 Okay. Welcome. Welcome to the session on setting the course for the future of emergency preparedness. I'm Todd Smith, Senior Level Advisor for Emergency Preparedness and Incident Response at the NRC. And I have with me today a very diverse and trusted group of subject matter experts. We're going to talk about EP. I'm not going to go through their full bio, so I would actually please take a minute to read their bios online, but I want to introduce our panelists here. We have Marie Pajita, Senior Reliability and Risk Analyst from the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. Keith Compton, Senior Reactor Scientist, Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research. Jim Anderson, Emergency Preparedness Specialist, Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response. Captain Janice McCarroll, Senior Public Health Advisor for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And Colin Ocata, Senior Principal Scientist U.S. Department of Energy. Welcome panelists. We're going to be talking about the future of emergency preparedness. And I love the theme for this year's RIC, particularly I like the idea of navigating the future. It speaks to me in a couple ways. One, as a prior sailor, I really like this. So fair warning, we're going to use a lot of nautical references in this session. But I think that's also good because what I'd like to do is kind of think about EP in a little bit different way. Okay. So we're going to use nautical themes to explore what EP means in other areas because there's many types of hazards we deal with. And we deal with them in very similar ways. In many ways, radiation is not special. We can think of water as a hazard. Okay. And I think we all understand that what we do to keep people safe looks different on a cruise ship than it does for a yacht, than it does for a public pool. In each case, the capabilities that we need depend on the risk that the hazard poses for that situation. And radiological or mercy preparedness is no different. At the NRC, we take a great approach to EP where the requirements are set commensurate to the risk. So in this session, forgot to advance the slides, we're going to explore what it means for EP to be a risk-informed layer of defense in depth and what it means to have capabilities to provide those savings. And to start our journey, we need to start back at the beginning with a planning basis. Excuse me for a minute. I'm going to bring this over here and let's start our discussion. The planning basis for radiological mercy preparedness was developed by a joint task force of the NRC and the Environmental Protection Agency back in 1978 when they were asked, what should we be planning for? And what that task force came up with was to look at the consequence of a spectrum of accidents tempered by probability considerations to scope the planning for the distance to which planning for predetermined prompt protective actions were needed, the time-dependent characteristics of release, and then the types of radioactive materials released. So this concept of distance time materials is actually pretty simple. In fact, in many ways, it's a lot like radiological protection principles of time distance shielding. And we can take those principles and apply them to many different situations. The same thing with the planning basis for EP with distance time materials, we can apply them as we need to to ensure that emergency plans provide adequate protection. But there's some phrasing in here and some interesting discussions in the planning basis that are worth exploring. The first thing I want to point out is I said on the last slide, EP is risk informed. But in the planning basis, we see consequence and probability. Normally we think of risk as consequence time. Probably what sounds like what I'm saying is risk based. But Jim, can you explain us a little bit more? What were they thinking for the basis for this plan? Is it risk-based? Thanks, Todd. Yeah, so specifically talking about the EP planning basis, no, it is not risk-based in the sense of calculating risk in terms of probability and consequence. It is risk informed, though. And I think that's the word that you've already used it. We use it quite a bit in kind of all aspects of EP now. Going back to the task force and the EP planning basis that they originally put forth and that we still use today, they explicitly explored a risk-based approach. And it was rejected, as was an approach that was founded specifically in probability or cost. So they did explore that and they determined, and we still rely on that determination today, to not base it solely on risk or probability or cost. But it is risk informed. So those things are factored in. And what that means is, and it's, again, it's also explicit in the EP planning basis, that we look at the consequences of a full spectrum of accidents, specifically thinking about dose in terms of consequence. But that consequence, while not relying specifically on probability, is in their words tempered by probability. So probability is part of the discussion, part of the determination on what amount and what types of EP capabilities are necessary, but it isn't the whole conversation. So I want to jump on something you said there, because probability is considered, but there's also an interesting part of the planning basis that reads it says, EP is not based on the probability of an accident, but on public perception of the risk. That sounds a little odd when you read that at first glance, but actually I think there's a little bit deeper meaning. Can you explain, what did they mean by that? Could you say the first part again, Todd? With the, with the idea that, that the planning is, is based on the public perception of the risk, and then there's a prudence to the planning. So the EP planning basis isn't based on a qualitative or quantitative public perception of risk. That's, that's not what they're talking about there in terms of, of perception. You use the word and I think it's also used again explicitly in the EP planning basis. Prudence, EP is a matter of prudence. It needs to be that final independent layer of defense in depth to provide the capability so that the public knows that actions can and will be taken in the event of emergency to protect them. So that's, that's the prudence. That's the public perception when it comes to our planning basis for EP. It's not, it's not quantified. It's not a hard analysis, but it's the fact that we need EP to exist as that independent layer for the prudence of protecting the public from things we may not have considered in all the other layers of defense in depth. It's defense in depth. Yeah. So then we get to this concept of the spectrum of accidents, which really isn't too quite clear. But Keith, can you explain a little bit? What were they thinking? What did the task force have? And what were they considering as a spectrum of accidents? Sure. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to, I'm going to go back to just selected quotes from a foundational document. The document number is Nurego 396. Did we, is that in the references? Okay, I just wanted to make sure. Nurego 396 provided the planning basis. It was the document that established the idea of, for example, of emergency planning zones. So I went through and was looking at what Nurego 396 said about the spectrum of accidents. And I found two quotes that are kind of useful. I'm going to try to read them. And there's one statement on page five, which reads, the task force concluded that the objective emergency of emergency response plans should be to provide dose savings for a spectrum of accidents that could produce offsite doses of excess of the packs. So that's one of I think the first places in the document that the term spectrum of accident shows up. But maybe that's not a very precise statement about what that actually means. There's a statement on page I for that maybe is a little bit more descriptive about what you know, where you would go to find that spectrum of accidents. And it states the task force considered the complete spectrum of accidents postulated for various purposes, including those discussed in environmental reports, i.e. best estimate class one through eight accidents, accidents postulated for purposes of evaluating plant designs, e.g. the DBA loka, and the spectrum of accidents assessed by the reactor safety study. So in quote. So basically, if you look at 0396, you'll you'll see that they're they're fairly precise about what they what they meant by spectrum of accidents. It was the it was the information that you had that you have available to you. It's the it's the design basis accidents that are evaluated as part of the licensing. They had that from the safety analysis reports. It's the accidents that were used to they were included in environmental reports. And I should mention that they later concluded there wasn't enough information in the environmental reports to use those but they did they did think about them. And then they also looked at some information which was new to them at the time. This was about 1978 that they were doing this this report and that was just a few years after the reactor safety study, one of the first PRAs came out. So that's kind of my summary. Yeah, great. Your