 I'd like to reiterate the value of this conference. It's in both the formal presentations and it's the opportunity for informal discussions and networking. Each year, I notice robust discussions after the sessions and in the hallways. I also notice some of this in the restaurant and the bar down the hallway, so I do note that. I urge all of us, whether we're regulators, licensees, international, the public, no matter what sessions or what location, to take the time at this conference to listen carefully, ask questions, and come away better informed with progress having been made. Now it is a great pleasure that I welcome our keynote speaker, Chairman Spinecky, to the stage. The Honorable Christine Spinecky was designated Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission by President Donald Trump on January 23rd of 2017. Last year, she was sworn in for her third term as a commissioner for a term ending on June 30th, 2022. She began her service on the commission in 2008. Chairman Spinecky has enjoyed a distinguished career as a nuclear engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy and as a policy advisor in the U.S. Senate, advancing policies and initiatives regarding national security, science, technology, energy, and the environment. She has served on a number of expert advisory panels and has twice received the presidential citation of the American Nuclear Society for her contributions to U.S. Nuclear Policy. Chairman Spinecky is a graduate of the University of Michigan, please join me in welcoming to the podium our Chairman, Christine Spinecky. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Brian, for that introduction. How is everybody feeling this morning? Feeling good? This is really a large group of people. I'm very pleased to take part in this year's regulatory information conference and I extend my thanks to each of you for attending this session and also to those of you tuning into the webcast and there are a number of people who've said to me, I'm gonna be tuning into the webcast so I know you're out there. I wanna add my personal thanks and on behalf of the commission to all of the many NRC employees who make this conference possible, as Brian was noting, as I note each year, this is a tremendous undertaking and it's fueled by the hard work of our many NRC staff and the Rick volunteers who actually are here during the implementation of the conference and make everything run smoothly. Their hard work and dedication are a chief contributor to what makes this conference a success on the part of the U.S. NRC. I'd also like to acknowledge the presence of our important partners from both other federal agencies and state agencies within the United States as well as the many international colleagues who are joining us this week. The NRC's critical relationships with other governmental entities and collaboration on lessons learned with international counterparts facilitate the effective achievement of our mission. Thank you for taking the time to be here and in some cases for agreeing to be a presenter at one of the technical sessions this week. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my commission colleagues, Commissioner Sperin and Commissioner Burns. They are both fine individuals and good colleagues and I'm very, very grateful for that. Where we agree, we agree. Where we disagree, we disagree and we move past it quickly. And you don't have to agree on everything to with someone in order to like them and enjoy working with them. Now, most of us in this room know that to be true. Outside these doors, well, I'm not sure I can always vouch for that but I really thank my commission colleagues for the productivity of our working relationship. So thank you both and I look forward to your remarks later in the morning. So a big milestone is coming up for me later this month. I will hit the big one, oh, I will complete a decade's worth of service on this commission and that makes this my 10th RIC speech. So last week, I was meeting with our EDO Victor McCree and I said, in case you're wondering, Victor, when it is that the well on RIC speeches and creativity runs dry, the answer is the number 10 but at the end of the day, all of you will be the judge of that, not me. And as Brian has mentioned, the remarks of our executive director for operations, Vic McCree will follow mine with a presentation of various agency initiatives and I'm gonna leave him that broad terrain for him to cover as our executive director. As he has been mentioned, there are individuals who are, will be circulating in the aisles to collect your written questions. So if you pass your question cards down to them, they will bring them up the row to be collected and brought to Brian so he can be prepared to ask me the questions at the appropriate time. But we can't break a 10 year record. I decided maybe year 11 is an opportunity for reset but I worried that some ill fortune would befall me if I didn't begin by telling a bad joke. So, okay, is everybody ready to groan? In unison is best, it's the most, it's maximum effect if you all groan in unison so this is the joke. I tell you a chemistry joke but I'm not sure I'd get a reaction. There you go, okay, that's the joke. See, I didn't want you to miss the joke because it's a joke about telling a joke. So it's kind of like the mobius strip of jokes, if you know what that is. It turns back in on itself. Perhaps you'll laugh later when you circle back around to it. So, since I last addressed this conference, the NRC has continued to challenge itself to deliver our safety and security mission in an effective, efficient and agile manner. Our public outreach to and engagement with those we regulate, public policy makers and the broader range of interested stakeholders continues to provide valuable insights to inform and shape many ongoing NRC program changes and enhancements. These insights are continually factored into the agency's work. That said, at its heart, our central safety and security mission remains unchanged even as our methods and means to