 Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ho-Nee. I'm the director of the Office of Nuclear Ractor Regulation. We're going to start a couple of minutes early because I do have a few housekeeping reminders, but it's great to welcome you back to the second day of the RIC. And I hope you really enjoyed yesterday's opening and the sessions that ensued. Obviously, we're doing things a little bit different here at the RIC, and I got a lot of feedback about it. And one interesting feedback I would share, because more than one person had mentioned to me yesterday that, hey, we didn't hear as many scientific-related humor or jokes during the opening session, which those jokes typically adorn the opening sessions of RICs of the past. So I looked this morning and I'm going to try to do my best and give you one. I don't think I can meet the standard that has been set in the past by the commissioners, but did you hear about the time when Heisenberg was pulled over by the cops? The police officer asked him, do you know how fast you were going? And Heisenberg replied, no, but I know where I am. Okay, I don't know if that was used before. You know, we don't catalog the RIC jokes, and maybe we can write a new RIC of scientific jokes at the RIC. I hope Commissioner Barron doesn't find that one when it's written, but we can put it in Adams and guarantee that he won't find it. So, okay. I heard some groans there. Okay, another near pause. Thank you. Okay, just two quick housekeeping reminders in the app. It's new, right? Please make sure you rate the sessions. That'll give us a good feedback on the quality of the technical sessions that you go to. And then today we're celebrating Women's History Month in the United States here in March to celebrate all the great achievements of women and their contributions to the world. And there's a luncheon sponsored by the Federal Women's Program Advisory Committee. I know it's sold out, but I just want to put it out that we are honoring the women in their contribution. So, without further ado, I'd like to welcome the honorable Commissioner Annie Caputo, who was sworn in as a commissioner at the NRC in May of 2018 to a term ending June 2021. And Commissioner Caputo, as many of you know, has previously held positions in the Senate, Environment and Public Works Committee and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. So, welcome, Commissioner Caputo. Good morning. And I will start by thanking Ho and Ray for organizing such an amazing conference. I know your staff has spent considerable time and effort planning and coordinating the event with months of preparation. I'd also like to thank, for those of you who haven't noticed, the Montgomery County Police for being here and staffing this event and watching over us. I am always amazed at how well attended this event is, having grown to over 3,000 participants. It looks really big from up here. So, thanks to all of you for participating. NRC staff, international colleagues, academia, federal and local governments, non-governmental organizations, members of the public. It's wonderful to have you all here and we greatly value your participation in the conference. I also want to thank my husband and kids for coming today. Without their love and support, I wouldn't be able to do what I do. While they mostly consider me a geek, their being here today is a chance to show them that nuclear safety is, in fact, cool. Their being here also gives me an excuse to share a story of change that my family experienced recently, what I learned from it, and an opportunity that grew from it. So, I will start with the opportunity. My mother became a Christian minister when I was a junior in high school. Every Sunday, in every sermon, she used me as an example for a message to her congregation. This was my weekly dose of embarrassment. Every day, every Sunday, until I went off to college for two years. Now, fast forward to the RIC and I'm presented with an opportunity. I can pay it forward and provide this experience to my kids all in one shot, rather than 52 Sundays a year for two years. So, to my kids, you're welcome. Now for the family change. My husband and I recently decided to transfer our kids to a different school. When we told them, their reactions were very different. One said, great, this will be an adventure. I'll make a bunch of new friends. The other one was reluctant. This is the only school I've ever known. I've gone here all my life. I don't want to change. After talking about it more and explaining our reasons, then visiting the new school for a day, the attitude began to shift. Well, most of the teachers seemed nice and the kids are pretty friendly. And then a little while later, you know, this change will be good. And then my favorite, wait, why do I have to wait for January? Why can't I just start there tomorrow? So what this taught me was people respond to change very differently. Some may eagerly embrace it. Some may want to discuss it and understand the reason for it. Some may need to experience a little to fully embrace it. Some changes are inevitable. Some are changes we choose to make. How well we adapt to the changes we face is a result of the changes we choose to make. How well we adapt reflects who we are as individuals and as a team. When my husband AJ is confronted with change, he boldly announces, I have super AJ genes. I will adapt and overcome. It's pretty comical. We may not have super AJ genes, but who we are as an agency and our character is embodied in the principles of good regulation and in our values. The NRC is a collection of highly skilled, experienced and dedicated employees. But it is our principles and values that will enable us to embrace change and successfully accomplish our mission as a team. And there are many changes facing the agency. Many of them were discussed yesterday, so I won't repeat them today. That's the benefit of speaking on the second day of the REC. A lot of this has already been said, just not by everyone. But I will quote Will Rogers, a vision without a plan is just a hallucination. We are in a stage where the transformation effort is taking shape, but different people have different ideas about what it is exactly. I believe the transformation is about becoming a modern regulator that promotes and embraces innovative approaches to achieve our mission. The mission doesn't change, and our principles and values don't change, but our workload and how we manage it will have to be different. Margie Donne referred to innovation as a muscle. Innovation is not a matter of waiting for inspiration and shouting Eureka. It is something we should all exercise as a part of what we do, in the same way that a questioning attitude is crucial for nuclear safety. We can ask, is there a better way to do this in our daily decision-making? In this spirit, I want to applaud the work of the NRC's Innovation Forum and all the employees who have contributed their ideas so far. As our workload changes, there are also opportunities to invest in the leadership and skills of our employees. Training will be key to this