licensing. And then and then they used the information in all those spectrum of actions to to inform their planning. So one of the things that they did in in in 1978 is they use the information they had to answer the question of the planning distance. Okay, so the emergency planning zone. So looking at all their information, they use multiple lines of reasoning to come up with the now familiar 10 mile plume exposure pathway emergency planning zone and the 50 mile ingestion pathway planning zone. Now, when we look at these figures, there's a couple things that jump out. First thing you'll notice is that the emergency planning zone is not a boundary beyond what you can't exceed dose. Okay, so it's not an exact calculation. So Keith, can you enlighten us a little bit more and how do you arrive at a result like this? Well, once I can turn my microphone on. So yes. So I'll pick up on a couple of a couple of pieces from that. Yes, they did use multiple lines of evidence. It's evident that when you read 0396 that they they looked at the design basis accidents they assessed for for all the safety analysis reports they've had. They also use the wash 1400 and some other existing reports that had. And they all get numbers that are about 10 miles is justified. I'm keying in on the about because I've looked at it's interesting to look at the transcript when they were presenting 0396 to the Commission. So back in 1978 and in two places they were very clear about the fam. I need to have the microphone with me. They were very clear about the fact that this was a judgment that was informed by by lines of evidence. They were actually asked by the one of the questions with Commissioner Herne asked you know is this a calculation or is it judgment and they answered it's a judgment that's informed by analysis and that they picked that up again with another answer that you know one of the task force members explicitly said you know this is this is a judgment that's based on kind of probabilized consequence. I think he said but any he said yeah, could it could it be nine? Yeah, could it be 11? Yeah, we picked in. It's around number. It kind of emphasize it kind of illustrates the fact that this is this is an approximate number. Yeah, because when you're looking at that planning basis, there is no numeric criteria involved. And so it had to be some level of judgment and it also doesn't mean that you just, you know, pick a frequency cut off beyond which you're not looking at accident information, right? So Jim, though, if we're looking at this, you know, how was that acceptable if the planning basis, you know, assumes you could exceed dose beyond the emergency planning zone? How was that protective of public health and safety? So the question is if we can get dose beyond the emergency preparedness zone, the plume exposure emergency preparedness zone, how do how does that protective? Yes, okay. So the entire purpose of emergency planning EP is dose saving. So there's no set criteria for what needs to be done. It's about putting in place the capabilities to take actions to prevent dose. So the the EPZ, how how is it protective if the EPZ doesn't doesn't extend all the way out to where doses could be received? The it's just a planning tool that aids decision makers in developing their plans, and particularly those plans for the emergency preparedness zone for taking predetermined prompt protective actions to protect the public. So I think it's useful to realize that, you know, for the large light water reactors, the EPZ is 10 mile in support of those predetermined, you know, in a lot of cases we think about evacuations. But, you know, for a research reactor, it could be the the facility boundary, you know, the the protective action to save dose in that case is to leave and shut the door. So I think that I think that bounds the planning for the prompt action. So there are actions and capabilities that need to be brought to bear beyond the prompt actions and the planning that occurs in support of the prompt actions in the emergency preparedness zone generates capability and the ability to transfer that work and that preparation into protective actions if needed or other EP response activities beyond the emergency preparedness zone. And so in in that sense, it's protective. Yeah, I see. So I promise you some nautical metaphors. And so the first one I'll give is this, you know, the EPZ is kind of like the whole of a ship. Okay, it defines the bounds of the ship, but it provides no capabilities to make the ship move or to make it useful. Okay, so the emphasis in EP is not on the EPZ, it's on the capabilities, as Jim is saying, to act. Okay, as we think about a ship, you know, the life boat extends the capabilities of the ship beyond the ships of boundaries. The same thing with EP is that the capabilities that we provide within the emergency planning zone have to be flexible to be applied outside the EPZ as needed. But then, Jim, if we're doing this and we understand that those can exceed, you know, these boundaries, why not just plan for the worst case? So why not plan for the worst case? The answer is actually also in New Reg 0396, our planning basis, fairly explicitly, that we don't develop specific plans based on the worst case scenario because that would potentially limit us in the capabilities that would be generated for that event. That doesn't mean the worst case is not considered in the planning, it absolutely is the worst case scenarios you can think of. But accident characteristics differ based on scenarios. So planning only for or planning only based on the worst case scenario could leave out some accident characteristics that might be more applicable and more associated with higher probability events. And then that capability might not exist based on specific planning for a specific worst case scenario. But the planning basis does, like I said, require inclusion of the worst case scenario in that analysis, in that spectrum of accidents to ensure that capabilities to respond to any of the spectrum of accidents includes characteristics of augmentation. If capabilities are needed beyond a specific emergency preparedness zone, those resources of offsite organizations are part of the planning and can be brought to bear. So it does include it helps get you to that point of having the capability to augment beyond the emergency preparedness zone. Yeah, that's a critical point of planning. And I want to take a minute to kind of reflect on this in a little bit different way. And Keith, thank you for helping me kind of put together this illustration, what I call EP in the cliff edge. There's an obvious hazard here. Okay, somebody could fall off the edge of the cliff. So we build a wall. And the question could be how high of a wall do I need? And you may decide, you know, somebody has an accident, well, I need to build a higher wall. But for EP, the question is never how high of a wall is safe enough. For EP, the question is always, what would I do if somebody fell over the cliff? And the answer to that is very important to understanding how we do EP. Because what that means is the licensee may be required to have a certain capability. They have a rope and they can get down to the bottom of that cliff. But when they're down there, they need help. So they call the state and locals and they bring their capabilities and they meet them at the bottom. And then when they need help, they call the federal assets. Okay, and this is what we call a whole community approach to emergency preparedness. And so we need to take some time to understand this. And so I've asked Captain McCarroll and Colin to give us some perspectives on planning. And I'm going to ask Janice to come up now and talk about national preparedness. Right. Okay. Can I just, I promised my colleagues and my boss that I would not tell any jokes. But I'm looking at my watch. I am so excited that our panel is literally going to be during 159 on 314. Because that's the exact number of digits that I always remember pie. So just want to make another shout out to pie day. Okay. Two six five four. Yeah, listen. FEMA engineer, NRC engineer. There you go. Okay. I love the lead in. I do. Okay. Although I do need the clicker. Thank you. You know, we talk about the unthinkable. You know, we had kind of a little bit of an unthinkable, unthinkable conversation on this. But I also was really taken with the chairman's conversation this morning. And he really emphasized a couple of things that I'll also emphasize within the next few minutes is, you know, really focused on not only preparedness and whole community, but really emphasizing risk informed community centric approach. And I think that we all share that across our enterprise. I'm hoping I know that some of my colleagues in the audience have heard that other joke that I wasn't going to tell, but I'm going to tell it anyway. Being a captain in the public health service, I'm really trying to get everybody to buy into the nuclear enterprise instead of community. But that would make me captain of the enterprise. No. Okay. Thank you for the pity laughs. I appreciate that. Okay. So I will use enterprise and community kind of interchangeably here. But you know, that community centric approach and then but you know, while