accomplish it may evolve. At this year's RIC you'll have the opportunity to hear from NRC staff and a diverse set of external presenters as they provide information and engage in dialogue with each other on panel sessions about a range of topics. One of the breakout sessions this afternoon has generated significant early interest from attendees. In fact, I think it might already be oversubscribed and that is the technical session that begins at 1.30 entitled Transformation at the NRC. In his remarks following mine, Vic McCree will discuss at a high level the NRC's transformation initiative that he has charted and that is currently underway. I'm gonna leave that topic for him to discuss. Instead, I decided to highlight an initiative that perhaps isn't as visible outside of the NRC and that is the NRC's Innovation Forum. In assessing the results of employee viewpoint surveys of recent years on the statement, my organization values innovation, the NRC staff thought that the low to moderate level of employee agreement with that statement presented an opportunity to bring greater focus, structure and agency wide attention to capturing the many employee innovations and suggestions that probably were out there but they weren't necessarily finding a home. Although a handful of NRC offices had something along these lines such as Region II's idea greenhouse, the communications agency wide were piecemeal and not all employees had access to the same opportunity. Not being content with this is the status quo and with the support from the EDO and other agency executives, a diverse cross section of employees from across NRC's programs, regions, subject matter disciplines and levels of experience came together to create the NRC Innovation Forum. They're bringing tremendous energy to the cause of innovation and are off to a promising start. Unlike transformation, ideas submitted to the Innovation Forum need not be grand. I confess to occasionally hopping on the NRC internal SharePoint webpage for the forum and browsing the log of recent suggestions, I discovered for instance that moving to electronic concurrence on documents continues to be a very popular cause here at NRC. I was wondering if there are any members of the Innovation Forum here today, I would ask you to raise your hands but if you're not in the room, I still wanna thank you for establishing this forum and for your dedication and your infectious energy to harnessing all the creativity that we as NRC employees know exist in our organization. More broadly, the NRC continues to endeavor to forecast our work with greater accuracy and identify changes to our resource needs in the current very dynamic nuclear environment. The agency is pursuing activities such as standardizing and centralizing support staff's functions for both headquarters and regional offices and establishing a common prioritization process to prepare the agency to evaluate emerging work more readily and to staff it more efficiently. We're also implementing an enhanced strategic workforce planning process to improve the training, agility, and utilization of our capable workforce. In our programmatic work, the NRC continues its pursuit of risk informed regulation through which we strive to put focus on those issues that are most important based on their safety significance. The NRC staff continues to evaluate and update key risk informed decision-making guidance, develop a graded approach for using risk information more fully in licensing reviews, enhance our communication of risk activities, and advance other risk informed initiatives across the agency. This includes steps to ensure uniform implementation of backfitting regulations, improve training and oversight leading to more consistent identification and treatment of potential backfitting issues. The conference breakout sessions will examine activities such as these in greater detail, as well as many others, as Brian has noted, such as cybersecurity, radiation protection, decommissioning, low level waste, digital instrumentation and control, and emergency preparedness. With this broad set of topical sessions, I hope each of you will find the time you spend here at this conference to be very productive. As I reflect on the many activities underway, if I had to describe my personal assessment of how NRC is doing in one sentence, it would be, I continue to be fully confident in our ability to fulfill our mission and yet never satisfied that we have perfected the means and methods of how we go about it. And that's okay. The NRC is not complacent. We are a continuously learning organization and an inquisitive bunch of people. Will we extract the right lessons and evolve in the right ways while staying ahead of the changing world around us? I don't think any organization knows that for sure. The proof will be in the doing. In my view, the staff's innovation and transformation efforts are central to charting the course to NRC's future. As a member of our commission and as an NRC old-timer, I actually filtered with the term OG or Old Guard of 10 years, I am fully committed to this process and to helping them be successful in any way that I can. The way I see it, the failure to adapt to change, standing still, if you will, is simply is not an option for this or any organization. Change is hard work, though, and I know that. So I look for inspiration where I can find it. Last fall, I was invited back to my alma mater, the University of Michigan. The visit coincided with homecoming weekend, which was fitting, I suppose. As I walked the engineering campus, I did a lot of thinking about the intervening nearly 30 years since I was a student there. My first thought was, where did all those years go? And that's a thought best not lingered over the passage of time. But since I needed to address some of the students and alumni, my thoughts turned to why I chose to become an engineer in the first place. And the truth is, I think engineering is beautiful. Engineers have been known to be much maligned as a personality type, if not a profession. So I