So it means we have stabilized and it's important to mention that each level of course corresponds to the strictness of allowed activities. In other words, the level of restrictions as far as movement of people, as far as gatherings, as far as events and so on. Next slide please. Now to start with Eskom which is our operator introduced 14-day quarantine period for internationally and returned from those that traveled internationally and were returning from high-risk countries and this was in preparation for the outage activities. You would remember that we use a lot of international skills for our outage period because with just two units it would be very expensive to be 100% self-sustainable even for outages that happen after 18 months or so. They supplied PPE to staff in critical positions and commenced with thermal screening. All meetings were virtual. The initial access to control rooms were suspended except for operators, safety engineers, specific maintenance personnel who supported the control rooms. They also reduced staff on site in order to not only have personnel, in order to only have the required personnel on site, so-called critical personnel. They continued to categorize staff in two teams that would alternate working on site and also established an off-site team and this off-site team did not perform anywhere on site but they stayed in self-isolation, had quarantined conditions until called upon to assume duties in the event that on-site minimum resources requirements are challenged. The SCOM also introduced mass testing before outages of all workers and implemented the requirement for 72 hours negative test results. In other words, if you do not have a negative test that is younger than 72 hours, you would be required to perform another COVID test. Now, they also went on to develop a model which tested a number of scenarios and this model focused on staffing strategy for the operating unit. In particular, critical staff namely maintenance operations, radiation protection and security to protect employee health and safety while ensuring planned safety and planned operations. You can see on the graph to your right that if you, for example, look at a sample of 100 staff members and assume worst case scenario of 6% of them susceptible to COVID infection, then it would take you at least about five days to get 50% of your staff infected and then you can see the recovery as the curve begins to rise. So what this tells us was that SCOM could from these scenarios make critical decisions of whether to have standby shifts and staff and staff and personnel on quarantine so that they could strictly ensure that at no point do they have below the number of critical resources on site. So the safety of the plant had to be assured in both short term as well as the long term. Now with these models, they could conclude that higher infection rates would lead to too few people to operate the plant which of course as you can see from the graph was a short term risk and in that regard the risk of one side transmission is higher but you will have the decrease in staff density. You will provide difference in depth and you would reduce work to get through the peak. On the other side, if you had lower infection rates, the main risk would be that the plant material conditions will continue to degrade because you would have fewer staff on site which may imply that you would have had to postpone some of the maintenance or delay some of the maintenance and on the flip side you will have lower risk of site transmission and you would have an increase in staff density and you will have no additional difference in depth required and ultimately perform all normal work. Next slide please. Now on the side of the regulator, we put in place measures for business continuity like Christa said in fact before the pandemic. Three weeks before the pandemic we had performed a wide-scale test of the effectiveness of our business continuity model and we had about 36 staff members from all critical areas working from home for three weeks and lo and behold, just less than a week after that drill COVID lockdown happened. So with our business continuity, the measures included travel restrictions implemented as a lockdown regulations of government, continued engagement with the operators and applications from would-be licences via electronic media. We ensured that all incoming and processing of urgent licensing requests and associated reviews continued as per normal. Although the access to the nuclear power plant site under new conditions was possible, the plant site inspection activities were rescheduled where possible and where not very urgent. We continued the monitoring of plant and operation performance by online access of live plant information, plant databases and logs. Where possible going forward working remotely will be encouraged. Now what we have seen from the effectiveness of our oversight using a combination of means has actually assured us that for future pandemics our business continuity model is robust and effective and therefore we would not hesitate to adopt the remote working as part of, as family part of our working modes. We procured and issued PPE to all employees and contractors and we implemented work rosters to ensure minimum staff at work and also to assist social distancing. Next slide. We continued to direct nuclear power plant to evaluate impact of the national lockdown restrictions on the effective implementation of the nuclear power plant emergency plan and to develop contingency plans as appropriate demonstrate that efficacy of the emergency plan and communicate with the public in terms of the readiness. Now there were consent, there were consents from interest groups on the effectiveness of the evacuation model for the kubek nuclear power plant during lockdown conditions considering for example that public transport was grounded to a halt and therefore and of course our evacuation model also features public transportation. That is why we demanded or required of ESCOM to demonstrate that even in the under the given circumstances of a total lockdown they do not have they still can demonstrate that the emergency plan was quite effective and continue