all along making sure that we're mindful diversity, equity and inclusion, these are traits that these are very important, not only to our administrator, but to our nation. Three things I really want you to take away from my 10 minutes up here is, yeah, whole community. It's a us thing. When I look down the table, right, it's multi agency. When I look out into the audience, if I do this, that's really loud. This is the community, right? I mean, we are the community that looks at radiological preparedness and it involves the entire spectrum from government to industry to public to the public to our nonprofit partners. It is truly whole community. And frankly, at least from a FEMA perspective, I can say we're in the disaster business. So we kind of have to think about the unthinkable. Todd and I talk a lot and we talk about the known, the known knowns and the known unknowns. And then there's that unknown, unknown. And we're kind of in that business of having to think about that. And that's an enterprise wide, you know, problem set that I think we all deal with. And then lastly, we're in the preparedness business. And these are all kind of intersecting. All right, should have figured out if I click this button. Okay, perfect. So we will start with just emphasizing that the whole community, most of my job is focusing on preparedness and resilience at the national level. And we recognize again and again that we can't achieve this alone. The federal government governmental partners. Obviously, that's where I spent a lot of my time. But the whole community is really the only way to get this done. And to really achieve the strategic goals that we were talking about here at the RIC whole whole community is government whole community is local, state, tribal nations, territories, industry, nonprofit, I mentioned the public. We're all in this community. And we're all committed to the common goal of health and safety of our citizens. And we all look at that kind of through our own sliver of the portfolio. I'm going to see how savvy I am. Okay, good. The health and the health of the overall enterprise is strengthened as we recognize the resource needs of our communities, each of which is unique, our communities are unique. Like with preparedness, overall, each jurisdiction, each community works within their area to determine the specific goals and levels of resources that that are needed for the threats and hazards in around their jurisdiction. Equitable and inclusive community engagement is critical to helping people before, during and after the unthinkable to play on words because of our FEMA's mission statement. The importance of communications. You know, you mentioned it, you touched on it, Todd. But you know, we talk when we talk about the need to communicate, you brought up the lifeboats, right? And the conversations that we had in the past have talked about the need to communicate your needs in the moment. So being able to, not only the lifeboats, have you gone through the analogy yet? Great. I'll, I'll try to weave this in. But the idea that if you, if you have a ship and you have lifeboats, the lifeboats are kind of an in between, right? You're getting from a ship with a problem to a rescue ship or a partnership that's coming partnership. That was funny. But you need to be able to contact that other vehicle or you need to be able to communicate. And it's just not the equipment, right, to communicate. But it's the, the processes and the procedures, the SOP, right, the person that is operating the, the equipment needs to understand that. And we'll, we'll get into that in a minute when we talk really about that cyclic nature of preparedness. I'm going to just end this by, end this topic about saying with emergency management, we kind of have a saying, I'll butcher it. But, you know, the time to exchange business cards isn't at the hood of like the emergency vehicle, right? The importance of making those connections, making that connection across your whole community is before, before, before the unthinkable happens. And we've seen the impact of building strong relationships before, and that obviously builds trust and partnerships during and then after. So when we talk about preparing, one of FEMA's pre-disaster functions is to coordinate, consolidate, communicate and distribute doctrine, guidance and plans to the nation. These are just a couple of examples. For the next three hours, I will go through each of these documents. Thank you for laughing. Okay. These are non-radiological guidance documents. I thought I'd put something up here that you may have not seen before. But just, and there's another document that, that just came out wasn't ready when, when I needed the slides in. But I thought it was interesting. So it's called the Guide to Community Engagement, available on FEMA.gov. It's a shameless plug for it. But it provides guiding principles, tools and best practices to strengthen engagement with communities and to support our work to instill equity as a foundation of emergency management. I would encourage folks to take a look at that. Again, it's called the Guide to Community Engagement. And it's really, I think it really highlights current, the current methodology and emphasizes the importance of how to approach community preparedness. So, yeah, I would say that this product is timely and relevant. As we think about nuclear technology, our facilities are in the community, right? They're in someone's community. And I think that there's, it's important to emphasize here that you need both general capabilities, but you also need specific capabilities when you look at the particular threats and hazards. I mentioned these are not radiological nuclear specific. And I can't tell if one of my other colleagues is in the audience, but I suspect that you're familiar with the planning frameworks. We have the nuclear radiological incident annex that ties to our operational plans at the national level. But then we also have upcoming, I know, late breaking news that we do have some nuclear detonation guidance about to be released from FEMA. And again, that's from our partners in our response side of FEMA. Bottom line, I would just say our community, our enterprise needs both general and specific tools and resources to assist while we're planning for the spectrum of incidents. We talked about the spectrum of incidents. And that's from all the way from local but all the way up to our national level. So I kind of touched on a little bit when we talk about the cyclic nature of preparedness, you know, there's a deliberate approach here. How do we even identify what each jurisdiction needs? The national preparedness system, it's a methodology. Hopefully you're mostly familiar with it for the last 10 years. We've been pretty wedded to this process. And it's something that both nationally, right from local all the way up to the federal level. This is an approach that makes a lot of sense. And I'll just touch on each part of it. But it's integrated and it's a circle for a reason, right? It's not linear. But it all starts with risk. So we talked a little bit about that. But that's the idea is that jurisdictions identify the threats and hazards that are in their jurisdiction. Depending on the language, we do use worst plausible threats and hazards from a FEMA perspective. And so again, that's sometimes I think the words are different. And methodologies are different. But I would emphasize that the threats and hazards identified through the preparedness system are key to the next step in it, which is identifying the capability requirements. So when we ask our jurisdictions to resource, that we're asking them to define their own capability targets. And that's driven by the threat and hazard scenarios. But ultimately, the targets for their particular community are then what gets focused on for the rest of the cycle. That second chunk there, when you talk about estimating capabilities, that's just that's knowing. And we talk about core capabilities. And again, we don't have three hours to talk about it. But but I want to emphasize the capabilities. But also, and it goes, if you keep going around the cycle, building and sustaining those capabilities, I would emphasize the bottom of that that cycle is really focusing on planning to deliver those capabilities. The planning system is a subset of the preparedness system. Really important as we talk about the building capacity, both at the federal and the local level and everywhere in between, validating capabilities, almost to the green green sliver there. A lot of times we talk about exercises, but I'd also emphasize that this is an area where even doing your annual reporting, depending on a lot of our states, our tribes and our urban areas are required to do those annual reports that outline the capabilities. And last, it's a review and update cycle. And again, you kind of go through the whole thing again. You know, while we may all have different roles to play in this entire systematic way of looking at preparedness, in the end, we're all striving to achieve the same goal. And I've got the national preparedness goal up there, but it's ultimately secure and resilient nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk. And really back to my first point, preparedness