 our plant in the back with the cranes and some others. And so I'm going to try to make sure I bring out the relevant point of applicability between the regulators, R&D, and plant operations. So I'm going to talk about the Calvary Nuclear Generating Station. And then I'm going to hit about some of the issues and problems they have, what caused them to go through recovery. It's direct link to knowledge management and workforce planning. And then a couple of process things you can look at. This might help you with your case studies that you're working on. Because each of you will be doing a case study about a specific, made-up organization, or a real organization, or a real organization. And then you can see a kind of example of maybe what a case study would like to look like. All right, real quick. Palo Verde is the largest nuclear generating facility in the United States. It may continue to be the largest one without the new builds going on in the US and some of the new builds that have stops. It's 1,400 megawatts per unit, over 4,400, 4,500 megawatts total output. May not match all the Koreans, but it's pretty big. All right, challenge. In 2002, 2006, a plant had declining performance. Now you heard Andre talk about what's the most important part about nuclear power, nuclear safety. Nuclear safety is derived in good performance, correct? So the regulators have to make sure the plants are performing well. R&D has to make sure they design the plant well and they're monitoring it. The operators back there, they've got to operate the plant well. They've got to make sure that's a performing as intended. You have poor performance. It's an indicator of problems. Employee turnover was increasing. People were leaving. Nobody wants to stay in an organization that's not performing all right. Operator training program was inactive. No leader development program was in place. Maintenance backlog was growing. The work wasn't getting worked off. Issues were staying with the plant and they weren't being fixed. And there were numerous operator workarounds. What this means is the light was going off to the control room instead of fixing the problem. They just put a piece of tape over it. That's how operators do it sometimes in order to keep the plant running. And so your capacity factor dropped around 2006. Look how we were 94% and it just dropped like a rock. And then through recovery, capacity came back up and it's staying around the 94% tile now. Takes a while to come out of recovery. So that's the bottom line. And it was directly affected by impacts on knowledge management as a result of leadership issues. So let's talk about kind of how you diagnose this. Now this is the document from IMPO Institute for Nuclear Power Operation in Wano. Have you guys heard of IMPO in Wano? Some of you? OK, IMPO in Wano. And you Koreans, you've heard of IMPO in Wano because they're right there next to you. They're the organization next to IAEA that regulates and evaluates performance of nuclear power plants throughout the world. And they have guidelines that they look at to help you determine if you have an organization whose plant's performance is in poor health. There's three phases. A rational phase. You rationalize it. Oh, we know why that problem's there. We've always had that problem. We can fix that. Don't worry about it. Then you realize, face, oh my god, we really are in trouble. Crap, the plant is really broken. And finally, the recovery phase. It identified leadership attributes. It's created the concept of a learning organization, very key word for knowledge management. And so you look at the cycle of plant performance, you've got various aspects of it. So for a regulator, this is very important. And for an operator, this is very important. You have seeds, like seeds, like you plant a seed in the ground, right? And you watch it grow, right? Put water on it, and you watch it grow. Seeds of decline, that means your plants, your declining plant is growing on you. You don't know it yet. It's a weed. And then you've got the growth, and you're declining, and you realize you're in trouble, and then you come out of recovery. And there's a lot of denial that goes on in here with the leadership team. They don't think they're in trouble. And usually what happens, and I've now worked with the numerous utilities in US, actually three of them, in recovery work. That's what I do now. I didn't realize I'd go into that business, but I am. In almost every single case, management gets replaced, period. It happens almost every single time. I've not seen a case where the management team doesn't get replaced because the snake is rotten from the head down. Remember that. The snake is rotten from the head down. You can never, ever got to recover without replacing the management team. The management team will fight you because they don't want to be replaced, but the snake is rotten from the head down. And so here are some of the things that you read about in the Policy Note 14 document from Wano and IMPO. These are not my words. Pipeline program for people is reduced, things to look out for. Turnover or attrition occurs for technical roles, so the impact is not evident. You're losing your best talent in the organization. They're leaving you. Succession plans exist, but development plans don't. Now, what does that mean? It means, well, we know if Bob leaves, Sue's going to replace. But we're not hitting Sue ready for that next level of opportunity, are we? Sue, you got it. Good luck. Reduction in investment in the plant. Misalignment of budgets and business priorities. Key word, don't be cheap. Money's not there. We can't afford to operate this way. We have to find a way to get it done. We can't make the investment. If you're going to operate nuclear power plants, you have to make the investment. The consequence is too severe. Leaders lack the integrated plant knowledge. Less experienced people at work. That's really key. I'm going to show you some demographic information here throughout my presentations that talk about the demographic shift going on in the US industry and think about the demographic shift going on in your