decided that I wanted to dispel the notion in my remarks at the university that we cannot be poetic as engineers, but maybe not being as poetic myself as I would like to be. I was forced to turn to the words of others. I was helped in this by the author H.G. Wells. I was reading and I appreciate that some of you have said I always have worked in something about a book I'm reading into my remarks, so here goes. I was reading within the course of the last year what I found to be a really interesting history of the electrification of America, and it was entitled, Empires of Light, Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. And it's written by a historian, not a technical individual. So I think that it had maybe a broader scope than other histories of this same topic. But I came across a quote from H.G. Wells. He was describing his visit in the year 1895 to the Niagara Falls Power Station, which was the first major hydroelectric facility in the United States. In describing what he saw, he wrote the following. These dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, starkly powerful. All the clatter of the early age of machinery is past and gone here. There is no smoke, no grit, no dirt at all. These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engineer irresistible forces in their sleep. All these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made as the heart in a living body, and stouter and stronger than that. I fell into a daydream of the coming power of men and how that power may be used by them. I think of those words every time I stand on a turban deck at a nuclear power plant, the people in this room work in and around the most powerful technology on planet Earth. On any given day, that keeps me both inspired and humble, and I hope it does you as well. I thank you for your kind attention and I'm happy to take any questions you have. Okay, Brian, what have we got? Go ahead. I have a selection, Chairman, so we'll get to them all. Chairman Sminneke, do you think the NRC will ever achieve being fully risk informed? Well, the question was made easy by the term fully because, well, I'm not trying to pick it apart, but I think, and I was asked last year about NRC's progress and journey towards risk informed regulation, and I think it really is that a journey, but I think over the course of time there can be a different pace of change that occurs, and it may be in my opinion that with the dynamic environment right now, NRC may stand at the threshold of maybe making more of a step change through the transformation work, maybe even through the internal innovation cradle that we've created inside the agency. I don't think progress always occurs at a consistent pace, and my tenure observation of NRC, I think that what's happening now is around maybe looking at, we've gathered a lot of information, have we added to our knowledge in a way that we have the time and space to take a fundamental stepping back, and really looking at targeting some areas where there could be a more transformational increase in our risk informed regulation, so I don't know that fully to me would imply that you wouldn't be continuing to gather risk insights, and if nothing else, as new technology is adopted you have to build a base of understanding and risk understanding and safety understanding of that technology, so I think we'll always be adding to that, and it comforts me that NRC does have such a continuous learning approach to its work that I think I can't envision a future NRC 30 or 40 years from now that wouldn't still be seeking out those risk understandings and insights and feeding them back into the process. I've got at least five questions on one subject. I give credit to some well-prepared individual who has a typed printout, came prepared with questions they put on cards, so that's a new one for me. You know, that's quite brilliant. I think that that's wonderful. At last years, all five of them are very similar. At last years, Rick, Chairman, you expressed your support for making progress on digital INC. We have seen very little significant movement this past year. Why not? Is digital INC still a top priority for the NRC? What is the commission doing to drive progress within the staff? A couple of the other questions talk about the safety improvements that they hope that they can leverage and that aspects of digital INC has been proven to reduce SCRAM initiators on non-safety-related systems, so questioning our progress. I think that I encourage the questioner and others, and I know there's broad interest in digital INC, please question the NRC staff presenters. I think that my assessment of the NRC staff is they're ready to have a vigorous dialogue on digital INC and have been having it in various fora where they engage outside of the NRC on this. I think in my first year on this commission in 2008, one of the things that I did was visit the nuclear navy in the US to talk about their success in adopting digital instrumentation and control technologies. That was 10 years ago, and I'm fairly confident in saying the following. If you were to ask any NRC subject matter expert or the NRC managers if they're content with the pace of issue resolution on digital INC, I'm fairly confident they would tell you that they are not personally satisfied with it. That being said, I think that there have been a lot of issues that have been brought to the fore, and I think that the notion, I think success on digital INC could actually be a precursor to other kind of risk informed approaches that could spread into other areas of the NRC's work. So it may be a reason why it is, we're taking the time to work through with some finality the digital INC questions because they may philosophically have connection to other modernized technology that we know will be coming our way, and we wanna be sure that as we approach digital INC, we set a path that is going to work in terms of a risk informed approach overall to new technologies that are similar to what the regulated community is engaging us on now. It does take a