Meeting of the Joint Subcommittee on Reliability and Probabilistic Risk Assessment, Plant Operations, and Regulatory Policies and Practices


                      UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
                     NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
               ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON REACTOR SAFEGUARDS
                                  ***
             MEETING:  RELIABILITY AND PROBABILISTIC RISK
             ASSESSMENT, PLANT OPERATIONS, AND REGULATORY
                        POLICIES AND PRACTICES
     
                             Room T-2B3
                             11545 Rockville Pike
                             Rockville, Maryland
                             Tuesday, July 13, 1999
     
         The Subcommittees met, pursuant to notice, at 1:00 p.m.
     MEMBERS PRESENT:
         GEORGE APOSTOLAKIS, Chairman of the Subcommittee
           on Reliability and PRA
         THOMAS KRESS, Chairman, of the Subcommittee on
           Regulatory Policies and Practices
         JOHN BARTON, Member, ACRS
         ROBERT SEALE, Member, ACRS
         ROBERT UHRG, Member, ACRS
         GRAHAM WALLIS, Member, ACRS
         MARIO BONACA, Member, ACRS
                         P R O C E E D I N G S
                                                      [1:00 p.m.]
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The meeting will now come to order.  This
     is a meeting of the ACRS Subcommittees on Reliability and Probabilistic
     Risk Assessment and on Regulatory Policies and Practices.
         I'm George Apostolakis, Chairman of the Subcommittee on
     Reliability and PRA.  Dr. Kress is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on
     Regulatory Policies and Practices.
         ACRS members in attendance are John Barton, Robert Seale,
     Bob Uhrig, Graham Wallis, Mario Bonaca.
         The purpose of this meeting is to review proposed options
     for development of risk-informed revisions to 10 CFR Part 50, domestic
     licensing of production and utilization facilities.
         The subcommittees will gather information, analyze relevant
     issues and facts, and formulate proposed positions and actions as
     appropriate for deliberation by the full committee.
         Dr. Powers just joined us.
         Michael T. Markley is the Cognizant ACRS Staff Engineer for
     this meeting.
         The rules for participation in today's meeting have been
     announced as part of the notice of this meeting previously published in
     the Federal Register on June 21, 1999.
         A transcript of the meeting is being kept and will be made
     available as stated in the Federal Register notice.
         It is requested that speakers first identify themselves and
     speak with sufficient clarity and volume so that they can be readily
     heard.
         We have received no written comments or requests for time to
     make oral statements from members of the public.
         I forgot to mention Mr. John Sieber, who is also
     participating, although not quite a member yet, I understand, as an
     invited expert.
         The ACRS reviewed SECY-98-300 in December 1998 and issued a
     report to the Commission, dated December 14, 1998.  In a staff
     requirements memorandum, dated June 8, '99, the Commission directed the
     staff to pursue option two, develop risk-informed definitions for
     safety-related and important to safety systems, structures and
     components; to modify the scope of the maintenance rule; approved option
     three to study other areas of 10 CFR Part 50 that may be risk-informed;
     and, approved policy issues related to voluntary provisions of the use
     of exemptions for pilot plants.
         We will hear about the staff's plans today for risk-informed
     on these issues.
         The staff also met with NEI on June 22 and July 8 of this
     year on this matter.  NEI is supposed to go first, according to the
     schedule, but NEI is not here.
         So we shall proceed with the staff's presentation, which was
     scheduled for 1:45.  So we're ahead of the schedule already.
         Who will take the lead and introduce everybody?  Okay. 
     Please.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  I'll take care of that, Mr. Chairman.  My
     name is Scott Newberry.  I'm the Deputy Director in the Division of
     Regulatory Improvements in NRR.  Let me introduce the folks with me.  At
     either end, Gary Holahan and Tom King, who you've seen before on
     risk-informed activities.  Of course, Mark Cunningham over here in front
     of the projector, and to my right, a new addition to our group, Tim
     Reed, who is spent the last few years struggling with steam generator
     issues, but now we've drawn him into the risk informing Part 50
     activity.
         Later in the presentation, there is a specific viewgraph on
     the organization in the NRC working this project in terms of the role of
     NRR, in terms of the role of Research.  I won't go into that in any
     detail here in the introductory remarks, only to say that this is a
     large project.  It's going to touch on the programs in every division in
     NRR and we're working closely and have established a process that will
     talk to you about, working with the Office of Research on both options,
     and we'll try to make that clear to you and answer your questions.
         But there's certainly a larger group working on this project
     in some of the other activities because of its breadth and touching on
     many regulations, some of which we will talk to you about today.