organization or your country. Then once you get, so what do you know when you're in decline? You see these things. These are the seeds. These are the things you should be looking out for. So once you're in decline, here's what you're going to start seeing. Very slow to fill vacancies with qualified people. Good people don't want to go to work for a sinking ship. Just don't. Why do I go to that organization? They're in trouble. I don't want to go there. Training issues surface. Pass rates for licensed operators is an issue. You know when you're in trouble, if you're a power plant and you're a regulator, is if the operator pass rate falls below 90%, period. You go and you look at an organization, the operator pass rate for the regulator's license because the regulator's issuing the license. If the pass rate's below 90%, that plant is in trouble. The training program is ineffective. Remember that. Take that to the bank every single time. What happens is licensees, plants, they justify that low pass rate. Well, we had a problem with recruitment. Where our candidates had an issue. There's a problem at home. They make up 101 excuses. There's no excuses. Bad selection processes mean bad candidates which mean bad employees, bad operators. Period. Organization becomes individually dependent. So this is important. One of the speakers this morning talked about is knowledge individual or is it group based, right? It is group based. And plants are in trouble. You find that everybody depends on the individual to get it done. We'll give it to Sue. She can handle it, right? Sue does it all. The organization can't solve its problems. And individual heroes pop up. Why those are great, having individual heroes, a little superman here and a superwoman over there, it's not gonna solve your problem. The organization effectively has to work together to solve problems. The energy level for learning is lessened. We don't have time to go learn something new. How many times have you heard that? We don't have time to go learn something new in an organization, regulators. We don't have the money to send you, do we, right? There's no money. Over there. You don't have time to go to school. You gotta stay on duty. You just gotta stay on schedule, right? You hear it all the time. That's a very important indicator that your progress is not gonna perform. If you can't reinvest in the future, continue expanding the knowledge base, you're creating yourself a problem down the road. It will not surface for many years. But I promise you, as Mother Nature causes rain, it will occur. Oversight, the organization is weak. The oversight people don't have the knowledge or skills to understand the problem of the plant. And the one I like the best, the HR and training people were overloaded. And staff is reduced. Don't have enough engineers. You don't have enough training people. You only have one person in HR and you expect that individual to do everything. It doesn't work. So these are indicators of declining performance. Those weren't my words, by the way. Those are the words written in Policy Note 14. For the last 10 years, Impolwano has said this, but nobody pays attention to it. Nobody until you're in trouble. Recovery at Palo Verde identified our knowledge gaps. We started doing workforce analytics. We put a workforce development program in place. We put in our business plans and linked it to our knowledge and training programs. Palo Verde had a goal to be top, decile 10% in the US in knowledge and learning. Proved qualifications and standards for selection and hiring. And leadership model standards expectations were put in place. So these are some of the recovery actions, right? To recover. Because now the regulator has told the licensee, you're in column four, which is on the NRC matrix for performance, right? Quality form means one more incident and you get the keys taken away from you. You can't operate. And for Palo Verde, that means a million and a half dollars per day of lost revenue. How long do you think the plant can operate losing four to $5 million for the site? I can tell you it's not very long. It's just a few months. Santa Norfolk regenerating station shut down not because it technically couldn't operate. Southern California Edison couldn't financially afford them any longer. They could no longer make the investment to keep them operating. The decision made for Entregy to shut down pilgrim plant was based on the fact that they had to continue to make investments and reinvestments into the plant and the plant was not profitable. And they had to shut the plant down because they're making investments to keep it operational, but they're only for the short term and not for the long term. So these are the cycles of plant performances. These were the stages that Palo Verde went through and they're currently are about that location. They've been through recovery. They've had some performance issues recently again, but they're still doing, they're still doing very well. So this is the Palo Verde demographic profile a few years ago. And so you can see real quickly, the demographics, right, you're gonna lose all of these people through retirements and you don't have enough mid-career professionals. So you have to have good development, knowledge and training programs at the back because these workers are coming in today have a shorter period of time to get ready for the future and the workers that have been there who started to operate the plants. They learned over 20 years how to operate the plant. Today's world, you don't have 20 years. That's the challenge. So knowledge management is having the right development and training programs for competencies for the future. Isn't about creating the knowledge base, it's about maintaining the knowledge base. That's very important in our industry. We're not, nuclear power has been around a long time, right? So we have to maintain the knowledge base for those who are newcomers, it's about creating the knowledge base. Those that are long-term operators in Korea and Russia, it's about maintaining the knowledge base. Two different sort of dynamics, but has the same issue. And so this is a