 Good afternoon from Vienna and welcome to our social media corner. My name is Diana and I'm the social media manager at the IEA. 2021 marks 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. Following the accident, the IEA, alongside the nuclear community, worked to promote and ensure that safety was further enhanced at nuclear facilities around the world. Now, a decade later, experts are gathering here in Vienna for a conference to look at lessons learned and actions taken and to identify ways to further strengthen nuclear safety. Here with me, I have the president of the conference, Mike Waitman. Mr. Waitman is an international nuclear safety consultant and was the leader of the first IEA International Fact-Finding Mission to Japan in May 2011. Good afternoon, Mr. Waitman, and thank you so much for being here with us. I have some questions for you and the first one is, is nuclear power safer now than before the Fukushima Daiichi accident? And if so, how? Good afternoon. It's my pleasure to be here and talk with you today. Is it safer now than it was? Yes, I would say so. I would say so in perhaps three main areas there. There's a lot of improvements been done, a lot of lessons learned, a lot of listening and not being complacent there. And that is good. The first lesson I would say is about institutional robustness there. Trying to make sure that there is an independent nuclear safety regulator, that people listen to what the public, who we serve, are saying, and what we can do to improve the way in which we explain things as well. Because it is important that all three pillars of the nuclear safety system operate together. The three pillars are industry, independent regulator, and stakeholders like the public. And they have to interact effectively. And what we've found over the years is that the more we listen to the public, the more we listen to other stakeholders, the more they challenge us, the better we are at what we do. There's no stopping and being complacent because somebody is challenging you. So that's a really important lesson to learn. The second lesson is more technical. And it is about building the resilience of the systems that you have in place on the nuclear power plant to secure the three Cs that give you nuclear safety. Containment, cooling, and control. And so they've built independent systems to ensure those safety functions are delivered, no matter what happens on the reactor, no matter if you have a station blackout or you have major natural hazards occurring there. These safety functions are still delivered. And that's built great resilience into the nuclear safety systems on the reactor sites. And the third area is enhancing emergency preparedness and response for severe accidents. Both on the site where the operators have to respond to a severe accident in unusual circumstances as they were heroically did at Fukushima Daiichi, but perhaps not with the resources that they needed, but also offsite as well so you can make the right decisions at the right time in the right circumstances there. Thank you. And what do you think is the future of nuclear safety? How can it be improved even further? Well, it is bright if we do not get complacent, if we listen and we learn from each other and from the public and other stakeholders. We cannot just sit in our ivory towers and think, well, we know everything. We've got to accept and welcome challenge. And that way we will never be complacent, which is the most important lesson there. The second lesson is that we must grasp all the opportunities of new technology, small modular reactors, advanced reactor designs so that we can improve the basic intrinsic safety of reactors as we go forward there. And I would say, thirdly, it's about elegance. It's about actually having an approach to nuclear safety that delivers things intrinsically safe. So things like passive safety, intensive operation, the way in which you have low temperature coefficients, other technical issues that ensure safety through the basic physics of the system there. So it's about elegance in safety there, not just keep on adding more and more things that may complicate the way in which safety is delivered. And lastly, what advice would you give to the next generation of nuclear safety professionals? Well, perhaps I shouldn't advise younger people, because I don't understand all that they have to go through in a modern society. But all I would say is you are the future. You are what will take these things forward. You can deliver some of this bright future for nuclear energy if you exercise your duties to the public as nuclear leaders. And so I would urge them to think about their duties as serving the public. I'd ask them to listen to the public, to respond to their concerns, to welcome their challenge and make sure they make good decisions. Decisions based on science and technology, not who shouts loudest or who pushes hardest, but making sure they're rational decisions. Doing the right thing at the right time is all I ask there. And making sure decisions are balanced. As Confucius said, taking things too far is as bad as taking things too short. So make a balanced decision. That's where wisdom comes in. Thank you so much, Mr. Whitman, for this short but very insightful conversation. It was a pleasure having you here. My pleasure. Thank you. We'll be back on Thursday for some more discussions. Until then, follow us on social media to learn more about this conference on the lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant so we can further strengthen nuclear safety around the world. We'll see you later.