starts and ends with our community, our enterprise, if you guys have bought into that. Each segment of our enterprise through our own authorities and our own lens will be required to ensure that the next generation of nuclear power serves our communities equitably and it will take all partners to ensure the capabilities all at levels. Preparedness like disasters start and end locally. Our emergency management system is built on the premise that preparedness is local, that states manage and then ultimately fed support, federal agencies support preparedness is a shared responsibility. It's a partnership. And I'll just end here as he kicks me under the table. No, no, he didn't. I'm that is supposed to that's a bad joke. You know, they teach us how to write an engineering school, but not not how to tell jokes. I emphasized here a couple of the individual. I focus a lot given the seat I sit in on fed and kind of our state and local engagement, but preparedness is also individual. You know, when we started the conversation, you know, we talked about the enterprise and the public is important. Todd and I talk a lot about, you know, what are those messages that need to be out in the public in the enterprise before an event happens? It's knowing where to go. And of course, that's the one that I hid under there. But it's, you know, we're in a building is safe to go, whether it and again, look across the hazard spectrum. And I'll end with just kind of emphasizing where we're kind of in the disaster business where we always have to think about what is that low low probability high consequence. We have to think of the unthinkable and we're in the preparedness business. So thank you. Thanks, Janice. Colin, why don't you come on up? So now Colin Ocata is going to talk to us about what are some of the federal response capabilities that we have that we're going to employ? I'm Colin Ocata. I'm located at the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as Nevada Test Site. The capability that I'm talking about is largely from the Department of Energy side, but it's really designed for the whole federal government response. What we have here that the title is the Federal Radialogical Monitoring and Assessment Center. That is an interagency organization that's supposed to combine all of the federal assets along with states and locals and tribal organizations who may be responding to a radiological emergency. It's going to have capabilities that go from health physics, atmospheric modeling, radiation monitoring and sampling capabilities. We'll take that information that's gathered and then provide some assessment of it and provide visualization of what the consequences are. You can see the mission statement there. I'll let you read it. It basically says that we collect data and try to make it presentable in an understandable way. This Federal Radialogical Monitoring and Assessment Center came a lot about because of the accident at Three Mile Island. After that accident occurred, there was a meeting in Congress and with President Carter who looked at what happened and said, well, you've got all these federal agencies who are responding to this emergency, but they're not doing it in a coordinated manner. And we need to do a much better job of coordinating all of our resources, coming up with a common picture, and coming up with a single presentation of what the situation looks like. So as a result of that, an executive order was written. It created this document called the Federal Radialogical Emergency Response Plan that in that plan, they came up with the sacronamine and the Firmac, the Federal Radialogical Monitoring and Assessment Center. That plan has now been superseded by the National Response Framework and also the Nuclear Radialogical Incident Annex to those plans. We as Department of Energy and as Firmac, sorry, Firmac as a whole, get a lot of practice, not necessarily in large-scale accidents, because luckily there aren't too many of those that have occurred. But we did go and deploy some level of assets to Japan when they had their accident. We've been involved in many of the things related to Chernobyl for the last two decades. But within the country and across the country, there are between three and five smaller level accidents that occur that don't necessarily require the full support of a Firmac, but they will engage some of the teams on the Department of Energy side. And it allows those teams to get exercise in their performance and the task that they would carry out in a larger exercise, a larger event. We also conduct exercises once every 18 months to two years. We have full field exercises, which bring in 100 plus participants. The last one was in 2002. Our next one we project is going to be in 2025. Those exercises that we conduct, they do not always revolve around a nuclear power plant accident. The last one was a radiological dispersal device. We have also done other exercises that have related to nuclear detonations. Some of the things that you get when Firmac is there for you, you've got radiological monitoring and assessment. We do have support for medical professionals. We have a team out of Oak Ridge who has physicians, nurses, and other trainers who can train what procedures are needed if you've got radiologically contaminated patients. When we perform our operations, we will staff liaisons who can sit in your operations centers or operations facilities. And they facilitate getting information between the local agencies and our Firmac. So I'm going to quickly jump ahead to get into your timeline. So this sort of allows you to get a picture of when things are happening, what's happening, what can occur, and when you might be able to expect things. Our response team is broken down into three major blocks. You see consequence management home team, consequence management advanced command and consequence management response team. Consequence management home team is really a home team asset. It's somebody who's available on phone to answer questions, field data, and start to help you get your plans in place when something has gone bad. Your consequence management advanced command is a small person team who will go out there and start to do the organization in the field for how we need to organize a response. And they are preparing for the wider consequence management response team. A little bit better description of consequence management home team. You can see lots of assets that it or lots of support that it has available to you. You've got atmospheric modeling. You've got assessment scientists, health and safety information. We've got reach back capability for aerial measurements and laboratory methods. So if that's where we're going to guide you on what kind of samples to be collected and organized contracts with the laboratories that can perform those analytical analyses. We also are tied into the advisory team for the environment, food and health or the A team. They will be initially operating as a remote node. This team will be stood up within hours of being notified. So you call us on the phone. People will get on their computers and start getting things in place to be able to communicate with you. For a very small incident this may be one or two people who are going to be involved but for a very large incident it can easily be built up to more than 20 people who are on that home team. Part of that home team is our National Atmospheric Release Advisor Center in Iraq. They do the atmospheric dispersion and transport of radiological material. They can also do chemical releases. They have a full 3D model that they can employ. That includes terrain and land usage in their models. They have real-time weather, both actual measured weather as well as forecast weather that they can combine into their models and continuously update these. The Radiological Assistance Program is one of our, the DOE teams that is originally arranged. It's dispersed around the country in six teams to facilitate being able to access any location within the country within a relatively shorter period of time. They have built in their capability everything from a small transportation accident or a lost source up to preparing for the full radiological, sorry, consequence management response team. They are on call all the time 24-7 and they have in their plans the plan to try to be on site within four hours. The consequence management response team is what we would call a small-scale Firmac. This is a small-scale Firmac because this is coming out of the Nevada test site operations. It's going to be about a 50-person team, maybe a 100-person team, but this is going to be fully just DOE Department of Energy Assets. The full Firmac would involve assets from all the federal government. So it's going to be having people pulled in from FEMA, from EPA, from NRC if it's a nuclear power plant incident, possibly the Department of Defense as well. So when you get this, you get the full capability to go out and collect radiological measurements and samples. You've got health and safety support. You will have the ability to prepare samples that have been collected and get those sent back to fields for analysis. There will be some small capability to do a field-level analysis, but it's very limited in what those