hiring development program, Palo Verde's goal was that 70, 90% come to the pipeline and then the smaller amounts come into the side. I won't go through all of these because of time's sake. So this slide's important. I wanted to make sure we got to this. So we talked about the knowledge, nuclear knowledge management process is about people, process and technologies. And so as you come into an organization, one of the things you have to do, you should be looking at is what are our people programs? How do we maintain and develop our people? How are we mentoring them? How do we hold them to performance standards? What sort of processes do we have? Do we have good standards, good procedures? Are we efficient? But most importantly, do we have the right technology for us to manage our knowledge base? So it's all three of those combined. You could be successful without one of them, but you won't be successful very well. I will argue you will never be successful without people. I'd argue you can be successful without computer expensive IT systems, but you need technology for management of data and records and execution of processes, very important. And so Palo Verdes, when we talk about knowledge risk assessment, and we're gonna talk about that over and over again throughout the course of this week, that's one method, one single method or strategy to understanding if you're managing your unique and critical knowledge. But the most important message is you have to have all three of those pieces in place. You have to have the right people development programs, the right processes, and the right technology tools. Without those, you will not be effective long-term. And as a regulator, and you're looking at a plant to get ready to come online or to get operational licenses, what are other programs? So let's talk about why this is important. This is gonna be your typical nuclear power plant. We have three types of people in this industry. We have people who are new to the industry. We have people who go through a training program, come out as independent competent workers. Key word there, independent competent workers. And we have people who are our experts. It takes about 10 years to get a senior license reactor operator, a license in the United States, about 10 years, eight to 10 years. From the time that person comes in the door, they go through the non-license operator program, they go through the license operator program, they go to the senior reactor license operator program. It takes eight to 10 years. And so when we talk about knowledge management, we really talk about closing that gap between the independent competent worker and the expert worker. We have training programs in nuclear power. We wouldn't be able to operate. IAEA requires a certain standard training programs to be in place. Impolano requires a certain amount of training programs to be in place. But the training programs do not train everything. They can't. The gentleman earlier this morning talked about it. It's up here. You cannot have everything in a book. You have to get the experience, right? You have to take the book learning and the relationship building, get it out in the field, and start working with the expert worker so you can understand the subtleties of things that just don't necessarily translate in training. And as regulators and as operators and as R&D, we need to understand that. You can't take a new inspector, pit him or her in the field and expect them to be successful. They're gonna get walked on by the plant. The plant's gonna know you're green, it's gonna smell it, and they're gonna take advantage of you. If you're an operator, you can't go out and do a round without having somebody to go out with you to show you how to do that round no matter what they teach you in class. You've got to go with somebody and touch the equipment and feel and understand how it operates. And the guy or gal who puts those valves back together, I don't care what you say about those mechanic guys and gals, valves are complex and they're difficult as much as easy as they might think. What causes nuclear plants, the most issues that I've seen in my experience is bad packing in valves. Now what's packing? That's that sealant between the valve closure and the opener. There's packing in there. Time and time again, these plants get into trouble because the packing fails. Lord knows, I don't understand it. And then the other problem is erosion, corrosion, right? In the pipes, stuff gets old just like instructors, we get old. So it's really about working with that expert worker. I showed you the demographic. What's happening to the expert workers? We're dying off, I'm a dinosaur. Pretty soon I'll be oil and tar. So how are you gonna ensure as a regulator, where are you getting the experience from? As R&D, where are you getting experience for research and development and designing new knowledge sources? And as an operator, hiring and sharing that the operators today are doing the right rounds. I have been to two different utilities that each of those utilities had an issue with operators not doing the rounds correctly. Non-license operators, these guys are a miracle. They know they have to go out and daily do a round and inspect the valve and look at a piece of equipment and they have to mark it off on a sheet, right? Well, that gets old after a while. So after a while, instead of looking at the valve, going up and looking at it, they look at it. Okay, I think I see it over there. They mark it off and they don't touch their equipment like they're supposed to. I've seen it happen now at two different sites, due to their different utilities. That's where technology can eventually come in and be able to provide those measurements and those rounds without having to go touch the valves all the time. But nonetheless, you still have to go out and do certain rounds in a plant, right? You have to physically look for certain conditions. And that's the work that humans need to do when they interact with the plant. Operators will tell you the plant's always talking to you. You ever heard that term? The plant's talking to me. It's making noises. You