effort. As things change, it will be more important than ever that we provide the tools that our staff need to manage the changes that they face and be successful. And as we anticipate the changes in front of us as an agency, one thing is for sure, leadership will play a decisive role in shaping the outcomes. With all of these changes and incumbent upon all NRC leadership, including my colleagues on the commission and myself to communicate clearly, diligently and thoughtfully. To that end, I think Margie Donne's strategies on a page or SOAPS and the new transformation webpage are a good start and I hope that staff finds them useful. One of the dominant aspects of transformation is expanding our use of risk-informed decision-making. I often hear it discussed at a high level, but I'm working to understand how we use it on a daily basis. Our principle of efficiency states regulatory activities should be consistent with the degree of risk reduction they achieve. This is the foundation for our ongoing endeavor to better utilize risk information. Better utilizing these tools will enable us to modernize our decision-making and focus our time and resources on achieving the greatest safety benefits. To this end, the EPRI's 2018 paper on insights into risk margins and NEI's paper on understanding current levels of safety are useful to consider as we incorporate risk-informed decision-making, provided, of course, that the industry maintains its high levels of safety. And with that said, the roots of our regulatory framework originated with the Atomic Energy Act in 1954, and our industry has over 4,500 years of operational experience in nuclear power. Where we stand today is the result of many lessons learned along the way, but our experience also contains a wealth of data that provides risk insights. As a commission considers expanding the use of risk-informed decision-making, either in licensing or oversight, such proposals should have a sound foundation in transparent, objective, high quality, and data-driven analysis. In fact, this topic is of such great interest to me that on Thursday, I am moderating a panel discussion on risk-informed decision-making that I hope will provide a great conversation and diverse perspectives on how to best leverage risk insights. So yes, that's once more a shameless plug for the Thursday morning session on risk. Similarly, our back-fit rule serves a valuable purpose by refining our focus on safety significance in licensing decisions. The back-fit rule provides a disciplined process for determining whether regulatory changes are necessary for adequate protection or provide a substantial cost-justified safety increase. In this way, the back-fit rule is an essential tool for achieving more risk-informed decisions that are transparent, objective, and high quality. For this reason, I'd like to see us improve our adherence to the back-fit rule. The result will be higher-quality actions focused on areas that yield significant safety benefits. Now I'd like to turn my attention to the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which was signed in a lot earlier this year with overwhelming bipartisan support. I consider this to be Congress and the President's statement of their expectations for transformation at the NRC, particularly with respect to budgeting and fee recovery, advanced reactor licensing, and accident-tolerant fuel. With regard to the last two issues, our ability as an agency to reach prudent decisions in a timely manner will directly impact whether those efforts are successful. Prompt action, delayed action, and inaction are all outcomes that are directly determined by our choices. External stakeholders, including Congress, are watching closely to see how well we execute our responsibilities. This will require us to be responsive, accountable, and proactive to efficiently reach sound decisions in keeping with our principles and values. Congress was also clear about the need to reform our budgeting and fee recovery process. As reactors closed and new reactor licensing work declined, the fees from those licensees and applicants decreased. Unless there's a corresponding decrease in the budget, this dynamic results in fee increases for operating plants under the existing law. For example, under our proposed fee recovery for 2019, operating reactor fees increased 8.4 percent as a result of the closure of one plant. The planned closures of two more and the completion of a design certification. Congress recognized that this structure was not sustainable, particularly given the trend in premature plant closures. But currently, we use a budget developed two years ago to formulate a budget for two years from now without much calibration of comparing to actual expenditures. This results in a budget that is slow to reflect our changing environment. The new budget and fee recovery structure in the new law provides an opportunity for us to harness analysis of actual expenditures to better inform our budget decisions and rethink how we allocate our resources. Allocation of resources is a major instrument of policy for any agency. It's a statement of our priorities and the means to achieve objectives. For this reason, I dedicate a significant amount of my time to our budget formulation and fee recovery process, a fact that is well known to the staff that are tasked with answering my many questions. But I firmly believe our financial management should not be exempt from the benefits of data analytics and transformational thinking. For these issues and many others, I would like to see the agency use more results-driven approaches and better utilize data to measure performance and decision-making. As a great artist, Michelangelo once said, the danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. Our existing metrics have given us our existing performance. If we want to improve our performance, then we must begin by improving our metrics. In the future, I'd like to see the NRC able to objectively and candidly assess our results and share those results publicly. As in this, our transformation efforts will fall short. In conclusion, while the NRC is facing many challenges, our principles and values don't change. They are the roadmap to embrace change and be successful. In the words of Mark Twain, success is a journey, not a destination. It requires constant effort, vigilance, and reevaluation. Our journey as a regulator began in 1954 with a determination that nuclear could be used for peaceful purposes. Since then, the industry and this agency have gone through several periods of change, but our most basic charge has remained the same to provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection of the public health and safety. That safety mission must remain the sound foundation on which all of our transformational efforts are built. Thinking beyond that, we need to find ways to improve how we do our work. We should use our own expertise to rethink how we do things, but this is also where innovation can be a huge help. Companies and other agencies are innovating all the time. We need to examine how