bit of a paradigm shift. I will admit that personally I view coming to some greater resolution on digital INC, I think that'll be a leading indicator of having NRC having confronted some tough issues on risk and being risk informed. And I will say that I also observed that NRC makes a broad acknowledgement that digital INC systems, in addition to being necessary to address obsolescence issues in the supply chain also offer safety advantages. And I think that NRC is very committed to moving through these issues so that those safety enhancements for operators can be, we can accomplish that in the United States. Yes, thank you Chairman. And I know at the transformation session this afternoon, digital INC will be one of the items brought up by Dan Dorman at the transformation session. And I do highlight, as the Chairman mentioned, session T8, progress and challenges in implementing digital INC in the nuclear industry. So NRR is prepared to answer more in-depth questions at that session. Chairman Svanicki, what do you worry about day-to-day versus year in and year out? I think one of the luxuries for the members of our commission is the tremendous technical depth in the agency that allows us day to day to proceed with an extremely high confidence. I know I do and I think this is true to all the members I've served with. You can go day to day with great confidence that should some event happen at an NRC regulated facility, we are going to be able to have the people and processes and capability to address that on behalf of the American people. So that is a luxury to know that day to day, just the basic operational issues are not something that I need to worry about because my confidence is so high in the quality of how we would respond to an event. Year to year is a different question though because that's about peering over the horizon and saying, for the time that I'm at NRC, am I contributing to putting in place the things that when I arrived, my predecessors were thoughtful enough so that certain things I didn't have to immediately take on and worry. It is, I don't favor the term leaving a legacy but I think all of us in our work say that I want that those who follow on after me will go. Well, I didn't know that Christine Savenneke but thank goodness she thought that this might be a problem 10 years from now and she at least started to encourage people to put something in place to address that. I think if year to year I worry about anything, it's kind of about NRC is an organization, all of us and the way the culture that we're creating, the way we're working with each other and are we creating a legacy as kind of an organic organization that is gonna make all of our successors gonna position them for success and so I think year to year I hope I'm being as thoughtful as my predecessors were. A couple related to that topic on timing and in the future, there's two questions. One individual says I've been in nuclear power 47 years. Where do you see nuclear power going in America the next 47 years? That's prophetic. And another question congratulating you on your 10 years at the NRC. Where do you see yourself 10 years from now? Okay, well I didn't think I'd be standing here today so it makes me humble about predictions. Isn't that supposed to be a fool's errand to make predictions? So this is really me and this is not coming from anybody else but I've been in, so I don't have 47 years in and around the nuclear profession but I do have the end of this year it'll be 28 years not counting my time in the educational system. So I've observed things from being in a more technology development environment at the Department of Energy, being in a kind of a pure raw policy making environment of the Congress and Capitol Hill and then coming here and seeing kind of exquisite high fidelity mission execution that I think and I offer that so sincerely as a compliment to NRC as an enduring organization. I think they should pride themselves on that but I know it's ego to feel like you stand in uniquely dynamic times but gosh it sure feels like that to me, it feels right now I don't know if it's just I've progressed through enough of my career that I have enough runway that I, enough runway still in front of me but enough in my rear view mirror that I, that was a horrible mixed metaphor, that I, you know I have some perspective and maybe a little bit of going forward runtime that it seems like the future of nuclear in the United States is gonna be determined by what happens and so this is a crazy thing I shouldn't say as chairman. I think it's gonna be determined by what happens in the next five to seven years and so depending on what happens in the next five to seven years I'd be able to answer that question about 47 years from now but I think that the paradigms all around large light water reactors, the program that we have in the US I think it's at a pivot point and if for the part of the mission we execute for the part of the mission that technology designers execute for those who support the whole nuclear enterprise I think unless there are some kind of experimentation some pilot, some modeling of new paradigms I'm not sure that the old models can carry us through the next 47 years and by that I say you know I think the whole business of nuclear by my observation has changed and therefore the fact that you can have a design certification review in front of the NRC for even a model milestone of four years or six years or eight years if you talk to the communities that are investing in the future of nuclear they're not gonna hold a business case together that long so I think that some of what you see here are innovation forum which is inward looking and those are the tweaks to the process the transformation initiative that you'll hear more about I think fundamentally that is NRC's recognition of the fact that we've got to examine maybe again not our core mission changing but some of the methods and modes through which we conduct it and so we're looking at it and you can if you want to you can fault NRC for a lot of