gotta listen to the plant. It's a piece of equipment, it's like a car. You know your car. You know the sounds your car makes. You know it's making a funny sound so you go into the mechanic and say, it's making this thing, it's doing this thing. Mechanic looks at it and says, I don't see anything wrong with this thing. No, no, no, it's not right. Well, it's working now. Soon as you leave, the mechanic closes up for the night. There goes the head of the car, right? The engine head pops or something, right? And now you have to tow the car and now the problem's more visible. But the plant is always talking to you. So the guidance is for operators, how do you listen to the plant for your regulator? How do you listen to the plant through the operators and making sure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing? Anyway, you get that through this part right here. And that is the knowledge risk assessment. When we talk about knowledge risk assessments, we're talking about assessing who has unique and critical knowledge. What is it that they have and how are we gonna help them share it with others? There's lots of ways to do that, but that's really the risk process. So at Palo Verde, we developed a process, like any good thing. We developed maps, a process map for who has responsibility. We developed tools and guidelines and a process. But the bottom line is it's a leader's responsibility to understand the competency skills that their workers have and who has unique or critical skills or competencies slash knowledge to be effective. And at Palo Verde, we use a process that looks at uniqueness and criticality. So I'll share with you this concept, right? An operator has critical knowledge, right? A licensed operator. You would say it's critical, very important. In fact, some would say it's mission critical. Somebody had the definition earlier for mission critical knowledge, right? Without them, you couldn't be successful. But are they unique? You usually have somewhere between 90 to 120 at a plant, give or take, size of the plant. So if you lose one or two, it's not a problem. It's an issue, but not a problem. You lose 100 of them, you're not operating. But what about that engineer who does the calculation? What about that craftsman person who's out in the field who can really understand how that plant operates and the noises it makes? It's talking to them, remember? That's why these guys that wear the overalls and go out and work in the plant, they're always a little strange, aren't they? But they're listening to the plant. Anyway, so that's the unique or critical knowledge. That's what you're looking for. And you have something that's very unique and very critical, that's the target that you want to look for. You don't need to do it for everybody. You don't need to assess everybody's knowledge. I've got 35 years of nuclear experience in the plant. Who cares about what I did 35 years ago? I'm not an R&D. It even R&D 35 years ago is a long time, right? A regulator in the United States, and I can't speak for elsewhere, what you read in the regulation and what you actually know you're supposed to do are two different things sometimes. The regulation says one thing and the inspectors live by a different set of guidelines. I have no idea how they do it. They have the regulation and they have their inspection guide. It has kind of different criteria. So even some of that is different. And so you don't necessarily, you have to have this understanding by working with the organization and not everything can be captured and written down. You just have to get experience. That's the most important thing. You gotta live life. The problem is the dinosaurs are dying off or becoming oil and tar. And how are you gonna ensure the continuity of the expertise necessary for nuclear power and other nuclear products across the world? That's the challenge in front of all of you because in a few years I'll be a dinosaur. Andre and I will be the dinosaur old folks home. Monica will come and visit us. Make sure we're healthy. But you in the audience, you're the ones who are gonna carry this on. So learn from us to help you carry this mission on. It's a critically important mission. I cannot stress it. I am not a big fan of renewable energy. Stuff happens to like the wind, the solar. Stuff happens, right? Unless we can find a way to produce energy that doesn't require turning a turbine. I'm all for it. That's reliable 100% of the time and safe. And no matter what the weather conditions that Mother Nature throws at you. So I think we need nuclear power around the world. I just think so, in my opinion. All right, so here's the skill for uniqueness that APS uses, Palo Verde uses. I'm just gonna tell you real simply, highly unique. Nobody else has it. Somebody else had this definition, very similar. Nobody else has it. So that's unique. A bunch of people have it, not so unique. Just think of it that terms, right? Somebody's got highly unique knowledge. There are five. If somebody, everybody knows about it, right? It's not really unique. Criticality is very similar to the definition you saw earlier for critical. It's mission critical knowledge. It's very important versus important, but not as important, it's just knowledge that's everyday knowledge, it's not that important. The key is it depends on each company what's critical and important to them and then what's unique. When you do knowledge risk assessments and you find out that the manager has unique or critical knowledge or the vice president has unique or critical knowledge or the general deputy director, that might be a problem because their role is to teach it to others and to transfer it. So when you see that, you know that's a problem. But then it's that hidden technician in the back corner that nobody talks to at lunch or takes out after work with the rest of their friends that spends all the overtime hours cranking out these calculations and she's all by herself and all of a sudden she gets a better offer and she's gone and guess what? The calculations aren't being done anymore and the engineer who relies on that technician now has to think for himself, oh, God