we can take their ideas and put them to work for us. In looking farther ahead, the road is less clear. This is where we will be agile, flexible, and ready to tackle whatever comes. No matter what the future holds, I will join you in rolling up my sleeves and putting on my best thinking cap to shape a modern, successful NRC. Thank you for your kind attention. I hope this conference is productive and engaging for all of you, and I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much for those remarks, Commissioner Caputo. We have a few questions for you here. This might be a good opening one for you. I'll put this in my words. Commissioner Caputo, you've obviously been very familiar with the NRC given your experience working on the hill. You've watched the NRC do a lot of things over the years and probably even do some changes over the years as well, but now that you're working at the NRC as an NRC commissioner, what are your thoughts compared to your previous experiences at the NRC? Well, I will start with a piece of advice or an observation that former Commissioner Magwood gave me after I was nominated. He said that above all, the thing I would enjoy most about the NRC is the people. It's a fabulous, dedicated staff, very, very knowledgeable. I learn a lot from them every day and I really do relish our robust discussions and the diverse perspectives that I hear and it does a lot to inform my thinking on a whole range of topics. So I have to say I am just absolutely thrilled with the staff and look forward to working with them every day. Okay. I've got a couple questions here related to risk here. You mentioned regulatory changes with the principles of good regulations that regulatory changes should be commensurate with risk reduction. How much more risk reduction is needed and required or warranted? In other words, how much is enough? I think that's a decision that gets made every day on a daily basis. I think what we need to make sure that we have is processes that lead us to risk-informed decision-making and our tools for employees to make those decisions as they come across them in their daily work. Okay. And one that's related to that, I guess you're going to be chairing the clinical session tomorrow on risk-informed decision-making. Can you tell us what risk-informed decision-making means to you? Can I tell you what it means to me? Yes. At this point in time, I would have to equivocate on that. I think we talk about it a lot at a high level and in concept, but I am working to learn more about what it means in daily practice and how we actually use it as a tool, how we increase our use of risk-information in light of our deterministic history. So that is something that I am working harder to understand more fully. Okay. So we have a question here based on recent tragic examples in the aircraft industry with the Boeing 737 airplanes. And the question is, what can the industry learn from these experiences? And I suppose there's maybe a connection perhaps to digital technologies there. It doesn't say that in the question, but the question really relates to what can the industry learn from other events, including these tragic accidents with the Boeing aircraft of recent years? Well, until we know fully what the reason was for those situations, I wouldn't really want to comment on those. But I would point out that the airline industry has been using digital technology successfully since 1994. So I'd like to think after 25 years of use that we won't indict it on one result. I do think it's a situation where we certainly need to understand in great detail what happened with those incidents, but I don't think that that is a reason not to proceed with digital technology because there are a lot of safety benefits that are inherent in increasing the use of digital technology. Okay. Okay. You discussed in your remarks NRC becoming a more modern regulator with focusing on better data analytics. Where do you think the NRC improved the most in this regard? I think in budgeting is one spot but also in timeliness of decision making. I think we have some metrics that are shared publicly, but I think they're very high level and I don't think that they are necessarily as ambitious as what we could achieve if we set more aggressive goals. Can you maybe deepen a little bit more your thought on the budgeting in terms of the data and being more modern and how we go about that? When you look at our budget and the document that we produced for Congress, the numbers are rolled up to an extremely high level. So there is information in there, for example, with subsequent license renewal that we need to increase our spending on subsequent license renewal, but there's no detail provided on how much we already spend and how much that comparative increase would be. So I think we need to understand a lot more historically what we have spent, how we've spent it in order to educate ourselves on whether or not such an increase is warranted or too lean or too much. Without the detail on actual expenditures, I think it becomes very difficult to know whether we're actually placing our resources where they do the most benefit. Okay, thank you. The commission has before the paper, I'm sorry, SECI 18-00-60 entitled Modernizing NRC's Risk and Form Decision Making. I think this is what we so-called called the transformation paper. Can you tell us please what the status of that paper is with the commission and what your views are of what was presented? Well, I can't speak for my colleagues. It's something that I have looked at and reviewed, but there are also a lot of papers pending before the commission. And so I think this is one that you heard the chairman and Margie Dunn mention yesterday that transformation will in many ways be made one decision at a time and one step at a time. And I think that's perhaps where we are. My own views are that transformation really extends beyond the paper, not just the items that are covered in the paper. So I think as a commission, we're working to assess really what our next steps will be in that regard. Okay, so I'm going to embellish that for me a little bit here. I heard in some of the hallway conversations yesterday some comments about the one decision at a time. And I think that may mean different things to different people. I think the person that was speaking to me presented in the context of that sounds like an incremental change. And he was asking, is that where NRC is really going? So do you have a perception or a view on what one decision at a time really means and is NRC just making incremental changes or do you think you see the NRC needing to make more, making bigger, do you see the NRC needing to make bigger changes? Every journey begins with a step. So to the, you know, if we're going to talk about increments of change, there's still increments of change and it's still important to begin that journey with a step. Some changes will be larger than others. Some will be incremental. I think it's, you know, remains for the commission to decide where we feel comfortable making larger strides and where there are