capabilities are. We're mostly related to the health and safety of the responders on site. One of our special capabilities that we have is our aerial measuring system. We have both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters that have radiation detectors already built into them. These are on-call 24-7. The instrumentation is fixed in place. It's ready to go. The teams will be in the air within two hours of being notified so that they can get to your site. Hopefully, they can get anywhere within the country, within the continental United States, within 12 hours. This is our medical team, the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center and Training Site. These are the physicians, nurses who have experience in dealing with patients with radiation and radiation contamination. They also have access to retrospective dose analysis capabilities. So they can do analyses of blood samples to make an assessment of how much dose an individual has received. If you want more information about FERMAC, here's our program manager, Alvin Morris. He's also located out in Nevada. The information is there in your slides. Thanks so much. So as I was preparing for this session, I was thinking about the Titanic, the unsinkable ship, right? You know, the Titanic was built to actually exceed the design standards of the day. It had even remotely operated watertight doors. But there was a design flaw in the Titanic, because the top of the bulkheads weren't sealed. And the designers actually knew this, OK, because the thinking was they would never be in this impossible situation that they couldn't get water out. And unfortunately, that led to the tragic sinking of the boat. Of course, following the sinking, there was changes in design standards. But there was also an examination of preparedness. And people started questioning the number of lifeboats, as you heard Janice talking about. You know, some people thought we needed more lifeboats, because in fact, there was only enough capacity for half of the passengers. But before saying we need something, we really understand why we're doing it, OK? Because actually, lifeboats aren't there to ferry everyone to safety. They're there to facilitate a rescue between ships. You see, the actual critical piece of equipment on board at the Titanic was the radio telegraph. Because without that, their distress signal never would have been heard. And the RMS Carpathia never would have picked up any of their survivors, OK? I think about this in the context of radiological mercy planning. We've had our seminal events, Chernobyl, 9-11, Fukushima. After these events, there's often a call, we need bigger EPs. We need more capabilities. But we need to stop and think about what we're doing. Actually, what was revealed in these events is something interesting about the spectrum of accidents that meant we just needed different capabilities, like reliable communication for a station blackout. So this is what we need to do when we're thinking about EP. And if you heard the chair this morning, he says, sometimes we have to stop and do the deep thinking and think about the why of what we're doing. So with that in mind, and with this established planning basis and all these capabilities, I think we're ready to start talking about the future of EP. So let me come back down here. And panelist, we have a lot of ground to cover. I do want to leave some time for questions. So we're going to keep this conversation going. So the NRC has drafted a final rule on emergency preparedness for small modular reactors and other new technologies. Jim, what is that future going to look like? So in some ways, it looks like the, can you hear me? Sorry. Some ways, it still looks like the past. It does continue to rely on that valid EP planning basis for a risk-informed and graded approach, as with current EP regulations, the requirements in the future are going to be set to be commensurate with any hazards associated with the facility. What's going to be new and transformative is that the future is going to be technology-inclusive. It's going to be performance based in its framework. The current regulations are often prescriptive on how a licensee is to meet their EP planning standards for a specific type of facility. Technology-inclusivity makes it flexible for a variety of designs. And being performance-based puts the emphasis on demonstration of capabilities rather than the emphasis being on written plans. I think those are some of the key differences that we'll see in the future. So another thing I see that's a little difference is hazard analysis for contiguous facilities. Can you describe that a little bit? So hazard, yes. That's a new piece, the hazard analysis, for the contiguous facilities. It's a recognition that the external hazard, potentially posed by contiguous or a facility that is adjacent, also needs to be considered in the planning basis. It is also a hazard that can both affect the utility and the hazards associated with it and also affect the ability of the capabilities to take their actions as part of the emergency planning. Thanks, Jim. Marie, let's get you in this conversation. So the framework for emergency repairs is going to look different, but we still need to inform our planning on the hazards assessment. So what kind of information is going to be available that we can use to scope our planning efforts? Probabilistic risk assessment excels at gaining risk insights about the spectrum of accidents for any design. And equally as important, PRA is also important for identifying key sources of uncertainty and how that uncertainty can impact EP decisions. Thanks for that. So Janice, another thought came to my mind. So for the past 40 years, FEMA and the NRC, we've been implementing a REP program that's been based on meeting the 16 planning standards that were very prescriptive. But at the same time, comprehensive emergency management has been evolving. So how does a performance-based framework fit in with national preparedness? Yeah, thank you, Todd. I do think it's in line. I think the words we use are capabilities-based preparedness and capabilities-based planning. But I think that the work that we continue, FEMA and NRC continue to do, is right in line, not only with national doctrine, but in line with what you just talked about, with performance-based. Yeah, you're going to hear us keep saying this word, capabilities, capabilities, capabilities. And there's another piece here, right? Ingestion planning capabilities, rather than the defined ingestion planning zone. Colin, is this the capabilities that you just described to us? So within the United States, most locations choose to use the federal, the Food and Drug Administration's drive to intervention levels for determining if food items are acceptable for consumption, or food or feeder are acceptable for consumption. And the resources that we have for doing the sampling and analysis are consistent with doing that within the capabilities, whether it's an ingestion planning zone or outside of that. So another feature of the rule is this scalable emerging planning zone. Of course, it's not really new, right? We have the current regulations provide for scalable EPs and we license different facilities that some have site boundaries, some even have no EPs. But what I want to talk about again is this idea of what does it mean to be risk-informed, okay? So Jim, first of all, with this new framework, has the idea of how we risk-inform EP, has that changed at all? No, no, the risk-informing still means the same thing that it says in the planning basis that is still valid. EP is risk-informed by considering a full spectrum of accident consequences or from consequences from a spectrum of accidents, and then tempered by the probability of those accidents. Yeah, it's interesting really when you think about it. I kind of look at Neurigo 396, the EP planning basis, one of the first kind of risk-informed applications. So EPs kind of always been risk-informed, but we hear this term now a lot more in other licensing areas. So Marie, can you explain to us though what does risk-informed decision making mean in other areas of licensing like design? Working to get this mic going. Thank you, Keith. Well, when we receive a design application for licensing, that design is reviewed, the risk assessment is reviewed for risk insights, and how the numerical results compare against the numerical commission goals for new reactors. But the task of identifying the spectrum of accidents and the uncertainty with those spectrum of accidents and their frequency for the sizing of the EPC and risk-informing the EPC process is completely separate and distinct from the review that for the licensing of a new reactor design, they are two completely different animals. Yeah, yeah, thank you for that. I think that's a very, very important point, right? In EP, we're not trying to establish some sort of acceptable level of risk. What we're trying to understand is that spectrum of accidents, and we're getting those insights from PRA and other pieces of information. But let's get to this figure that I have up here, because what we're looking at is some sort of a hypothetical set of those distance curves that would inform, say, emergency planings on size. Keith, what