         We're flexible on the agenda.  We'll just plan on going
     ahead and proceeding, Mr. Chairman, and if you want to make a change,
     just --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Let's see what -- go ahead.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Okay.  Let's go ahead.  Mark?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Thanks, Scott.  There are six parts to the
     presentation today.  The first couple I'm going to cover, talking about
     what was talked about in SECY-98-300 and what the Commission told us to
     do in the SRM.  I will talk a little bit about the organization of the
     whole activities.
         After that, we're going to talk about the plans for option
     two.  Tim will cover that.  We'll come back then to some initial ideas
     and plans for option there that I will talk about.  And last, but not
     least, we've got some technical process and policy issues and some
     schedule, and Tim King will talk about those.
         There were three key elements to SECY-98-300.  We started in
     the document by describing what we saw as the intended outcome of
     modifications to Part 50; also talked about three options for
     accomplishing that outcome; and then we raised four policy issues that
     went with those.  I'm going to come back and talk about each of these in
     a little more detail.
         Now, as laid out in 98-300, the intended outcome of a
     modification to Part 50 was to have a Part 50 or some new version which
     accomplishes the following at the end.  One, it would do, as Part 50
     does today, to provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection of
     the public health and safety.
         Second, it would --
         DR. POWERS:  When you say that this new Part 50, for want of
     a better term for it, would do as Part 50 does today, to provide
     reasonable assurance of adequate protection of the public health and
     safety, do you mean exactly that way, in a very rather nebulous
     definition of what reasonable assurance is?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Not necessarily.
         DR. POWERS:  You would be looking for something that is
     crisp, comprehensible, explicit.
         MR. KING:  We're not at the point of recommending a
     definition of adequate protection.  We're farming that out.
         DR. POWERS:  It was more that you would have a definition
     and giving me the definition.  So your intention is to actually define
     what adequate protection means.
         MR. KING:  At this point, we haven't made that decision.
         DR. WALLIS:  Let me follow up on that.  Will the public
     health and safety be better or worse as a result of what you've done?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  In both cases, we expect that it will be,
     as the words say, that we will have reasonable assurance that it is
     protected.
         DR. WALLIS:  That's not good enough.  Unless you have a
     metric or something to compare it, you have no idea if the new one is
     any better than the old one, and reasonable assurance doesn't mean
     anything to me.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Let me try.  I don't know that we're going to
     --
         DR. WALLIS:  If you're going to be quantitative about risk,
     you've got to be quantitative about number one, as well.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  We're embarking on a rulemaking plan in
     process here, as we would with any rulemaking, and going into it, we
     don't have an answer to your question with respect to making things
     better or worse.
         We'll get into the context of the discussion when we talk
     about the option in terms of a risk-informed scope, but we're going to
     have to have an answer to your question as we proceed into the process
     here.
         DR. WALLIS:  Unless you have answers which are quantitative,
     you are just invoking words.
         MR. KING:  We're going to hit this when we get to the policy
     issues.  One of the policy issues is do we take the current risk profile
     and make small changes around it so that each plant, which has a
     different risk profile, is just adjusting around where it currently is,
     or do we take some more absolute approach and try and come up, for
     example, with a Part 50 that brings everybody down to a level of safety
     of the safety goals.
         We haven't decided one way or the other at this point.  I
     think the Commission ultimately has to make that decision.  It's one of
     the issues we're going to talk about as we get into the presentation.
         DR. SEALE:  Is the intent, though, to have a quantitative
     metric, if you will, on the revised definition of adequate protection of
     the public health and safety?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  That is not -- it's not clear at all that
     that would be the outcome of this.
         DR. SEALE:  My point being that to come up with a
     quantitative measure of what the present words mean now really doesn't
     necessarily help you one way or the other.  You could very easily say
     I'm just going to pass that by and go for a quantitative version of what
     it will mean in the future.
         And while that may not be a this versus that comparison, as
     Dr. Wallis has urged, at least it gets us on a quantitative basis.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  This is Gary Holahan.  Let me go back a little
     bit here.  What we're talking about is risk-informing Part 50, not risk
     basing Part 50.  We've talked for a long time with this committee and a
     lot of other people in coming to a consensus on how to use not only
     quantitative risk assessment, but to bring other valuable safety
     concepts, like defense-in-depth and safety margins, which are sometimes
     quantitative, but frequently qualitative, into the decision-making
     process.
         And I don't think that we want to be or that we are on the
     course to converting all of our safety decisions into numerical
     criteria.
         DR. WALLIS:  I think you owe it to the public to tell them
     how safe they are and not say we are risk-informed; therefore, whatever
     we do is adequate protection.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  That's fair, that's fair.
         MR. KING:  We're taking the approach that whatever we do
     defines adequate protection.  The current regulations provide some level
     of safety above adequate protection.  That's been the agency's position
     for a long time.
