 I'd like to welcome everybody to this morning's meeting on the status of operating nuclear power plants that are transitioning to a risk-informed performance-based fire protection licensing basis. That was a mouthful. This transition is performed in accordance with the National Fire Protection Association's standard 805, and here to fourth will be referred to as NFPA 805, a blessed acronym in today's meeting along with NRC. So we're going to provide, or this meeting will provide, a status of the plants that are submitting license amendment requests to transition to NFPA 805. Our briefing will also include a discussion of the technical issues involved in fire probabilistic risk assessment. The first panel is an external panel, which includes Mr. Paul Hardin from First Energy, Ms. Joelle DeJoseph from Duke Energy, Mr. Jim Chapman from SCIENTEC, Curtis Wright, and Mr. David Lockbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists. We'll have a short break after the first panel, and then we will turn to our staff panel, who will provide a status of license amendment reviews and a discussion of the progress in addressing technical issues encountered during the NRC reviews. Now I'm going to turn it over to our Executive Director for Operations, Mark Satorius. Good morning. The staff is here to brief you on the reviews that the staff is performing on the National Fire Protection Association standard 805. I want to start off by saying, and this is important, that all U.S. nuclear power plants are being operated safely under the current fire regulations. NFPA 805 is a risk-informed, performance-based alternative to deterministic fire protection requirements. This approach allows licensees who submit an application for NFPA 805 to leverage risk insights from a plant-specific fire probabilistic risk assessment to identify modifications to reduce fire risks at their plant. We believe that the safety improvements being made in support of NFPA 805 are among the most significant safety improvements being made by industry, and in many cases dovetail well with some of the improvements that we're making as a result of the lesson learned from the Fukushima accident. As you will hear from the staff, progress is being made on completing these reviews. You will also hear the staff's perspective on some of the challenges associated with these reviews as well as steps the staff has taken and continues to take to address those challenges. Joe Gitter to my left, the Director of the Division of Risk Assessment in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, which has the primary responsibility for conducting these reviews, will now provide an overview of the staff's effort. Thank you, Mark. I'd first like to start by introducing the two branch chiefs of my division who are responsible for most of the work that's going on with NFPA 805. To my left is Hossain Hamsey. He's the branch chief of the PRA Licensing Branch. And then to Mark's right is Alex Klein, and he is the Chief of the Fire Protection Branch. I want to start my presentation with an emphasis on safety. Licensees who have made the decision to transition to NFPA 805 have made or have committed to make significant safety improvements to reduce fire risk. Examples are the installation of reactor coolant pump seal injection systems like you saw in Joe L. DeJoseph's slide, or shutdown seals to mitigate the effects of a station blackout that might result from a fire. Some plants are installing sensitive insipient detection systems, which you heard about, that can detect fires even before they start. In some cases, plants are making major modifications, such as adding new auxiliary feedwater pumps to ensure that the plant can be safely shut down, even if both trains of safety systems, safety-related auxiliary feedwater systems are affected by a fire. And you heard Paul Hardin talk about one of the modifications at Davis-Bessie. Many of these modifications have been incorporated into post Fukushima mitigation strategies. Even plants that have decided not to transition to NFPA 805 have made considerable investments to improve fire safety. For example, industry has indicated that non-NFPA 805 plants have made significant investments on modifications to address fire-induced circuit failures, or what we call MSOs. So we can say with confidence that the operating reactor fleet has made and is continuing to make substantial safety improvements to address the risk from fires. That is the good news. The reality is that the NFPA 805 reviews have been more complex and resource-intensive than we envisioned. I think you heard that from industry and you're hearing it from the staff. As you can see from the figure on the slide, we are currently at the peak of the review effort as planned by the staggered approach approved by the Commission. The resource estimates and a schedule for reviewing the non-pilot NFPA 805 applications were based on a premise that the fire PRA submitted as part of the NFPA 805 application would follow the guidance jointly developed by EPRI and the NRC. That guidance was validated by two pilot applications and endorsed by the ACRS. However, the fire PRAs developed by the licensees contractors have utilized many methods that were never reviewed or approved by the NRC. While the licensees always had the option of proposing a technically defensible alternative to NRC guidance documents, the magnitude and number of deviations from the guidance have required significant additional resources to resolve and have been the number one driver of scheduled delays in the reviews. The industry and the NRC had been working through the fire PRA FAQ process and the risk-informed steering committee, which you heard about from the industry earlier, to address these deviations. You will hear more about how the staff is addressing this issue from Hossein. At the outset of the non-pilot reviews, we were challenged by the Commission to find efficiencies in the reviews. The staff did identify some efficiencies, which you will hear more about later this morning. These include efficiencies identified by the leading Six Sigma experts from the Office of the EDO. However, we are continuing to challenge ourselves to identify and implement further process improvements on the remaining reviews. Towards this end, we have developed a set of metrics to help ensure that we sustain our efforts to continually improve. My last area of emphasis, before I turn it over to Alex, is communications. Consistent with the principles of good regulation, the NRC staff has held numerous public meetings with industry to resolve issues related to NFP05, including frequent meetings to address unreviewed methods, and monthly NRC NEI management meetings. As you will hear from Hossein, with the support of industry, we have already resolved many of the unreviewed methods in parallel with the licensing reviews. In addition, every two months, I hold a phone call with each site vice president to discuss the status of the NFP05 reviews and to highlight any concerns. These communications have proven very beneficial to the NRC, and we believe they have been mutually beneficial to the industry as well.