I'm seeing here, there's one curve down at the bottom, this blue curve that extends beyond the others, okay? And it's saying that there is some potential to exceed one REM further out. First of all, how might you get yourself in this kind of situation? Well, we talked about, this is an interesting curve. What I look at when I see this curve, I see a couple of things. I see some dashed and dotted lines. And those indicate that to me, that you've got a couple of accident sequences that produce various, you know, that push certain doses, one REM or 200 REM out to certain distances with different frequencies. And then I see a solid line, a solid line for one REM and a solid line for 200 REM. And so I see that it looks like there you've got some curves where you've aggregated a number of the relatively more frequent events. But then I see that interesting little curve down in blue. It's got a pretty low relative frequency. It looks like it's four orders of magnitude, or three to four orders of magnitude lower than the other ones. And it goes out further. So, but it's not part of that aggregate curve. And I think that what I would do if I saw something like that, well, first I'd read the report to make sure that I understood how the curve was generated. And then I would, you know, that might be a discussion for emergency planners to say, you know, how do you wanna handle that? Most of your accidents don't seem like they go beyond your calculated EPZ. But you've got this very low frequency event that could push a one REM dose out a bit further. Yeah, I think you hit the right point there, right? Is that when you're looking at something this, you wanna talk to the emergency planners how they wanna handle this event. Because you're not looking for an exact calculation. What you're trying to do is understand, what do I need to know about these accidents, right? And as Jim mentioned, you know, this is really no different than the situation we have with current emergency planning zones. You can exceed possibly dose beyond the boundary. So the key pieces is the capability. But you know, as we start to look, you know, with these designs and we expect them to be safer, we're starting to look at even lesser, lesser likely accidents, okay? But as I do that, because I've been looking at very low likelihood, of course, keep in mind, in Wash 1400, they were looking at accidents beyond the lifetime of the universe, okay? But as I do this, and I'm informing my planning based on this, is this a reflection on the design safety? Marie, if I'm looking at these low probability events, does that mean there's something flawed in my design? It represents, you know, the designers, you know, being able to reduce known vulnerabilities, but the sizing of the EP and EP planning is different. And what we're looking at is a spectrum of accidents to look at those characteristics, you know, of timing and source terms as input to the emergency planning process. Right, so it's informing EP, but you've already met the requirements for design safety. Exactly. So then that leads me to kind of an interesting discussion topic now because, you know, we're looking at a lot of new designs and so this raises some questions. There's no operating experience. We've never, you know, tested these. So wouldn't it be prudent just instead to have massive emergency plans until we get more experience? But I think, again, here, we need to really do some deep thinking and understand why and especially, how does EP deal with uncertainty? So let's poke at this a little bit. So first, Marie, you know, how do we address uncertainty in PRA? Well, the NRC has issued guidance on how to treat uncertainty in probabilistic risk assessments for risk-informed decision making. So we have the tools to do this. So what we need to do is look at when we're sizing the EPZ and we're looking at what the PRA is telling us, we need to understand those key sources of uncertainty, whether it's parametric or modeling uncertainty, and we need to look at the potential impacts of that uncertainty on EP decisions. So uncertainty is very, very important. Yeah, and Keith, as you know, when you're looking at level three PRA or consequence analysis, we start to understand even more about uncertainty. What do we learn? Well, I started off preparing kind of a laundry list of uncertainties, and I'm not gonna sit here and read that laundry list to you, but what's important is that I think we do need to realize there are uncertainties and in consequence assessment, and they can come out, I'll give a few examples. Atmospheric dispersion, the modeling, the transport of material in the air, I mean, that's the subject of uncertainty, the source term. We don't have a very, we don't know exactly what the source term might be. We don't know exactly where people might be. So there are sources of uncertainty in the calculation, and I think one of the key things is that when you're looking at one of those distance curves, you realize it's not that precise. It's a nice sharp line, but the reality is that it's uncertain. But in opposition to that, or in response to that, kind of like what Marie said, is that there are ways to deal with that. There's kind of accepted approaches for doing dispersion modeling, for there's ways to do source term modeling to kind of get an understanding. I'd mentioned that we've done some research reports where we've explicitly quantified, tried to quantify uncertainty. The key, I think, is that when you do that, you can see whether your response is going to be robust and meaning that if you have a plan, you don't have to know exactly what the consequences are. You just have to know that your plan is going to be effective maybe across that range of uncertainties. Let me pose that question to Jim. All right. Given all this uncertainty, is that a problem for EP? The short answer is no. This is one of the reasons I like EP is, EP is the answer to all that uncertainty. It's why we have EP as a final independent layer of defense in depth. EP ensures that the capabilities exist to take an action even in unforeseen circumstances. So, the uncertainty is baked in. EP, it considers that uncertainty absolutely, especially in the generation of the emergency planning zones. Yeah. And in the capabilities, right? So, if I can respond in 30 minutes, I can respond in 30 hours. I can respond anywhere in between. The uncertainty is baked into the capabilities that we have. But now, let's shift our perspective just a little bit though, because now you're off-site, you know something's happening at the nuclear plant. So, Janice, what does that uncertainty look like to somebody in the off-site? Yeah, and I think that I thought about this in the framework of kind of what is our response model, right? Whether it's a local response, all the way up to federal. And I think the preparedness system and a subset of that, the planning system, right, is trying to reduce the number of unknowns, right? Like, I mean, I think you make critical assumptions going into any deliberate plan. And I think that that is kind of both an emergency response and an emergency management way of handling uncertainty is to both identify kind of critical information requirements that you need, right? Like you try to address it beforehand with deliberate planning, but there's a recognition that you're not gonna know everything you need to know pre-event. So there's gonna be critical information requirements that then get plugged in so you can adapt your deliberate plan so that way in the moment you're able to do that. And again, I don't wanna talk too long, and decision makers, they wanna base their decisions on evidence, on science, right? They need to make the best risk-informed decisions they can, so Colin, how can we use, you know, the tools that we have to reduce uncertainty when we're trying to inform our decisions? Whenever we are doing a response, we will generally start with plenty of default assumptions. There'll be default assumptions for the source term, default assumptions for how the material is being dispersed. Once we get out there and start collecting measurements, that starts to really narrow down our uncertainty. We now have some much better idea of where the material is actually located and what the material is, what the source term looks like. So that starts to narrow down our uncertainty very quickly. Fundamentally, right, EP comes down to the ability to take action, right? So with this rulemaking, and as with all EP, we need to give information to the public and decision makers on how to act. Janice, what's important for people to know when they're trying to decide what they need to do? I think that's a great question, and I know across our enterprise, if I say it enough times, you guys all agree with me, across the enterprise, we've come up with messaging of get inside, stand side, there's a stay tuned that's in between that, right? Like get inside, tune in, and then stand side. I think that's critical to understand, right, that the importance of shielding, and again, I'm sorry, I'm assuming that the question is specific to Radnick, but that was certainly something, and I know that we've done a lot of research, again, kind of across the community on where in buildings are the right places