to communicate with the public to assure them that in terms of any eventuality of an accident all would be good to go. We directed the nuclear power plant to perform control room habitation habitability studies and analyze the possible infection scenarios to ensure that the operability of the main and emergency control rooms was up to speed. Next slide. Now the current status as you can see from the graph you see a number of cases from the beginning to date and you can see that ESCOM has implemented a mass testing effort and at each stage you can tell you can see the the number of positive cases that were identified for mass testing and the last one denotes the fourth wave of covid where a number of tests were identified and removed so big numbers were tested and a few were identified as positive and removed. At level one for more than 150 days regular regulatory staff were required to be at work at least three days per week the operators were busy at that time with major refurbishment outages in fact currently we are going through a an outage at ESCOM at the kubek nuclear power plant which was initially scheduled to include the replacement of steam generators and that was subsequently postponed delayed to later after winter and kubek is still meeting staff numbers as per the nuclear license requirements and we have no active cases at present in the operating unit seven positive cases have been reported the past week at kubek with six active cases the country has exited the fourth wave as we speak what lessons have we learned from this initially due to the uncertainty of the infection rate and the impact of the pandemic on availability of resources to safely operate the nuclear power plant we adopted a precautionary approach the operator was required to demonstrate that adequate staffing is required for the short operation for the short and the long term in other words for operations short term and for outage maintenance and testing for the long term that refers to the outage and maintenance and we continued to require them that they must conduct mass testing the staffing the staffing strategies had to be developed and implemented during different waves of the pandemic especially during the recent fourth wave with the omicron variant with the higher infection rates certain functions were challenged the staffing strategy had to be flexible enough for example changing shift rosters putting in additional stuff etc to ensure minimum staffing levels were not compromised implementation of various covid protocols especially the mass testing ensured that the on-site transmissions were kept as far as low as low as possible next slide please i already mentioned that we had certain interest groups that questioned the safety of the npp during lockdown and the need for the npp operation in light of lower energy demand as well as viability of the imagines plant during a pandemic now you would recall that due to lockdown a lot of industry had to shut down and those that operated only operated at the very very bare minimum and therefore the demand for electricity was very low and so part of the anti-nuke strategy was to demand that since the nuclear power plant is really not essential at this point it must be shut down other concerns related to impact on evacuation assumptions mass cares mass care centers etc during the strict lockdown period as well as the readiness of local authorities to deal with simultaneously both the disaster in other words the pandemic itself and a nuclear emergency so the regulatory emergency plan exercise subsequently was conducted including testing off-site response organizations readiness and some improvement actions have been identified and addressed communication from both the operator and the regulator had to be adjusted adjusted to address the concerns from the public continue the lessons learned prior to the pandemic we piloted the work from home as i already said during the pandemic work from home has been implemented in a graded approach depending on the alert levels the reviews and assessment tasks have not been negatively impacted at all in fact we have seen the increase in productivity with the work from home inspections during strict lockdown were primarily conducted virtually all those options remained for site visits if deemed necessary in general all plan compliance assurance activities were completed currently our inspectors are on site almost on a daily basis for this major outage of refurbishment that we are currently engaged in there was no need to adjust our regulatory framework as a result of the pandemic as a regulator however we had to be responsive and adjust some of our regulatory and work practices with that and at the end of my presentation and would be very happy to take questions when the time comes thank you very much thank you Dr. Kobyakov for your very informative presentation i greatly appreciate hearing your perspectives on how the pandemic has impacted your organization's operations and remain confident in the NNR's continued strong regulatory activities uh now i will turn to our final speaker Mr. Toshiyuki Kogunaya director of Japan's nuclear regulation authorities oversight planning and coordination division Mr. Kogunaya the floor is yours okay thank you very much for introducing me it's my great pleasure to come back here Rick because as Darrell introduced me i used to be a foreign assignee in the NRC and i learned a lot about the U.S. NRC's ROP so i am very happy to here to make a presentation about our oversight program and licensing program during the pandemic so the next slide please okay i wanted to present about the three points one is the impact of the pandemic in the japan in general and the next one is the main issue regulatory activities how our activities modified or changed during the pandemic licensing oversight and other activities and then i finally i want to show you our lesson now from the pandemic next slide please okay next slide slide please so the the this slide shows the COVID-19 positive case in the past two years as you can see we have four times national emergency which they created and now the first emergency is now continued and based on this emergency situation our