         I would expect the risk-informed set would do the same
     thing; do we have to define adequate protection to quantify that?  It's
     not clear to me we do.
         And you're asking questions that we don't have answers to
     because what we're talking about today is work in progress.  This is a
     status report.  This is kicking around some ideas, some options and so
     forth.  We're not here to present a final proposal.
         DR. WALLIS:  I guess what you're hearing, though, is that
     there are several members on this side of the table who would like you
     to be more quantitative and measurable about these broad statements. 
     Then we have something more definite to get hold of.
         Work in progress doesn't mean too much -- to put it a
     different way, work in progress is more meaningful if you put it in a
     context of metrics.  You have something to go by, some telling what's
     been achieved and what you're aiming at, rather than some philosophical
     statement, some definite goal which we can then check and see if you've
     met it or not.
         I think we ought to move on, but I think you're seeing the
     way that -- you're going to get these questions again and again.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I must say, though, earlier on, somebody
     said that we're not sure whether we're going to be -- this new 10 CFR
     Part 50 will be better or worse than the existing one.  And do you
     really want to say that?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  There was a question to me, which maybe I
     misunderstood the question, but it was will people be more or less safe
     with the new Part 50.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And the answer was that they may be less?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  No.  They're not going to be less safe, but
     they may not be more safe either.  They may be just as safe as they are
     today.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The word "worse" through me off.  I hope
     we're improving the process here.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  We're improving the processes.  There are
     things that we need to fix in Part 50.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  We are improving the process.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  But we're not -- the goal of this is not
     to, from the beginning, improve safety.  That's not one of the goals.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I agree.
         DR. WALLIS:  No, but unless you have a measure of safety,
     you don't know whether you've improved it or not.  You cannot just make
     reassuring statements.
         DR. BONACA:  This is almost starting from scratch.  In
     reality, what you are doing, you are, first of all, currently stating
     that you provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection to the
     public.  That's something that I think you can -- or has been proposed
     in the statement.
         You are also then making changes to Part 50 within the
     constraints of, in part, some concepts which are already in Reg Guide
     1.14.  So you have a controlled process to modify that.
         In that context, do you need to remake that statement or can
     you rephrase that statement in a way that it would more describe the
     process you're going through, the one of modifying the current process
     within certain controls so that you maintain reasonable assurance.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Well, one has to be a little realistic, I
     think, and if you look, for example, at the in-service -- no -- the GQA
     regulatory guide that was published last year, I think most people would
     agree that that's an improvement over what we had before, but I don't
     think anybody can really put any numbers to the result, because you are
     just classifying components in a different way.
         You are dealing with an issue that nobody can quantify the
     impact of QA requirements on failure rates and so on.  So there is some
     element of truth to the argument that you can be improving the process
     without necessarily quantifying the adequate protection levels and so
     on.
         And I think with the ISI, although there you can have a
     little more quantitative insights, again, there was universal agreement
     that this is an improvement over what we had before.
         So I guess that was Gary's point that we're risk-informing
     the process without necessarily --
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I think it's fair to say what we're doing is
     analogous to what was done in 1.174.  When you use that reg guide, it
     was just for license amendments as opposed to some other things we're
     talking about here, but we're making the same conclusion.
         The purpose of 1.174, which was quantitative and
     qualitative, was to make judgments about providing reasonable assurance
     of adequate protection of public health and safety.
         That was done in some combined way of numerical analysis,
     plus checking that defense-in-depth wasn't eroded and that there was
     good engineering and safety margins, and it was that combination of
     things that we said was providing this reasonable assurance.
         DR. WALLIS:  I think you have a problem, though, because
     there is a significant body of opinion that believes that they're being
     provided unreasonable assurance, we're making them unreasonably
     regulated, way beyond the needs of public health and safety.
         If you're ever going to back off in response to those
     people, you're going to have to have some justification for it.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I don't have any problem with that, but that
     is the same issue that we dealt with in 1.174.  I think you can deal
     with that issue, how safe is safe enough and where are you comfortable
     going, in a combination of numerical analysis and philosophical and
     qualitative issues.
         DR. BONACA:  Just to complete my thought process from
     before.  Isn't it true you are trying to maintain reasonable assurance
     of adequate protection?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. BONACA:  You are not really starting from scratch.  To
     the degree to which you can utilize the concept, I think you will be
     with all the difficulties you have in providing from scratch every time
     reasonable assurance of adequate protection, which is almost like saying
     you start from scratch.  You don't.  You don't.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I agree with that, but once we decide to say
     we're going to change, there will always be the question of have you
     changed enough or have you changed too much.  So you're going to have to
     have some test to say where you stop is an appropriate point.