things we're pretty persnickety we're very deliberate we're very thorough if that bothers people but we're not closed off I just you know that's one thing I think there's a lot of defensiveness in debates about policy and stuff going on right now this is the least defensive organization with which I have worked I think there is an authentic spirit of saying we don't have the answers and so when I engage policymakers I work hard to communicate how genuine that is on our part if we're not doing enough to prepare for advanced reactors here's what we are doing what do you see that's missing tell me and I will take it back and we will take it on board because we do that doesn't mean that our proposed approach to it would be the same as anybody else's but you can't fault this place for being thinking we have all the answers and being closed off I just if you see it tell me about it but I don't see it thank you chairman a couple questions on timing of items why isn't the commission completed its deliberations on the final 5046 Charlie rule that's been up there there seems to be a second question on votes by the commission it is a low level could you comment on that progress yes as everyone knows our commission under law has the potential to have turnover on new members and members leaving our commission so every year we confront this but we have not been at our full complement of five commissioners for some years now and now we've been at three commissioners for some period of time rulemaking is a very very important that some of the questions seems to go around the rulemaking votes and the rules that are in process at the agency we have regulations on the books that have not been revisited in 20 or 25 years so one of the reasons that I as a member of the commission as I've always taken rulemaking as one of the most sober important things I do is that upon completion of a final rule that rule might stay as a regulatory requirement for decades to come and not be revisited in the absence of a need to revisit it so getting it right is a lot more important than getting it done super quickly we use other instruments for safety or security issues that need to be addressed immediately we have many other authorities we can do immediately effective orders so rulemaking is about putting in place the things that are likely to be in place for a very long period of time the administrative procedure act under which we're required to develop those regulations in general is a process that takes I think three years if you do it quick five, six years is not unheard of for a regulation so where members of our commission need time to investigate issues around pending either a proposed rule or a draft final rule I know I approach that with care I've observed every other member of the commission I've served with over the years takes that as a very, very serious responsibility and I think there are a lot of benefits to rulemaking but haste is not a positive attribute now some may say something taking a couple of years is not hasty the other thing, the reason I mentioned the composition of the commission is that although we have the authority to move forward with three members having served on five member commissions I observe that we have the greatest confidence as a commission that each of the unique perspectives brought by a member of the commission adds value and completeness and thoroughness to our deliberation on the final product which again might be in place for some decades to come so where you see that action is fast or slow by our commission the tempo of our work is something that we work as a deliberative body of three, four or five to pace that and I'm very I've been blessed to serve on commissions that were a colleague needed more time to continue to work through issues we tend to respect that with each other again knowing that where the agency needs to act quickly rulemaking is not the means through which we do that. Thank you Chairman. This questioner has enjoyed your references to popular culture in the past what film or movie reference comes to mind when you think about your experience as chairman versus a commissioner? Oh gosh, so many answers. And I don't share everything that goes through my head those of you who work with me probably think do you ever have an unexpressed thought? You know it's interesting this has actually I do have a lot of cable channels that run movies all the time and so I tend to see my old favorites you know I'm folding laundry or something on the weekend so I have something on in the background and recently something's been brought back forward although it's a film from 1980 I think I remember I first saw it I was in high school but it so I'll get to this in a minute but Cole Miner's daughter I don't know if anyone's ever seen that my grandfather was an iron miner so although it's not quite as quippy to say iron miner's granddaughter but Cole Miner's daughter it's a really great movie and we have an international audience here I don't know if people know this film but it is based on an autobiography by the first lady of country music Ms. Loretta Lynn and one of the reasons the movie inspires is just I have a view I am a fan of popular culture but I think that women in the arts we look at them as being entertaining and everything but the truth is during certain periods of time in our history and maybe to today think about those women had to be entrepreneurs business women in addition to being tremendously creative brilliant artists so much and often I have to assume they had to do all this in an environment while caretaking maybe providing for their families or not being treated all that well all the time probably I think that's probably true but this is a story of the hard life that Loretta Lynn had and she goes on to be very very successful of course but she has a moment where the success and the stress traveling all the time trying to care for her family she has a rather epic meltdown on stage which I am not about to re-enact right now but and I'm not having a meltdown being chairman