smaller increments. Because I think no matter what, we are changing a very established regulatory framework and that needs to be done very carefully and deliberately and a fair amount of analysis. And so to a certain extent, some changes will not happen overnight. Okay, thank you. I have a question here related to reactor oversight process. The commission has a paper related to engineering inspections. So question is, where is the commission at on this paper and what are your views on the use of licensee self assessments in place of inspections by the NRC? I think I am open to the use of self assessments, but I think it needs to be targeted and I think it needs to be well justified for exactly how we utilize the self assessments. I think in reality, our resident inspectors probably rely on a certain amount of self assessment that the industry does already, whether we're reviewing documents of measurements that they took in the plant versus making all of those measurements ourselves. So I think to a certain extent, it's an incremental step, but it's one that's worth looking at and evaluating. Okay, and the part about the commission, where you see things out on the paper, any thoughts there? I think it is one of many papers that we are looking at and I am waiting to study it more in depth. I think this is one area where there's been a pretty substantial regulatory effort. I'm not clear that it's in line with the safety significance that we found through those inspections, so I want to look at that closely and just look more closely at what the staff's recommendations are. Okay, so I'm going to maybe piggyback on to this because you're aware the NRC staff is embarked on an effort to enhance the reactor oversight process. It is a flagship inspection program for the agency and there's a number of changes or areas that the staff is considering for changes, including the size of the baseline program, the white finding issue, and also the significance determination process. So Commissioner Caputo, can you tell us your thoughts on what ROP enhancements means to you in terms of some of the things that we're looking at and the size of the baseline program, which has been defined as the minimum for the inspection program regardless of performance and then things such as how we treat white findings. Are you having any conversations about these issues and so tell us what you think about the things we're looking at in the ROP? A few conversations. I'm looking forward to seeing what the staff recommends. I do think there's merit in the statement that, you know, the ROP is almost 20 years old, so we have a lot of experience in using it and a lot of data has been produced by that program. So I think there's a wealth of information for us to look through and see if it is still as risk targeted as it needs to be. You know, the industry also makes the argument that they are operating at much higher levels of safety than they were 20 years ago. So I think if we factor that into our decision-making, we just need to make sure that we are inspecting the right things and making sure that they maintain those high levels of safety. And to that end, I think if we can use the data inherent in the ROP to create a sound foundation for changes, then I would welcome a review of a very thorough data-driven revision. Okay. I have another question for you in terms of what the agency is doing to prepare itself for advanced reactor licensing. There is a licensing modernization project that's being led out of the office of the new reactors. Can you share with us your thoughts on the direction the agency should be heading in terms of being ready for regulatory reviews of advanced reactor designs that are of non-lightwater design? Well, this is clearly one area where both Congress and a sector of the industry are very eager for us to make more progress. And I think this is one of those key examples which will define us in the minds of our external stakeholders as to whether we can modernize and learn to regulate new technologies that are vastly different than what we've done historically. So it's a very high-profile effort. I think at the end of the day, we need to make progress, you know, as efficiently as we can make it, but with the realization that we are learning as we go and need to make sure that our decisions are sound as we move forward. So it needs to be deliberate but efficient. And I think that's the lens that I look at is are we making enough progress to be ready for the industry when it's ready to test a new licensing process. And I think this is very similar probably to what the agency went through in preparing for the new application wave in 1996, sorry, 19-2007, with the new applications based on the new licensing process that had been designed in the 90s. Okay. So it's interesting. I actually can't see the timer here, but I think we're running close. I think we have maybe time for just one more question, and I'd like to just offer you, Commissioner Caputo, do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share before we close out your plenary session? I think this is a very exciting time for the agency. I think the measure of change that's expected of us can be daunting, but I think it's also a chance for us to embrace the opportunity. And with that challenge of change, I think can inspire us to achieve more than we previously thought was possible. So I'm very excited to be a part of that and look forward to working with everyone at the agency as we go forward. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Commissioner Caputo. I really appreciate your comments. I have the pleasure to introduce our next speaker. He's our newest commissioner. The Honorable David Wright was sworn in as commissioner on May 30th, 2018. And before joining the NRC, he served as an energy and water consultant and policy advisor on nuclear waste issues. He is a former president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and served as vice chairman and chairman of the South Carolina Public Service Commission. He was also elected councilman and mayor in Irma, South Carolina, and to the South Carolina House of Representatives. A colon cancer survivor, Commissioner Wright is an advocate for cancer awareness and education. He's a proud father and grandfather and has enjoyed empowering baseball for 47 years. He is a graduate of Clemson University and commissioner, I have to mention something about Clemson University and I think my first encounter with an avid Clemson fan was on January 1st, 1982. Some of you weren't even born then but I think Commissioner Wright will probably know what happened. I was in the Army and my best friend was a Clemson graduate. I was from a small town in Nebraska and I wasn't so much a football fan but he was and he kept egging me on about how Clemson was going to smash Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. So I just couldn't bear it anymore so we bet on the Orange Bowl and I think some of you, I think Commissioner Wright, you'll know what happened on that day. Clemson won its first national title by beating Nebraska