activities are also modified a little bit changed and in the above of this slide as you can see we also have another problem i say NRC internet access is not was not available over the past one years because of the cyber attack we had so we need to renew our whole IT systems so during that period we didn't use any internet access next slide please and also this is the cumulative number of deaths in japan we now have almost 24,000 deaths in total for the past two years and the many people are very concerned afraid of these pandemics so many social and economic activities are also restricted for example the for the first national emergency many schools closed and many restaurants and shops and also open in limited hours for example the restaurant will shut down about 8 p.m. or something and no alcohol are provided so these types of the activities also affect on our regulatory activities next slide please so the next slide please so I want to show typical activities of licensing here so there for the licensing process we had a lot of communication meeting with licensees as you can see these photos before the pandemic we have a face-to-face meeting almost every week and as you can see there the two side and the left side is our side regulatory steps and the right side is the staff from the licensees so every week we had a two hours three hours meetings to discuss the licensing basis and so on but after the pandemic the right side photo you can see only three or four guys this is our staff and the licensee is connected through the virtual systems so we communicate now with these types of conference systems so this is also the very efficient because many licensee staff no need to come to Tokyo to have a face-to-face meeting so and also they have a lot of technical staff participate in this meeting so these types of meetings have some merit for the licensing next slide please okay this is the oversight situation so our new inspection program is very similar to the USNRC ROP we had a baseline inspection by the resident inspectors as you can see the photos during the pandemic our resident office the people are divided into two groups as you can see these photos so they had a different room and they basically didn't have the physical contact in order to avoid the causing a cluster in the region branch so they had a different room and but they visited to the site almost every day and then they do the baseline inspection as we did before the pandemic but we had a little bit restriction on communication with the licensee for example some regulator asked us not to enter the control rooms to avoid the causing the positive cases to the operators so that types of restrictions existed still but we visited almost every day to the site and do the walk down and communicate with the licensee so next slide please for the team inspections which is done by the headquarter specialist so they have to have a business trip to the site but as you can imagine the Tokyo area we have a lot of positive cases so the many licensees asked us not to come the specialist and also we restrict the business trip especially in the first emergency period so that's why as I showed you this our team inspection some of the inspections are postponed especially during the first quarter of 2020 and also we sometimes have a very difficulties about the specialist because as you can see the second bulletins if we dispatch the inspectors they stayed near the site for two weeks before entering the site so they have to stay the hotel for two weeks before the inspection we did sometime these types of activities but this is very very inefficient because the inspectors have to stay for two weeks in the hotel only hotel they cannot visit to the site so we didn't do after the first national emergency ended but also we applied many remote activities such as the preparation phase document circuit and our we get through the internet their record and document and we checked these types of documents licensee documents next slide please yes so the other activities so our commissioners we have five commissioners and every Wednesday we had a open commissioners meeting and we decide some regulatory activities decision making but we these types of meeting we did face to face but now we have a hybrid of the remote and face to face meeting as you can see the left photos this is a typical remote commissioners meeting under the the center photos we had inspectors counterpart meeting every quarter before the pandemic we had face to face meeting but during the pandemic we had a remote meeting so the resident inspector can participate in this meeting in their branch and also the the right photos this is the thermometers and disinfectant at the entrance of the emergency response intent because we had several emergency drill through the year so the many responder come to the this center this center and then at that time they have to we check their temperature and they are we ask them to have this disinfectant so these types of measure also we are now still doing next slide please next slide so the lesson around so the during the pandemic we have we use a lot of remote technologies and this is in some cases very useful improving our effectiveness and efficiencies and also the our job practice not only the regulatory bodies but also the licensee also changing more remote mode job style and then now maybe 40% 50% of our staff work at remote or home and fundamental measures such as distance or masks and infections are very essential to the COVID-19 pandemic and the NRA has more remote interaction with the licensee especially in the licensing process but for the oversight site activities such as walk down and communication with the licensee staff in the site internal communication are very essential for our oversight of nuclear facilities okay that's all my presentation thank you very much okay thank you mr koganaya night naya sorry for your very comprehensive presentation it's always interesting to hear from our colleagues at the NRA and I do apologize for mispronouncing your name earlier especially given the number of years in the past it's always a pleasure to have the opportunity to work with our colleagues that we've hosted