to shelter. And so having the public, having every citizen understand this graphic pre-event, right, is what's gonna save lives. There's, this message and the interpretation of this graphic isn't, you don't have the time in the moment to be able to explain it to that level. So I think that, you know, that's certainly something I'd highlight. I don't know if anybody else listens to podcasts. I had the interesting decision to listen to a disaster podcast on the way in today, and it was talking about earthquakes on the West Coast, but one of the things was talking about if everybody just understood kind of why, to stop, kind of get under something and hold on, why that's such an important message. And I mentioned to Trish that one of the comments was, if everybody had just had two bottles of water underneath their desk and an earthquake hit, that could literally be life or death, depending on how long it took folks to be able to get somebody out from under the rubble. Anyway, that's a short story from a long podcast. So, you know, I've said this before, we said this last year at the RIC, the choice of protective action that was far from the exact science. So, but Jim, how do we in NRC regulations make it capable of making risk informed decisions? So the EP regulations, again, and the emergency plans that are built off of the planning basis, that sound like a broken record at this point, require consideration of a range of protective actions as part of the strategies. And then there is guidance that we have in place to inform any protective action decisions based on those strategies and those protective actions, considering the prevailing circumstances. Yeah, and let me jump at that too. We've been practicing this for over 40 years for large light water reactors, but looking ahead, looking to the future, how might these protective action strategies change with new technologies? So, for the new technologies that come along, protective action strategies, again, based on that planning basis, looking at the distance, the time, and the materials that could be released, the message might be, you know, to speak to the slide that's up, go inside, stay inside, stay tuned. That might be appropriate based on the accident characteristics of the new technology. For some technologies, there may not be possible to have a large release. That's a distinct possibility. So, you know, no release of radio iodine, for example. So, KI might not be a consideration for a new technology. And so, the protective action strategies while based in the same planning basis and to the same risk-informed pedigree will need to be updated based on the specifics of the technology. Yeah, so we're talking about the possibilities, but the thing of it is we're not gonna wait for an accident to happen before we figure out what we need to do. So, Keith, how can we use consequence analysis to kind of think through this and be smart about protective action strategies? Sure. I think what it goes to is that, and I'd highlight that, yes, there's a lot of work in preparation that you do because it takes time and you gotta think through it. One of the things that we can do and we have done is we've done, you can evaluate your protective action strategies under a number of different hypothetical cases. You can decide, you know, is it better to evacuate or is it better to shelter? Is it, you know, what kind of accident characteristics make a difference? If it's rapidly progressing, you may have a trade-off. If you evacuate and get stuck in traffic, you may get exposed. It might have been better to shelter and then evacuate. Consequence analysis and many of these analyses can allow you to think through those scenarios and come up with an effective strategy so that you're not having to try to do that in the moment. Yeah, thanks. Real quickly, so, you know, the beauty of a performance-based technology-inclusive framework is it really opens up the door to new technologies, not just new reactor technologies, but new technologies that we can apply to EP, like machine learning, digital twins. So I'm really excited about this future and what we're going to accomplish. So real quickly, you know, let's talk about some of these technology innovations that are coming to enhance our state of practice in EP. Marie, what's on the horizon for PRA? There's Mike here. There we go. Well, it's using the PRA, you know, to evaluate all hazards, all modes and sources of radioactivity. To arrive at a spectrum of accidents. And I think that's just the best way of saying that, that spectrum of accidents and understanding the characteristics of those spectrum of accidents. Thanks. Keith, what can we expect with Max and what else is research working on? Sure, I'll just mention a couple of things. Now, I have to say my expertise or my area is using a code called Max, which is a severe accident consequence code. And I think we're always trying to improve that. And that's not true just of Max. I think that's true of all the tools. As we learn more, as computing capabilities get up, we can start explicitly addressing a lot of the sources of uncertainty and understanding them better. So I wouldn't say anything more other than we're constantly modernizing, we're constantly trying to add capabilities and improve. I think AI is something that, although that's not my expertise, there are folks in my branch who are working on it. I'm gonna put a shout out. I think there's a presentation on that or a session on that later. But that's gonna offer some capabilities to learn more and to explore the diversity of characteristics, you know, sites and understanding what are the differences between sites and can you get a better understanding of what are high population, what are low population, road networks, all kinds of things that we may have. Janice, what's new for FEMA? Yeah, I'll just highlight, you've got two of the things right up on the screen. In addition to the guidance, I kind of mentioned, you know, we're always putting out new guidance as well, but the integrated public alerts and warning system or iPods, I think a lot of our community are well aware of communities and sites adopting iPods and wireless communications as an ability to alert and warn citizens. And the other thing I wanted to highlight, it's the map on the lower left is our radiological emergency preparedness, our rep national public information map. So we're using GIS to ensure that we're using both open source data but getting that information out to anyone who's interested. But it's, yeah, using GIS to be able to map both around nuclear power plants and including all those GIS layers. Thanks. Colin, same question. Back in our lab, we've got one group whose mission statement or motto is more data faster with greater reliability. So we're always working to try to get data in faster, but we're also working to get data out faster, meaning make it available to the decision makers so that they can understand what the situation is for them and how they can protect the public. Thank you. And thanks for this discussion, panelists. I think it's been made patently clear that the future of emergency preparedness is now. We're on the journey, okay? That future is going to look a lot different, but we're starting with a proven planning basis and we're taking a graded approach to EP that works. EP provides capabilities to act and those capabilities are informed by your understanding of what could go wrong and sometimes really the only capability we need is to know who and how to call for help. And I think we're ready to move ahead. As you heard this morning, we are meeting the moment and as the chair said, we're not just planning, we're doing, but we can't reach the future if we're stuck to the peer. What I mean by that is this, it's time to stop looking at the past. It's time to stop looking back at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, because that's not our future, okay? The future is different from the shores we've sailed away from. We're looking at new horizons. There's new technologies and I can tell you this, the communities are watching and they're waiting and they're asking smart questions. They wanna know what are these reactors? How do they work? How safe are they? Where are you gonna cite them? And importantly, they're asking, what would we do if something goes wrong? And we need to be ready to answer that question. Now we could stand here and say, don't worry, we're so safe, we're insinkable. But I don't think that answer's gonna work. What I would offer though instead is this, we can move safely into the future. But if something does go wrong, you can be sure of this. There's a plan for that. Wanna thank you for listening? Please give a round of applause to all my speakers here. All right, we did leave some time for some questions here. First question, post-event research. After both Chernobyl and Fukushima showed negative health impacts of both accidents came from response actions like evacuation and population relocation. Why aren't these lessons being incorporated in emergency preparedness programs? Jim? So we are working on that. We are actually, in terms of the non-radiological health effects from recent events, those are being considered. We are actually considering a petition for