and my punishment for that and you probably won't view this as a punishment Commissioner Wright but my punishment for losing that bet was to wear this bright orange t-shirt for a week with this white tiger paw on it and I think you're probably just an avid of a Clemson fan as my friend was so with that I'll Commissioner Wright. Thank you. I'm vertically challenged so I need to adjust this. Very good. So good morning everyone. Number five here. Last but not least. Before I begin and everything I want to say congratulations to my fellow commissioners for their presentations and their speeches here yesterday and this morning. It's really good stuff and I hope that I can live up to the same standard that you have set yesterday and today. I'm really proud of you. It's a pleasure to be here at my first rick. What you saw and heard yesterday and what you're going to experience today and tomorrow it's the final product of much hard work. Many dedicated people. The significant show of flexibility, creativity and problem-solving skills. A shared vision and just a hint of a long tradition. Thank you to everyone who has helped prepare for this event and for all of you for attending. In order to fully understand the purpose of the rick, its history and its traditions I'm going to go back and read. I've read a lot of previous speeches of the past and I've noticed that they often begin with thanks and I like that tradition. We don't thank people frequently enough in our lives both personally and professionally so I'm going to uphold that tradition this morning. So I'd like to thank the wonderful team make up my group team right who have become like family to me as well. Kathy Canardis who's here, she's my chief of staff. Kim Laura who's my administrative assistant and my very first employee. Carol Lazar, my legal counsel. Samantha Crane, my materials technical assistant. Mo Shams who is my reactor technical assistant and Carmel Savoy, my other AA and they make up the best office anywhere and they do a great job for me and for the agency too for their advice and their help and their guidance. I'd also like to thank Chris Cook and C.J. Fong who have filled in as my reactor TA is needed. C.J. is going to be coming back here soon and to a former office administrative assistant Zara Taru as well. I'd like to express my gratitude to the other commissioners and their staffs who share the 17th floor or the 18th floor with me and to the chairman and her staff on the 17th floor. Your excellent colleagues, your welcoming, informative, educational and challenging and encouraging in a very good way. I see the wisdom of the five member commission every day. The diversity of experience, the difference of opinions, the perspectives we bring to the table that just makes our decisions all the better and I'm appreciative for it. And finally a big thank you to each and every person that has briefed me since I was sworn in. I can't list you all because I only have 30 minutes but I want you to know that I do appreciate you taking time to prepare the briefing materials, answer my questions and get me up to speed on the issues. Your help has been invaluable not just to me but to our team as well so thank you. One of the things I noticed from reading past commissioner speeches is apparently a joke. It seems to be tradition, right? I do know a little bit about telling a joke. You see I'm the oldest of four kids, three boys and a girl who grew up with a father who made part of his living as a stand up comic. Dad was a comic of the Don Rickles variety though. If that name doesn't ring a bell, suffice it to say that he's considered an insult comic. So let that sink in for just a second. Anyway, my father played Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, the Hershey Hotel, Hotel Hershey up in PA, among some other well-known places. Dad emceed many beauty pageants and even more sports banquets and roasts and he hosted several local television and shows and radio programs over his 60 years in radio and television. Dad appeared in hundreds and hundreds of television commercials and he was a radio golf reporter for many PGA tour events, including the Masters Golf Tournament for 50 consecutive years where he received the Masters Golf Tournament Lifetime Achievement Award. Can you tell I'm proud of my dad? When we were growing up, which was a lot of fun in my house, Dad often referred to us kids in his routines, usually teasing us. He once said my sister Amy was so lazy that when she wanted to run away from home, she asked him to call a cab. Or about my brother Ricky, he would say, my son Ricky, he watches so much television, when he woke up the other morning, the radio was on, he thought he'd gone blind. With us being so young, those jokes went over pretty big too. I told my first joke on stage with Dad when I was maybe five or six years old. My father called me up on stage and told the audience, I was very smart, a real math whiz. Then he would ask me, he'd say, David, if you have two dollars in your right pants pocket and you have two dollars in your left pants pocket, what do you have? I'd say, that's an easy one, Dad. I'd have somebody else's pants. So there's my joke. It's not a neutron walked into a bar kind of joke, it's a fond memory of my father and the value and joy of shared humor, along with the willingness to laugh at things in life which I like to laugh at a lot. I'm going to go off script for one quick story just to give you an example. I told you my dad was a broadcaster for 60 years. He had a radio show every morning from 5.30 to 10 with two other gentlemen, it was live talk radio and it could get downright hysterical at times. They were practical jokesters as well. My dad, on the day of his 60th birthday, he was driving into town and the other partners had asked the local police department to stop my dad and they gave him a warning ticket for turning 60 into 35. So during this rick you have the option of many technical sessions filled with experts from around the world talking sometimes in bit of a code about high level nuclear topics of interest. I've been at the NRC for less than a year and I do not bring with me a PhD in physics or a long history as an inspector. So I'm not going to give you a technical address or perhaps that some of my predecessors might have done or even current colleagues have done to it as well. Instead what I want you to understand is who I am, how I think, how I expect to conduct myself and make decisions that I believe have been and will be in the best interests of the NRC and its stakeholders including both the public and the industry. I've had an interesting, certainly unconventional, path to the commission. I'm a proud alum of Clemson University. That would be the college football champion, Tigers by the way, to all my Alabama friends. Maybe we can meet again in the playoffs next year for the fifth year until then go Tigers. That's what I'm going to say. I graduated with a degree in political science with a minor in communications and some wonderful memories as a long distance runner on the Clemson cross country