         DR. KRESS:  Let me wade in a little bit on the
     quantification issue.  You're not -- when you put together new rules and
     regulations, you're not going to be able to quantify the effect on, say,
     risk, which I won't equate to safety, until you can identify the plant
     changes and the operational changes that result from that rule.
         You're not going to be able to do it ahead of time.  You're
     not going to be able to say this is going to result in a safer plant by
     this much or a less safe plant than this much until you can determine
     what the outcome of the rule is in the plant design.
         So basically you can't do what some of the people are asking
     you to do right now, and that's to say whether or not it's going to be
     safe or not.
         I think you can do something like Mario Bonaca said and say,
     well, by the process we've outlined, we know we're not going to deviate
     so far from our regulations that we already have that we have defined as
     adequate protection, that we're not going to deviate so far, that we're
     going to do it in such a way that we have reasonable assurance we don't
     throw you over some line of risk that's unacceptable.
         So I think you do have to define some measure of what that
     line is, you know, and throw it over, and that may be the way you
     quantify it.  And that may be the same numbers that are in 1.174, for
     example.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It seems to me you shouldn't put the first
     sentence there, because everything else refers to the changes and the
     first one presumably is being accomplished now with the current 10 CFR
     50.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  That's a good comment.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So you really don't need that there.  It's
     not that the change will lead you to a 10 CFR 50 that provides
     reasonable assurance.  That is already accomplished right now.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  We're providing an alternative.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  An alternative, yes.  But it seems to me
     you can very easily start with include requirements and so on, and maybe
     say something about the relative change regarding reasonable or adequate
     protection or say nothing.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Something makes me suspect that Dr. Wallis
     will raise the same question, whether we --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Now that you put it there, yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  I think you do have, because when you get down
     to maintenance of sufficient safety margins, you have to have some
     criterion; now, what is sufficient?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I don't have any problem with that.  All I'm
     saying is that when we get to that point, we ought not to expect that to
     be a health effects calculation or a core damage frequency.  It's going
     to be a combination of concepts.  There are valued safety concepts which
     are not necessarily numerical risk calculations.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Let's go.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  The second point is that the new or the
     revised Part 50 would include requirements on specific attributes of
     design and operations commensurate with their safety significance.  We
     would want to write it so that the -- it reflects, if you will, the
     plant-specific nature of some of the safety-significance of the design
     and operational attributes.
         We want a clear and coherent set of requirements, provides a
     regulatory basis for all of our activities.  It's performance-based to
     the extent that we can do that and it's practical to implement.
         The challenges, I think, or where we would most want to
     change from the present Part 50 is in a couple of these really right
     now.  One is that today the requirements are not necessarily
     commensurate with their safety significance.  We know there are
     requirements in Part 50, as somebody was kind of alluding to before,
     overdo it, if you will; that there is conservatism there that we don't
     need today, with our understanding today.
         DR. POWERS:  When you say that, I looked at several of these
     regulations and one of them seems just way out of line with respect to
     the others.  How did you reach that conclusion?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  You see assumptions built into the
     analysis, for example, that we could have a much more realistic estimate
     of today, with a much smaller uncertainty, if you will.  So the safety
     margin that's built in there is large compared to what we think the
     uncertainty is today.
         DR. POWERS:  I guess what I'm looking at is do you do you do
     this out of a context of the plant during operations or the threats due
     to fire or external events or shutdown operations?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  It has to reflect all of those things.
         DR. POWERS:  It has to, but does your assessment, the ones
     out of line with the other, reflect all of those things?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  I haven't done the assessment yet.  We're
     going to come back to what we would -- how we would do the assessment,
     but I think it does have to reflect all of those considerations.
         DR. POWERS:  Okay.  Good.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Now, the three lines there that are
     indented, consistency with defense-in-depth and so on, all this flows
     from the safety goal policy statement, correct?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  No.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  No.  No.  They flow from 1.174.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Which flows from there.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Which flows, in part, from the safety goal
     policy statement.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  The 1.174, in fact, derives from the PRA
     policy statement, which is a place where these different thoughts were
     pulled together.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But even in the safety goal policy
     statement, there are references to defense-in-depth and that the PRA
     should supplement it and all that stuff, or is that policy statement?
         MR. KING:  It's in the safety goal policy.  It seems to get
     more refined as the PRA policy was developed, 1.174 was developed.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  As you know, defense-in-depth if something
     that is being discussed now in various quarters.  Do you think that the
     Commission might change the policy there at some point in the near
     future, so that would change your approach?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Change the policy with respect to
     defense-in-depth?
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Regarding defense-in-depth and risk
     assessment.  See, today, the way I understand it, the risk assessment
     really is not a principle.  I mean, defense-in-depth is a principle.  So
     the PRA supports the defense-in-depth.