rulemaking right now that would ask us to include those considerations in our regulations, specifically asking us to ensure that protective actions to protect the public in the event of an emergency would do more good than harm. So we are considering that. Also, from a slightly lower level, we are doing research. We recently published a new reg on non-radiological health effects of long-term dislocation and relocation. And we're currently looking at the effectiveness of sheltering in place and considering the impacts that an HVAC system may have on the relative effectiveness of sheltering in place versus evacuation and those types of considerations. So all those things that the question asks, we are actively looking at right now. Right, yeah. So we're not ignoring those lessons, but we're proceeding with an evidence-based approach so that we can make risk-informed decisions. Oh, the next question, Janice, this is for you. How does FEMA talk about the hazards of overreaction? Are there lessons to be learned from public interactions after temporary evacuations for a hurricane? And how much pressure is applied to get evacuation zones reopened for public access? Yeah, that was a nice softball, I think. You know, I would say, frankly, we've been dealing, I'm interpreting this as kind of compliance to government instruction on protective actions. This is certainly not new. I think our state and local colleagues have been dealing with this and have mixed success. I think we do have some lessons learned, best practices for how to get communities to take guidance seriously. But there's no kind of easy answer to that. Yeah, and there's some interesting studies that we're following, the FEMA's post. They're working with Argonne National Lab and they do some really interesting looking to the demographics and the type of decisions different demographics make. And this is the kind of things that we can then use and then put into like communication strategies and targeted, you know, we didn't talk much about it, but really equity, right, is a big concern in environmental justice and making sure we're reaching the right demographics in the right way. And so all that data is out there for us to use. The next question, how has the NRC made the licensees maintain a good interface between emergency planning for nuclear accidents and emergency planning for a security incident in terms of the consistency in synergy? I think I'll take that one. So the licensees and offsite response organizations participate in hostile action-based emergency preparedness scenarios as part of their regular exercise and drill program. And that's been in place for quite some time for several years now. And I think we've gone through one full cycle and we're well into the second cycle of potential hostile action-based emergency preparedness scenarios. So the training and the exercise of those scenarios in the biennial exercises that require the utility and the offsite response organizations to collectively respond to an emergency that's initiated by a hostile action-based event, that provides that capability. It demonstrates that capability on a regulated basis that those events can be responded to, that the capabilities, the EP capabilities exist to respond to those types of events. Thanks. The next question, has the draft final rule on emergency preparedness for small modular reactors and other new technologies been scheduled for commission vote? Is there an update? So actually, if you go to our public webpage, you'll find all the rule-making updates. And right now you'll see a date, expected publication date of July of 2023. Our next question, does Firmac use data stored in RADResponder to assist in your assessments? Will you collect and load field team data into RADResponder, and that's a commenter saying they use and collect data and load it into RADResponder and it's a very helpful tool. So does Firmac also use RADResponder, which by the way for our group now is called CBRN Responder? Yes, we have actually worked very closely with the developers of RADResponder and we have the tools to be able to import the data from RADResponder into our databases. We also have the technology to push the data that we collect and from our systems into RADResponder as well. So it goes in both directions. Thanks, Kevin. The next question is a little bit long. I respect the idea of perceived risk. Although evacuations during Fukushima would have burdened the public more than physical health benefit to avoid radiation, but fear and psychological concern or radiation may partially justify the action taken. The caveat lies in diversity of perception by individuals as well as the radiological sensitivity by age and gender. Health risks due to protective actions are also inequitably high for senior and vulnerable citizens. How do you incorporate in risk assessment such diversity of individuals? All right, experts. So, I mean, I can take it just at least from a, right, like, so from an emergency management strategy, you know, I think that you as a jurisdiction typically allow for you evacuate special populations earlier, right? So, I mean, there's a timing factor here where you give yourself less time to make the decision as you see a situation unfolding. If you have a particular population that's either gonna take longer for whatever reason to evacuate. And it may not be age or disability status, right? I mean, it may be geographic, right? I mean, I'm thinking you have geographically isolated areas. So, you know, as a planning factor, you have to allow for more time and you may have to make an evacuation decision much earlier than you would, let's call it with the general population. I don't know if that's... Yeah, and Colin, I'll just throw one at you. I think, you know, that there's value in providing evidence and actual measurements to the public to, you know, I don't wanna say ease their concern, but, you know, to provide some support to their understanding of what just happened. And I think that's part of what we can do with Firmac, correct? Yeah, part of what we do is we do try to prevent or provide the information, the radiation data in terms of the guidance that's out there. And the guidance that does exist for evacuation is actually a range of doses, the projected doses that you can use. So, the highest level dose, they say, at five REM over a four-day period, you should perform evacuation, and at one REM, you should consider it. So that means that a lot of times, people will try to employ the one REM level, but for special populations, they may choose the five level because that allows them more time to think about how to do this more deliberately. Keith, I'm gonna put you on the spot next. Can we model different groups and behaviors and, you know? Yeah, just to highlight that, I mean, I think it goes to the, you know, which you can do in advance. You do this, you know, kind of planning beforehand. You can, again, you can think about trade-offs. So you might be able to think about the fact that maybe I've got a population, which is, you might have more difficulty in evacuating them soon, but they're further away. They're already in a place where they've got some shelter capabilities, and you can maybe evaluate whether, you know, does it make more sense for that population? You're not gonna, you might not need to evacuate at one REM. You might say, oh, we can, you know, we're not gonna avert that much dose. We can shelter them until we know more. So, yeah, you can look at trade-offs to kind of figure out what, and I think part of that trade-off is that you can maybe in a different way that you can start thinking about how can I trade off other aspects of the problem about does it make more sense to evacuate those people or to shelter them or, you know, what's the best. And I think a couple other points here, you know, evacuation and shelter in place are common response actions to many types of hazards, okay? So I think we can learn from other types of events, you know, how the public views and trust those protective actions, right? So we can provide evidence to them to say, you know, these protective actions you've taken, they work for radiological events as well. I'm thinking about another study about the use of potassium iodide out of Fukushima, and this is really interesting because it gets to different perceptions of risk. And so they understood, you know, the importance of taking potassium iodide for children. And so they did a very good job in one community of distributing like 94% of the community received KI, but what was really interesting is who took KI? And about 64% of the population actually took it. Many of them parents who took the pill to demonstrate to their children it was safe so their children would take it. But then for other people who had the KI, some of them held onto it, some of them didn't trust it. And so these kind of learnings are the things that we can, you know, use for our own strategies and approaches to make sure that we're providing for equitable outcomes. Okay, I think that's really all the time we have for questions. We will be available after this session. So if you wanna come up and talk to us, please feel free to do so with that. Again, I will thank our panelists and conclude this session. Thank you.