team. Since then I've worked at an advertising agency, owned and operated a public relations and consulting business, been a press secretary, a radio salesman, run a local newspaper, owned and operated a hickory farms franchise and a national advance man for a presidential campaign. I have my real estate license and I'm a licensed auctioneer in South Carolina. I've also, as you've heard, umpired baseball for 47 years. More about baseball in a bit. Despite all those various and diverse jobs and they were a lot of fun, the most important one in terms of my road to the NRC where things really started for me was as mayor of a small town. The NRC's historian Tom Willick did a bit of researching on my behalf and he's fairly certain that I'm the only elected official to sit on the commission. We've had an astronaut, lawyers, academics, military commanders, but I'm apparently the first mayor. I'm pretty sure I'm the first former state utility commissioner as well to serve on the commission. And I can tell you this, I've relied on what I learned leading a small town every day that I've been at the NRC as a commissioner. So you have to learn the process, how things operate first and you have to get to know the people that you're leading. Only then can you really figure out how to get things done, what's important to people, and what may need to change. You get wisdom through experiences. That's exactly how I've approached being a commissioner too. Let me tell you a little bit about my small town, Irmo, South Carolina. It's a neat little town, about 10, 15,000 people now straddling both the Lexington and Richland County line. It's near the shores of Lake Murray, about 10 miles north of Columbia. I was elected to town council at first, but because I felt some issues were not being addressed timely, if at all, the next time the filing period opened for mayor, I filed, ran, and won. I was all of 28 years old. I was the youngest mayor in the town's history and at the time one of the youngest mayors I think in the country. Sometimes youth is a blessing. That's because you just don't know how big a challenge something's gonna be. So with youthful energy and enthusiasm, you just go for it. And so I did. Representing a small town is no small job, though. Local politics are tough. You're never off duty. You run into your constituents everywhere, at church, at schools, at grocery stores, at the gas station, at the doctor's office, and on the ball field. You had to be a problem solver and a leader. You had to be compassionate and sometimes stubborn. You had to be a negotiator, a diplomat. You had to weigh priorities and never forget, never forget the people who put you behind that desk. You dealt with everything from garbage collection to zoning variance issues. And the decisions that I made had real and immediate impact on people's lives. On zoning matters, it can mean someone being able to keep their trailer on their land and having a roof over their head. You had to deal with the bizarre, too. Like the aftermath of a young prize bull getting loose in town and being corralled in the Winn-Dixie parking lot. About every Volkswagen rabbit Irmo had on its police force. Yes, our police force was driving VW rabbits when I was first elected. VW rabbits are not stronger than a bull. After three years as mayor, there was an opportunity before me, and I decided to run for the State House of Representatives. I didn't just run to run. I ran because it was an opportunity to do something for our area and for my state. The issue was the lack of state rules and regulations on storm water and watershed management. I felt like I could do some good from that position and with hard work I did. But as in baseball, life can throw you some big nasty curveballs. You think everything is on track in your life. You're running on all cylinders. You feel good. You play basketball. You run. You play softball and golf. Your work is satisfying. Your family is happy. And then you go to a routine doctor's visit, only to be told something that will forever change your life. It was 8.15 in the morning, on Friday, January 11th, 2008. I still remember that morning like it was yesterday. It was just a follow-up visit to a routine colonoscopy, my first ever. The doctor comes in, and with not a lot of bedside manner, says Mr. Wright, I don't know what caused you to get a colonoscopy, but you have cancer. The word cancer, when spoken like that at you, takes on a whole different meaning. It's not an uncommon word, cancer. We hear it. We know it. But the word takes on a whole new meaning when it's addressed to you directly by your doctor. Your mind simultaneously goes blank and races ahead. Am I going to die? How am I going to tell my family? Will I be able to work? What will happen to my family? What comes next? How am I going to pay for this? The doctor left me alone with my thoughts for a few minutes, and in those few minutes, the first thing I did is prayed. Then I got myself together, and I made the decision to do whatever I could to beat it. Not just for me, but for my family. So when he came back in, I was ready. I said, what can I do today? It was pretty me right away that I needed a team. Fighting and beating cancer is not fun or easy, and it's even harder as a solitary sport. I needed my general practitioner, I needed a surgeon, an oncologist, nurses, caregivers, friends, prayer. I needed to tell my family so they could help me too. Since I had not eaten that morning, which was a good thing for a number of reasons, one, I had no food in my stomach to worry about keeping down after getting the news, and two, I was able to have a CAT scan that day. I had two surgeries, and ended up having IV chemotherapy for six months for 54 hours straight every two weeks. On chemo days, I'd stop by the Burger King on the way in. Then I'd sit in the chemo chair for seven hours with the chemo right there, nausea medicines and steroids and fluids dripping into my veins. Then I'd go home with a bag of the chemo solution on my shoulder, and I'd sleep with it all night, attached. I'd wake up, I'd go back the next day and do the same thing all over again. When I left each day, I went to work. I won't lie, I didn't feel great, but I had work to do as a commissioner at the South Carolina Public Service Commission. Plus, I had to be a dad. I was facing a trial, certainly, but I had my faith and I had my family, so I pushed ahead. 