help him. Because the brain power just walked out and nobody knew it. That's what you're looking for when you do risk assessments. So at Palo Verde, they prioritize at Alpha Bravo Charlie, critical, business important and limited bench strength. This is their data that they have. Notice they've been making significant progress in the amount of reducing their alpha and bravos over the years. Slowly it's gone down and more and more focus is now on the Charlie's, which is business important. So the goal is you'll never get to zero. There's always something that pops. But one of the things that the site started doing and other sites are doing is instead of doing risk assessments, they're doing qualification, a qual matrix, or identifying the type of skill sets and qualifications that an organization needs when they're likely to lose it. This is an example. So what are the advanced quals? I can't even pronounce half of these anymore but it's software quals, it's startup quals, it's balance of plant quals, it's different things. So the key is, isn't always about unique or critical knowledge, it's about the qualifications and do you have enough of them and are you deep enough with them? So a lot of organizations are starting to move this direction. So some of the challenges that Palo Verde had, plain and simple, leaders weren't buying in, leaders thought this was extra work, until the leaders started realizing it's their job to ensure their employees are fully qualified, capable of performing their work. They can't complain, oh man I lost this person, now who's gonna do this? I need to go hire a consultant. Contractor, that's the management's fault, that's bad management. So if that happens to your organization, that's a leader issue. And so these are action plans that were put together, I'm not gonna go through all of them but I wanted to discuss with you this one particular concept real quick. So one of the things that Palo Verde did is they realized their action plans were important to make sure they're transferring the knowledge. But as HR people, and you kinda heard this earlier, we're not necessarily the brightest people in the world are we in HR, that's why we're in HR, otherwise I'd be an operator, or I'd be an engineer, I'd be an inspector. So I'm not very bright, so I have to rely on managers to help me understand if an action plan's any good. So at Palo Verde they put together this director review panel to review the action plans. Oh my God, accountability for their own organization, how about that? They said, listen, we're not gonna tell you, we've got good action plans. You, Mr. Director, Deputy Director, you own these action plans. It's your people for God's sakes. Figure out if you're transferring your knowledge, if you're creating a problem for the future. So they use these director panels to do it and they have a series of directors that review the work and they agree and they sign off and it has a couple of advantages, it gets the leader involved, it has very specific actions, it gets buy-in, that's the bottom line behind it, I'm trying to hurry this up, increases accountability, and these are some of the languages from some of the directors and managers, but the bottom line is it increases accountability, it heightened the value, it made it important because directors don't have time for everything but they sure know if they've got unique or critical knowledge, they gotta deal with it because it's a trisk, it's a problem in their organization and it proved overall effectiveness. So what a good look like, better sort of action plans, more signatures and approvals, more candidates who are identified for backup, strategies were modified for hiring, make sure we got the right type of people in there, and then they had, there's no oversight problem, I'm gonna talk about this later on a people health committee process. This is a process that's been implemented in the United States, it's designed to help improve knowledge management, leadership development, effectiveness, and so bottom line, the process is about, and I'm gonna talk about this tomorrow, workforce planning, linking it to your risk assessments, creating action plans, development plans, and then monitoring for yourself and just, so that's kind of the overall flow of this, right? There's a process involved. I'm giving you guys just a little snippet of the process, but the end of the day, end of the day, it's about leadership, it's about you, as knowledge champions, effectively influencing your leaders to do the right thing. Any questions for me? All right, well thank you, yep, in the back. Can you hear me? Okay, okay. I wanted to make a comment on the power of body because power of body is a reference plant to Korean standard nuclear power plant. When we decided to have our self-reliance programs on nuclear plant, power of body, the combustion engineering, the designer of the power of body agreed to transfer the design technologies, so we succeeded to have our own nuclear plant. So now we export our plants to UAE, so we agreed to do the technology transfer to UAE, so thanks to power of body. And that's why there's so many ex-powering employees working for UAE right now. Any other questions? All right, so the important piece about this is, not just the story I told you, all of it true, it's also think about your cases, right, that you have to work on your projects, your case studies. You're gonna hear other case studies throughout the week. So think about the structure of your case study, what problem are you gonna try to solve? What's your issue? What problem do you wanna try to solve? What tools and how do you think you wanna solve it? Who do you have to get to buy in on this? What's your timeline horizon? And then what do you think your results will be? You saw every one of those examples in this presentation. That's one of the advantages of this particular presentation. I gave you a timeline, a production, not necessarily of the work. I gave you kind of the problem and I gave you kind of the solution. So think about that structure, use this as your guide. All right, thank you everybody and have a good evening.