here as international signees such as yourself so now before we go to the Q and A's I'd like to cue Spencer for a live poll question Spencer Spencer you have the polling slides and can you spotlight those oh I see it okay okay so the polling question what measures to protect the health and safety of inspectors and plant staff during inspections do you feel were most useful and the slide or the poll is live so the answers are changing as we speak and it looks as if remote inspections is getting the lion's share of the response with nearly two-thirds of the respondents selecting that as the most useful um measure that was taken during the pandemic to protect the health and safety of inspectors and plant staff during the pandemic with mask requirements coming in second a distant second I might add um and then the other measures distance distancing increased cleaning rapid testing all lagging the first two answers uh verification of vaccination status looks like it's receiving a negligent um response so okay we'll keep the live polling um going for a few seconds and then we'll turn it over to Q's and A's questions and answers um we have about seven minutes left I'll ask the first question that was posed uh to me in the chat box which is for me directed at me uh NRC with regard to EP drill participation how many did the how many drills did the NRC participate in and were they all remote thank you and so the response to that um I would would just say that the NRC did grant some exemptions to um EP exercises during the pandemic I don't have the exact number um of those or of the number of drills that we actually participated in but we did participate in all EP on-site by annual exercises for which an extension for which an exemption was not granted um per 10 CFR 50.12 um and all of these that we did observe required the EP inspectors to be on-site however uh there were safety measures some as such as some of the examples you saw in the poll question that we just posed um such as social distancing masking and etc but none of those caused issues with the NRC's inspectors ability to um complete the EP exercise observations so hopefully that um is sufficient for that question I will now go to the next one in the queue which is addressed to Dr. Jobeka um that is with the alert level being shifted to level one will the company remain in a partial remote work status or will it adopt a hybrid approach model or do you plan to return to on-site work at 100% Dr. Jobeka yes thank you very much Dara for the question it's a matter of fact today we had our executive committee meeting of the NNR and we part of the discussions involved around revolved around our future plans for the return to work currently we are on a rotational basis we require that all staff without co-morbidities be present at the office for three days a week and that accounts for about 98% of our staff members so three days a week in the office two days a week at home obviously the site inspectors those that are on the site at the site office are more or less 100% back to work all the time and they go to site because we are busy with a major refurbishment project at Kubek and major outage however the discussions today made a few observations one of which is we have begun to pick up some staff disengagement as a result of an extended work from home there is some kind of fatigue web from home fatigue if you can call it that that has begun to set in and we have decided at today's executive committee meeting that we will require as soon as the president announces the lifting of the state of disaster expected to be by the 15th of March we will require that all staff be back to work 100% and that would be for a period of two weeks after which we would most likely revet back to the partial at the hybrid and this is done precisely to sort of remind people remind people that folks you are still fully employed and you still have jobs and there is a responsibility of you to deliver and therefore we want to in a way re-energize them for two weeks and then most likely revet back again to a hybrid model until we know what the future holds for the pandemic thank you thank you thank you Dr. Tobeka that's a very interesting approach to re-entering and returning to the workplace appreciate your answer now Spencer I'd like to queue up another live poll if we can before we close out the session do you see it is it posted Spencer Spencer if you could maybe have it spotlighted okay this all right I can see it now a live poll which of the following actions made necessary by the pandemic do you feel will have the most detrimental long-term impact on plant operations and safety um and I see a large spread if you will of response and percentages it looks like increased attrition is leading the responses with 39 40 percent followed by deferred maintenance and then reduced hiring coming in third and that seems to be the trend as more responses come in and it is it is true that attrition is a concern probably both here and abroad in the international community as people look for different career paths and what not as a result of the life changes that occurred as a result of the pandemic it's caused many people to re-evaluate priorities work-life balance career choices and the like so certainly increased attrition is of concern by many people deferred maintenance at the plants can understand obviously there was concern about work that could not be done as a result of people not being in the workplace or activities that had to be deferred as a result of the pandemic and then reduced hiring of course is also sort of goes hand in hand with the increased attrition issue um all right well those results results are continuing to come in but I do notice that it is 232 um so we're a couple minutes past the a lot of time for our session so I do want to take the opportunity again to thank our distinguished panelists for their time and their insightful presentations and perspectives the rick would not be a success without your participation I also want to thank the audience for your attendance at this panel today and I wish you a good rest of your day and please enjoy the rest of the rick and with that our session has concluded thank you