14 hours sitting in a chemo chair every two weeks gives you plenty of time to think. I used to tell people I had to learn how to do 14 days of work, nine days, when you count the sick time that you're down after the chemo sets in. I pondered, what interests me? What's my passion? What's gonna be my purpose if I make it through this battle? I knew I would advocate for early cancer screening, for sure, and I've done so, but what would I do for work? At the time, I was a South Carolina Public Service Commissioner, a position I had been elected to four years earlier. Waste was a big issue in South Carolina, thanks to the four nuclear power sites and the approximately 3,800 metric tons of spent fuel waiting for a national solution for permanent disposal. And I decided, sitting in that chair, the chemo chair, that I wanted to become an expert on nuclear waste and nuclear policy, so that's what I did. While battling back a disease that could easily have taken my life, I read on my computer. I asked questions, I studied, and I learned. I did become known as an expert on those issues during my time as a state commissioner and working through the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners as well. I testified in many settings and achieved some visibility on behalf of the ratepayers in my state and around the country. Eventually, my name somehow floated to Washington and I was considered for a position as an NRC commissioner. At my NRC confirmation hearing, I highlighted my local and state perspective on national nuclear issues. I don't think my role as a state commissioner got extra attention, but certainly my testimony was informed by my experiences working for the people of my hometown and for South Carolina. I was pleased to be confirmed as a commissioner on May 24th, 2018, which is my late father's birthday, by the way, and soon after, on May 30th of 2018, I put my hand on the Bible held by my mother and swore to do this job in good faith and to the best of my ability. So let me talk a little bit about what has happened since then. I figured out the computer system. I hired an excellent staff. I've made headway through the nine linear feet of backlog paperwork and I've been walking the halls. As I set up my confirmation hearing, I'm not a guy who stays in his office. So I walk around. I've been to all three buildings and headquarters, some of the floors more than once already. I plan to get to the region soon, too. I don't say commissioner in front of my name when I walk the floors to say hello. That's because it's not about me. It's about the meeting of the great people that make up this agency, seeing and meeting them in their work environment. I find it impactful to see when you walk into their cubicle or their office, just what's important to them, to that person. Family, pets, sports, travel. You know, what are they working on? What else do they love? Usually, once the initial shock was off, they relax and share ideas or stories with me, but not necessarily at first. Some are very surprised and taken aback and aren't sure what to make of a commissioner roaming around. And I get it. I get that I have a different leadership style and that people want to know that it's not a gimmick, that I am listening and paying attention, that I'm approachable and that I care. It doesn't always happen the first time I meet them, but they loosen up the second or third time. I'm happy to make that additional visit, too. It helps me know and trust the people of the NRC and for them to know and trust me. I've gained so much from my walk-arounds and met some incredibly bright, dedicated and talented people. Plus, I'm having fun with it. I've also seen some things that I think can change. One of the things is the number of silos that I've seen. I see people working on similar items across the hall or building from each other. They don't necessarily know their colleagues doing the same thing or something similar. I've seen people who are right next to each other, but who don't necessarily talk face-to-face at all? I think it's important that people get up and talk to each other. There's no need to recreate the wheel and there's no need to send an email if you can pop right next door and talk to them face-to-face. We all know that email can be misinterpreted. Face-to-face, there's fewer misunderstandings. You get the tone, the texture, and have the ability to ask questions right then and there, too. On top of that, when people talk, relationships form. People feel heard and can share their ideas and solutions with others. People being seen and heard. That's important because people matter. When I see people in the hallways, I want them to know they matter. They matter to me and they matter to this agency. I feel that the people of the NRC are extraordinary in their dedication, their talent, and their drive, and I'm telling you what, they're smart. Oh, my gosh, they got degrees. I can't even think about what they're about. That's not to say I won't differ with staff at times or question the way something's being done. Because I'm trying to understand and learn, I can and I will ask pointed questions, but I'll be respectful in doing so because people matter and the work they do matters. I empower my staff and I want the staff of the NRC empowered to do their jobs to the best of their ability for the NRC and all its stakeholders. It's the same standard I hold myself to. I'm a big believer in teams. Together, people can do remarkable things. My cancer team got me to remission. Not a day goes by that I don't think of them and I'm grateful. At the NRC, we're a team, too. Those at the top must model teamwork for that concept to permeate the layers, the floors, and the buildings of the NRC. Teams, not silos, achieve great things. There's no limit to what you can achieve when you work together and you don't mind who gets the credit. I have a plaque on my desk that references that and I look at it and try to live by that motto every day and I challenge you to do the same thing. This position is not about me and it's not about the individual members of the staff. It's about the agency achieving its mission in the most efficient and effective way possible. And that idea brings me to my last point, which I'm going to tie to baseball. Yeah, it's relevant, I promise. Baseball's been around since the 1800s. It's a team sport governed by rules that have stayed pretty consistent over the years. What's a fair file ball? What's a ball or a strike? These things, they remain constant. There have been some rule changes made over the 100 year plus history that were necessary to maintain fairness between the offense and the defense and to protect the integrity of the game as a whole, like the infill flower roll. Other things have changed with the times, too. Games are now televised, players chew gum and spit sunflower seeds instead of chewing tobacco. And pitchers have a whole arsenal of pitches now, not just a fastball, but home plate is still the same. The rules of baseball matter to the game of baseball and the consistency of those rules matter. Baseball provides instruction for life, too. And it happens right at home plate. As an umpire, I have a lot of affinity for home plate. Home plate is and always has been 17 inches wide. It doesn't matter if you're in major league baseball, minor league game, high school, travel ball, or organized little leagues, it's 17 inches wide. Not more, not less. A pitcher's got to get the ball over the plate, over that 17 inches, or he's not going to stay in the game. They're going to take him out. Umpires are not supposed to artificially make the plate 18 or 19 or 20 inches and say, oh, that's okay, Johnny, you were close. We'll just give it to you. Doing that would hurt the batter because they're