         Now, what if they come out tomorrow and they say it's the
     other way around, would you change anything here or do you think that
     this is flexible enough to accommodate?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  I think this is probably flexible enough
     and a lot of the information that would be used to make that decision to
     change or not is probably going to come out of programs like this, as
     well as work that's going on to relook at the safety goal policy
     statement and that sort of thing.
         These may be the stalking horses, if you will, to, if you
     will, drive that type of change.  I just don't anticipate the Commission
     changing it independent of what we're doing in these types of projects.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.  Let's go on.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  There are two key points here.  The present
     Part 50, where we have troubles with it is, again, the requirements are
     not today commensurate with their safety significance, maybe on either
     side.  Either there are too many requirements relative to the safety
     they provide or too few.
         The other part is the present Part 50 is not consistent. 
     It's not coherent, in part, due to the issue we talked about earlier on
     reasonable assurance; in part, because of consistencies across the
     regulations.
         They were developed over 30-some years, so there are
     inconsistencies.  That caused problems with the way Part 50 is today. 
     That's part of what we're trying to change.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I'd just like to remind you that this slide is
     a summary of the paper which the committee wrote a letter on supporting
     six months ago.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Eight or nine months ago or something.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  That's a historical fact.
         DR. WALLIS:  We're just checking that you understand what
     you mean by those words.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  We mean the same thing you thought we meant
     when you agreed with us.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  In the paper that the committee wrote a
     letter on eight or nine months ago, there were three options for making
     the changes to Part 50.
         One was to continue with the existing rulemakings that were
     underway at the time on the maintenance rule and 50.59, on reporting
     requirements, that sort of thing, and, in a sense, stop there and make
     no other changes.
         The second option was to proceed to make changes to the
     scope definitions used in certain parts of Part 50, under what we call
     the special treatment, what we defined in the paper as special treatment
     rules; for example, equipment qualification, QA requirements in the
     maintenance rule.
         The third option was to make changes to specific regulatory
     requirements.  This could be adding requirements, deleting requirements,
     or modifying them to look at a more realistic analysis method, to change
     the acceptance criteria, that sort of thing.  So we went forward with
     these three options.
         We also went forward with a set of four policy issues. 
     First was should the conformance with this new Part 50 or modified Part
     50 be mandatory on all licensees or should it be voluntary.  Within
     that, if it was voluntary, should licensees be allowed to select which
     parts of it they want to conform with and which ones they don't.
         The second policy issue was the potential for issuing
     exemptions to pilot studies, to pilot plants, to help us understand
     better how we should be risk-informing Part 50.  Third was modification
     of the scope of the maintenance rule.  The maintenance rule, when
     originally promulgated, had a fairly -- purposely had a fairly broad
     scope identified in it.
         Now, what we would be doing is reducing that scope.  We
     wanted that Commission decision to do that.
         Fourth is a somewhat separate issue of clarification of
     staff authorization.  On it, we proposed to develop guidance of when the
     staff can use risk information in the event that a licensee does not use
     it and the definition of what's an acceptable risk under those
     circumstances.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I'm a bit confused by this.  Let's say we
     have a situation where conformance with the modified Part 50 is
     voluntary.  Then the staff has the authority to use risk information in
     its arguments.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  What happened to the voluntary part?  I
     don't understand that.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  The last option, the last policy issue
     deals with the staff use of it when the licensee chooses not to use it.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So then you are coming back and saying,
     no, you will use it.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  We will use it, but what we're trying to do
     in this fourth point is define how we can use it and what the acceptance
     criteria are, if you will, for making the decision that even if the
     licensee doesn't use it, here is our decision to use it.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So let's say you have a situation that
     falls under one of the regulatory guides we already have and the
     licensee chooses not to use 1.178.  Then you are allowed to use risk
     information and you will define a process for using that risk
     information in decision-making, which will be different from what is in
     that regulatory guide.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  It could be, but not necessarily.  It could
     be.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But if it is the same, then essentially
     you are telling the industry, sorry, but this is not voluntary anymore. 
     Aren't you saying that?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Remember, what we're saying is there may be
     special circumstances under which the licensee is proposing to do
     something new and unusual that hasn't been looked at before and we'll
     have to find a way to address the risk implications of those things.
         That's when these issues tend to show up.  It's not when
     they want to use or stay with their current licensing basis.  It's not
     when they want to use standard technical specifications.  It's not when
     they want to use any existing reg guide.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I understand that, but isn't this a way of
     essentially making conformance with a modified Part 50 mandatory?  In
     fact, it's worse, because now it's not mandatory.  It's at the
     discretion of the staff.  Sometimes it's mandatory, sometimes it's not,
     depending on what the staff decides.
