NRC: Plant Operations, Engineer or Academic Centric Employees

Feb 14:  Most NRC commissioners come from the engineers' and the nuclear weapons side of the game, all academics and professors, mostly PhDs....none come from a seasoned nuclear plant manager; a broad fleet plant operations senior executive side of the game; a nuclear industry Union executive or a well respected politician. Let's not forget an outside nuclear safety or reformer advocate....

We got one commissioner who has overseen a squadron of submarines...but one small nuclear plant could put out more BTUs that his whole squadron of subs.

What commissioner skills that will appease our congressional or presidential politicians is way different than the skills necessary to drive future nuclear excellence in our fleet of nuclear plants.

It is like we are always electing a half dead Pope...we always get the same kind of guys with the limited skill and experience sets...

....What is horrendous, and was a practice during my days at VY...was the habit a maintenance engineer becoming the person in charge of running a nuclear plant or nuclear facility. It always ends terribly...

So the NRC had become a excessively rule based engineering centric outfit or an academic guy with no hands on experience within large plant and fleet operations.

So the license nuclear operator would be pondering before giving the orange; how would me giving that orange to my buddy affect my organization, what will it do to the plant and affect my life, and how it affects the community. And I am certain he would have a long discussion with his buddy with what he was going to do with the orange.

...I give you a clue...it is who is structurally educated the most and has to go through the NRC with testing. No engineer, maintenance or anyone else has as much plant specific education, regulations, tech spec, broad plant operations and the simulator training... ops people go to training one week out of six, simulator, one to two years of classroom training to get a license. We are talking about many hundreds of thousands of dollars of training over a lifetime.

I will tell you what, I'd like a broadly experienced plant electrician or maintenance person in the control room who has become licensed....it is a deep hole of knowledge missing from most control rooms...

We are too narrowly educated collectively on the control room staff...

 “USNRC 25th Annual Regulatory Information Conference Commissioner Plenary: The Education of an Engineer in Policy Making”
Prepared Remarks of Commissioner George Apostolakis at the 2013 NRC Regulatory Information Conference (RIC)
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
When an attorney heard that that was the title of my speech today, I am told that he asked “Can you really educate an engineer?” As a result and given that I’m a former professor of engineering, I feel free to tell you a lawyer joke.

An engineering graduate student and a law student were having lunch. The engineer started peeling an orange. The law student asked, "Now, if you were to give someone an orange, how would you go about it?" The engineer replied, "Here's an orange." The law student said, "No! No! I'd tell him, 'Consistent with all relevant statutes, I hereby give and convey to you all and singular, my estate and interests, rights, claim, title, and advantages of, and in, said orange, together with all its rind, juice, pulp, and seeds, and all rights to bite, cut, freeze and otherwise eat the same, or give the same away with or without the pulp, juice, rind and seeds….”