that's not the point of this story but they have a point in that meltdown and again she won the Academy Award for Best Actress if you have not watched it I recommend if you just look at the subtleties of Sissy Spacex's performance as Loretta she just embodied the woman and just the subtlety of how she portrayed such a big personality and she deserved it and she did all her own singing if my memory serves so it was just an amazing, amazing performance speaking of another woman in the arts but in that kind of stream of consciousness on stage this is finally answering this question she gets to a point, do her as in do little is you know kind of in the aisle and he's looking at her and he's seeing her kind of just collapse from exhaustion almost but she said you know I wanted to come out here and just tell something to all y'all good people she said do doesn't want me to say anything so she reminds me a little bit of myself because I'm like I shouldn't be saying this but I'm gonna say it anyway but she says her good friend was Patsy Klein she actually really admired Patsy Klein but she said so she's got this stream of consciousness and she goes Patsy's always saying now you got to run your own life so that's what I think of as chairman because and Mr. Burns knows this really well is that the pace of small items demanding your attention every single day so the core of what we do chairman, member of the commission all those core authorities are the same we have the same vote in the process but the number of items of maybe not the greatest significance but time sensitivity that demand your attention I think there's some sympathy for anyone in this room knows what it is to come into your office and feel like they just ran your whole day so sometimes I have to take a breath and say girl you got to run your own life so I've got to set my own priorities the other great thing and I don't do a great Kentucky accent but that was pretty darn good but the other thing she says to do later on cause he's always making this sound in his chest throughout the movie it was Tommy Lee Jones who also did a great job he might have been nominated but I don't think he got the Oscar for best supporting actor but she says I had to make sure I get this and she goes you sound like an old buyer growl and it's pretty good well you go listen to the movie though it's pretty good oh the other there's the other my case of my final great line from that movie is do little is talking about growing up I think he grew up in West Virginia anyway I just I love the culture of that part of America which I don't think we've honored as much Appalachia in that part of the country I mean some of our most authentic culture American pure American culture comes from that part of the United States but so do little this is the one line of his and I don't have his accent down as well but he goes honey there's three things you grew up in West Virginia you got three choices coal mine moonshine or move it on down the line very good Chairman St. Patrick's Day is coming up I don't know if you have an Irish accent in there but I won't ask that's that's my side of the family I do not okay Irish joke that's my side also if you know Chairman one last question a few of the and it's Vic we've saved some for you here but on innovation and transformation there were a couple related questions you know do you believe incremental change is enough in the current environment or is more needed it sounds like an NRC staffer had a question about young in my career at the NRC what can I do to drive change and modernize regular regulatory activities and another spin on that was should I as an NRC member encourage innovation and new technology is that my role in the NRC mission that's a great set of questions I think the first of those about incremental change versus step change I think that I've had remarks around that in some of the other answers that have given and in my remarks to say that I and I don't know and it will be NRC employees who decide what where the transformation initiative goes and things like that of course there will be ultimately I think proposals for the commission but taking on the hard work of seeing if there's transformation opportunity and achieving it that's gonna fall to many of the NRC staff that are probably here listening or back over at the office building making sure that everything is functioning well right now I think that the role of every person in any organization is to show up and not with don't withhold their best ideas I spent a lot of the early part of my career I know this is inconceivable based on sitting here even this morning but I was afraid to speak up because I just I felt the Shirley's as I call them surely there's somebody else in this room that knows better than me surely there's somebody you know there's people been here longer than me and they know better and I just at some point I realize that first of all the thing you're thinking that your lack of you know like my ideas probably not that good I shouldn't say it a lot of other people in that room are withholding their ideas as well and we're not gonna get there if that's our approach so I think it's everybody's job that's been my approach in my career once I had this point of understanding that I realized that I should toss my ideas out into the mix and I wanted to be part of creating the organization that I was showing up to every day so I think whether or not it enthuses you I bet you have something that is of value to somebody else if you put it forward and you know I think the pace of change is something that it will be uneven will continue to have an uneven pace of change but I'm excited for NRC's future just very sincerely and that doesn't mean that we don't have a lot of hard stuff to take on board and that you know we're doing equally well in every area but I stand here very optimistic as I said fully confident but never satisfied and that's where I am and I approach my work that way and I think both of those things can co-exist. Thank you Chairman Sminneken.