         DR. KRESS:  I don't think so.  If a licensee opts not to use
     the modified Part 50, then the NRC says okay.  I mean, there's no --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I know, but four will give them a license
     --
         DR. KRESS:  They're not doing anything, though.  When the
     licensee says I'm going to stick with what I've got, the NRC is going to
     say okay.
         MR. BARTON:  I don't think so.  I think the staff is still
     going to come back and ask risk type questions.
         DR. KRESS:  If the plant is not going to conform to the new
     Part 50?
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  No, no, no.  I think there are two
     different issues now.  Tom is saying what if a licensee does not ask for
     any action.
         DR. KRESS:  No.  He's just going to stick with his --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.  He is allowed to do that.  If he
     asks for something --
         DR. KRESS:  If he asks for something, then --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Then four essentially allows the staff to
     make conformance with a modified Part 50 mandatory, but at the
     discretion of the staff.
         MR. BARTON:  That's what it sounds like.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  No.  You're assuming that the same standard
     would be used in item four as in other places, and that's not clear yet. 
     We haven't developed how that process would work and what that standard
     would be.  We're running then on the parallel track.  We'll be back to
     the committee in September, I think, with a recommendation on that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The concern that I have is that, okay, you
     say even though you don't use risk information, Mr. Licensee, I
     naturally want to know what your change in the CDF is.  Then they come
     back and say, okay, this is a change.  Then you say, well, naturally,
     now I want to compare it with the guidelines from 1.174.  You would be
     crazy not to compare it.
         So what's left?  I mean, the qualitative part you do anyway. 
     So you're essentially applying 1.174, which was voluntary to begin with.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  But you're getting a little bit ahead, as
     Gary was saying, that the criteria that would be used in this case is
     something that was for a committee meeting here in September or
     something.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Another thing I'm saying is that I was
     always uncomfortable with this voluntary versus mandatory conformance. 
     I just don't think it can be voluntary.  Why don't we recognize that and
     then instead of looking for ways for the staff to have authority to use
     risk information, to find ways for the licensees to not use some of this
     information, these regulatory guides in certain instances?
         For example, when they don't ask for anything, you don't go
     back and say, now, we want to make sure that you comply with the
     risk-informed Part 50.  But if they ask for some change, they request a
     change, I just don't see how it can be voluntary.
         I mean, even if you decide not to ask the question, we will
     ask it.  It's a CDF change.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I don't think you'll ask it in every case.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  No.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Just as the staff is not going to ask it in
     every case.  We're going to look for cases in which this might be
     significant.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But that's where the 1.174 comes into the
     picture.
         DR. POWERS:  Let me understand, Gary.  Suppose -- I can
     imagine a couple of situations.  Suppose a licensee asks for, say, a
     power upgrade or something like that; that staff looked at it and said,
     well, yes, true, it seems to comply with all the regulations, but I
     know, from a risk assessment, that this is a very risky thing.
         And they say, so, I'm going to, because I've gotten,
     presumably gotten leave from the Commission to do so, I'm going to
     reject this based on my understanding of the risk, and you write that
     all down and you say I reject that based on my understanding of risk,
     even though the licensee submitted nothing on risk.
         That's one limit of where you're saying you might take
     action.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. POWERS:  The other limit I can imagine is you've got
     this same application before you, you have the same background
     knowledge, and you write to the licensee and request for additional
     information.  You say, well, how did the CDF change?  The licensee comes
     back and says I haven't got a clue, because I've never done a risk
     assessment on this, don't intend to, and I remind you that I comply with
     all the other regulations, and so you should go ahead and approve it.
         That's another limit.  And don't you have to say, well, fair
     enough, we know where he stands?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  yes.
         DR. POWERS:  And you make your decision based on whatever
     you make your decision on having done that.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.  That's exactly right.
         DR. POWERS:  And you have not compelled him to do and have
     no license to compel him to do a risk assessment if he chooses not to.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  That's right.  But it may affect the outcome
     of the decision.
         DR. POWERS:  It may affect the outcome of the decision,
     because you have leave to utilize whatever risk information you have.
         MR. BARTON:  I think the "may" is a "shall" or a "will"
     affect.
         DR. POWERS:  I think they would be delinquent if they had
     risk understanding of an issue and did not use that and I think they
     would be delinquent if they had risk information that counter-indicated
     a licensee's application and they didn't ask him about it.
         If the licensee says I don't believe these PRAs, I think
     they're a bunch of nonsense, I'm not going to use them for my license
     application, and he might well respond to a staff indication that there
     is a risk problem by indicating why he thinks it is not a problem and
     still not take any response to doing a PRA, I mean, I don't see the
     compelling nature of this.
         The encouragement I definitely see in it, but that's part of
     policy.  The compelling nature I don't see, at least in those two
     examples I picked.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  The point of the issue and going to the
     Commission was we need to write down, so everybody understands, the
     rules of that part of the game, if you will, and they are not written
     down today.