learning to hit and they're trying to learn what a strike looks like. For young pitchers, particularly getting the ball over the plate is challenging. Parents and coaches are yelling to widen the strike zone or widen the plate because games can get long. But you can't do it because if you give in, it won't stop there. They'll expect you to cut another corner later on something else. So as an umpire, I teach. I don't widen the plate. Both pitchers and hitters, they need to learn the rules. They need to know what a strike looks like, what a ball looks like, and how an out is made. Now umpires make mistakes, too. Sometimes. Well, maybe. I had a fellow umpire tell me that he thought he made a mistake once, but that he was wrong. I'm glad you're still with me. As an umpire, you've got to hold yourself to a higher standard of what you know to be right and fair. As an NRC commissioner, I hold myself to that same high standard. I must be accountable to those I lead and the agency must be accountable to those it serves. The NRC's mission is reasonable assurance of adequate protection, not more, not less. We must meet our mission, but we shouldn't widen the plate and regulate to absolute protection worth to zero risk. Let's make fair calls, interpret the rules fairly, change the rules and requirements when there is a compelling risk-informed reason to do so, and maintain the integrity of our mission to provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection. I approach my job as commissioner much like I approach being umpire. I call it like I see it, I follow the rules, and I will not artificially widen the plate. So if you've been following along with me this morning and I thank you for doing so, you will know that who I am and how I think and how I make decisions as an NRC commissioner comes down to a few things. People matter, teams matter, rules matter. My road to this podium started in a mayor's office of a very small town with an unexpected swing through a chair and a chemo center. I am proof that everything's possible. For us as people, for us as an organization, everything's possible. Things don't stay the same and they won't stay the same and they shouldn't stay the same. Change is inevitable. Curveballs are also inevitable. We should not be afraid to change. As John Wooden said, failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be. We should welcome change and look at it as an opportunity to apply our great knowledge and dedication to the mission to achieve great things. We have what it takes to do so. What the NRC does is vitally important to this country. What the NRC does has an impact on virtually everything, the safety and security of our communities and of our country. An impact on our roads, our hospitals, on the economy, on the workplace, on the global nuclear community. We make a difference. We have impact. We need that impact to be positive and a product of the people and teams who play by the rules for the integrity of what we do as an agency depends on it. One last thing before I close and take some questions from Ray. March is colon cancer awareness month. So I encourage you to schedule a screening colonoscopy or other screening tests for breast or prostate cancer. Please take the time to do it because the life you save could be yours. So thank you so much for your attention today and I'll be happy to take some questions. Thank you for your remarks, Commissioner Wright. We have time for a couple questions and we're getting questions as you were speaking. So I'm going to try to combine some things since we're running a little short on time. Towards the end of your remarks, you mentioned about reasonable assurance of adequate protection and we shouldn't regulate to zero risk. How will you apply your approach to reasonable assurance of adequate protection to help enable the use of new technologies in the nuclear industry? Well, so I was in a way, I mean you count it fortunate in some ways and disappointing in others, but I did not have the opportunity to serve in the military, but I've had the opportunity to work with a bunch of the Navy people and I've toured a lot of places and I've learned about some of the culture that they live by. And one of those things that I've learned is that it's a 20-20 thing. And I'll kind of say this too, if we all waited until we knew everything about raising a child, we'd never had them. So we waited until we got to that zero risk and it wouldn't have happened. So the Navy has that thing about if they're 80% sure we can go on it, let's go and then we can adjust some things that we need to. I mean that's a principle that I think is very important because I think we need to be open to that but put it in the context of what we do and what we're supposed to do in our mission. We need to be open to those change and to making sure that, one, we're not compromising ourselves but identifying that point where we can go forward. Digital I&C is one of those things that we've been doing for years and years and years and years and years. That's like having that baby. And not getting there. One last question. What's your greatest concern for the nuclear industry today? If they don't, so I come from an economic regularity side too. You know I have that background and I understand business, the business dynamics too. One, if as an agency if we do not do what we need to do to streamline things to make things more efficient, more effective while maintaining the integrity of what we do and what our mission is, we could cost opportunities out there and cause things to happen that may one day end up, we don't have anything to regulate. So I think they've got to look at change and embrace the new technologies and opportunities that are out there the industry does. And we need to be in partnership with them and making sure that we have the processes in place for licensing and whatever needs to happen so that they can get those things done in a timely manner. You know, I understand and I know that the taxpayer is our customer, our client, but anybody who's actually paying us fee for service to for review or whatever, we owe them that same due diligence, I believe, and getting things done for them in a timely manner. Thank you, Commissioner. Any closing remarks for the session? So it's my first trick and I had no idea what to expect but it's a great bunch of people attending this conference. The staff's done an amazing job putting it together. The people who are here they're very accommodating and they want to learn as much as they can and they've got a crowd and I'm thankful for the opportunity to meet so many new people and look forward to developing relationships with you. So thank you so much. I'll make a pitch for Commissioner Wright. He's going to be chairing a technical session this afternoon, W-20 on Independence Without Isolation International Perspectives. That's in the Ballroom E from 130 to 3. So with that, we'll end the session. It breaks until 10.30 and I hope all of you can join us for the technical sessions that follow. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much.