         DR. POWERS:  Okay.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Under what circumstances you can ask the
     question and by what circumstances or what guidelines we can accept or
     reject, based on our own risk analysis.
         DR. POWERS:  What you're asking is a constraint on your
     behavior.  That's a very unusual thing to do.  You want to be careful
     about that.  They might give you an answer.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The first policy issue then refers to the
     new Part 50, the risk-informed Part 50.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The licensee hasn't done anything.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Number four refers to requests for change.
         MR. REED:  Relaxations, yes.
         DR. KRESS:  For anything.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Is that what it is?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.  Because if we see risk issues that
     are not related to a request, it's always the backfit rule, if we have
     new research, information or whatever, and you can always use that
     process.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It would really help a lot, I think, if
     you made that clear.  Clarify the clarification.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Okay.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The fourth one really refers to requests.
         DR. KRESS:  Not necessarily.  I think in our previous letter
     on this issue, we said that we didn't think you had any choice but to
     make it voluntary, because you'd have a horrendous problem with the
     backfit rule otherwise.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes, with respect to the first issue.
         DR. KRESS:  With respect to the first issue.  The fourth
     issue, I think, is just broad-based.  When do you have authority to use
     risk-informed processes across the board?  I don't think it's limited to
     applications.
         DR. BONACA:  What you're saying is that it cuts both ways.
         MR. REED:  Yes, it cuts both ways.
         DR. BONACA:  The information is being used and it cuts both
     ways and it has to be that way.
         MR. REED:  And it's also applicable to the current Part 60.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But the truth of the matter is that if
     somebody says I don't want to have anything to do with the new process,
     please leave me alone, I have met all the requirements, I want to
     continue under the old system, the truth is that that licensee cannot do
     that anymore.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Well, if that licensee says I want to continue
     in the old system, but I want to change my licensing basis, it opens up
     the legitimate questions about what are the risk implications of these
     changes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So it is really related to requests.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Related to requests.
         DR. KRESS:  I guess it is, yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Then I understand.
         DR. BONACA:  What if it changes the licensing basis, not
     based on PRA insights, but purely some tech spec change or whatever?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. BONACA:  Would you still --
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Well, what we're talking about is probably in
     order to do item four, the first thing you need to do is to develop some
     screening process to say, you know, what kind of power up rates are very
     unlikely to have any risk implications, and then you do those through
     the normal process.
         But if you get ten or 20 percent power up rates, you may be
     introducing risk considerations even though you meet all the other
     regulations.
         So what we're looking for is probably, first, a screening
     criteria.  Maybe it's only one out of 100 cases in which this
     application by a licensee needs some special risk assessment.  All we're
     saying is that we want to clarify the rules of the game so that we know
     and the licensees understand, if they send us something that has risk
     implications, how are we going to deal with it.
         DR. BONACA:  I have just one more question.  Assuming that
     you go voluntary versus mandatory conformance, could you have a
     situation where somebody says I'm not going to go to modify Part 50;
     however, I have a risk-informed application for a specific element, and
     so I'm going to submit that one.
         So I'm still living under the old Part 50, but I want to
     have this.  Can he do that?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. BONACA:  But if he can do that, then you're going to
     have --
         MR. HOLAHAN:  But I might ask you an item four question if
     it's an unusual or --
         DR. BONACA:  I understand that.  But I'm saying that you're
     going to have infinite variations of mixes of all Part 50 -- you have a
     series of cocktails that's pretty amazing, and I'm trying to understand
     what the future is going to be.
         I mean, how are you going to track that?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  It's going to be complicated.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  It's going to be complex.
         DR. BONACA:  Complex, to say the least.  And what about the
     burden for the staff, for example, to try to control an environment
     where you have this mix, because you have that kind of situation.  I'm
     sure a lot of people will say I want to stay with the old Part 50, but I
     like the removal of hydrogen control.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I guess we can raise those questions when
     item four will be discussed in the future.  You don't have a proposal
     now.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  No, we don't have a proposal on it.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So we will come back to this.
         DR. BONACA:  Although, if you want to talk about it that
     way, it really blows my mind now, and then I always thought it would be
     voluntary, but in this kind of backdrop, I begin to have a lot of
     questions, in my mind.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  At the higher intellectual level, it's
     really crazy to say I choose to use this piece of information and I
     choose to ignore it.
         DR. BONACA:  Absolutely.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The information is there.  I mean, it's
     there.  I mean, it affects your state of knowledge and when you make
     your decision, right?  How can you ignore something when it's there?
         DR. WALLIS:  You can do that in the regulatory world.
         DR. KRESS:  Well, the information may not be necessarily
     there.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Oh, it is there.  It's a matter of
     calculating.
         DR. KRESS:  Well, if you think the IPE is the information.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  If the staff can calculate it, then the
     licensee can calculate it.  So, in my mind, it's there.
         DR. KRESS:  My point is the staff probably cannot calculate
     it.  They don't have the plant specific PRA and if it's some change, the
     licensee may not have calculated it.  So the information may not be
     there.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I think it is there.  They feel it's
     important enough to quantify it.  It's there in the sense that somebody
     can sit down and maybe in six months can produce it.  But it's there.  I
     mean, we're not asking them to quantify something that we don't know how
     to do.  You can always calculate, in the serious cases, the impact from
     CDF.  It may take you a while, but you can do it.
         DR. KRESS:  Who can?
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The licensee.
         DR. KRESS:  The licensee may not want -- may say he's not
     going to, though.  That's my point.  It may not be there.  Then they
     can't do it because they don't have the plant specific.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Physically it may not be there, but what
     I'm saying is that conceptually, it is there, and we choose not to use
     it, which is really a crazy approach.  Okay.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  At any rate, the next two slides cover what
     the Commission told us in response to our proposals.  Basically, in a
     nutshell, they said go ahead with options one, two and three, in
     parallel.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Right.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Option one, go ahead and continue the
     current rulemakings.  Option two, develop a rulemaking plan for
     addressing the special treatment rules and changing the scope and
     definitions; you can use pilot plants, with exemptions, as part of that;
     go ahead and change the scope -- as part of this, change the scope of
     50.65 to conform with the rest of the rules.  And to proceed with option
     three, which is to study the potential for other regulatory changes to
     specific regulations.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That confuses me, though.  These are not
     options really, are they?  If you can approve all of them, they're not
     options.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  They're options.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I got confused.  I thought I didn't
     understand the vote.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  No.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  We approve three, but we also approve one
     and three.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  I was confused, too.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.  I mean, the word "option."  Okay.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Options was, in retrospect, not a good
     choice of words.
         In terms of the policy issues, the Commission said we should
     assume that this will be a voluntary modification to Part 50.  We cannot
     mandate that all licensees change to the new Part 50.  They talked about
     the issue of selective implementation, where, to make it even more
     complicated, if somebody chooses to go to the new Part 50, can they
     choose to institute part of the new Part 50 and not all of the new Part
     50.
         We talked about that with the Commission and the Commission
     said it's premature to make that decision, basically; so come back when
     you've done some more work and talk to us about that, if you will.
         DR. KRESS:  They weren't all agreed on item one, either. 
     Did they?  Item one was also not unanimous.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  I don't remember.
         DR. KRESS:  Voluntary versus mandatory.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  I don't remember.  But the Commission
     decision was voluntary.
         DR. KRESS:  The Commission decision was to go to voluntary.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.  The Commission approved the use of
     industry pilot studies, with exemptions.  They approved a modification
     of the scope of the --
         DR. WALLIS:  The pilot studies, have they said anything
     about how you measure what you learn from these studies?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  I'm sorry.  I only caught part of what you
     said.
         DR. WALLIS:  Pilot study is an experiment and you have to be
     measuring something with this experiment.  You don't just sort of
     describe it like a journalist when you've done it.  You actually look
     for some meaningful results.  This gets back to the quantification issue
     and what is it you're going to measure.
         DR. POWERS:  To quote the EDO, the pilot studies aren't to
     test concepts, they're only to find out if things work.
         DR. WALLIS:  How do you know if it works?
         DR. POWERS:  You have to ask the EDO that question, and I
     think you will get a chance to.
     DR. BONACA:  But the evaluations always conclude whether you have a risk
     neutral or risk reduction, is it?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.  But what you don't get absent pilots
     is some indication of whether, as Dr. Powers was saying, that you get
     some real benefit from this modification; is it worth changing a
     particular rule if it doesn't really improve the clarity or the process
     side from our side and it doesn't save the licensee any money.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  But you also get some information on the
     practicality of what's been proposed and on at least some potential
     unintended consequences that may show up.  So you understand better the
     long-term implications of putting some of the things you're testing into
     the regulations.
         I don't think it's really going to be a test of are you --
     how much is safety changed.  It's probably much more a test of the
     practicality of implementing the concepts that are being put out.
         DR. POWERS:  I think that the concern that has arisen before
     in the committee is certainly the quantification Professor Wallis brings
     up, but also the interpretation of the results.  When you do an
     experiment, you clearly perturb the system and these pilots tend to get
     the focus of the best and the brightest, and a group of motivated people
     anxious to make things work well.
         And you hear about an overly optimistic result coming out of
     them that does not translate well.  You worry about the best and the
     brightest applying something that the rest of us are not skilled at
     doing.
         And I think what we telegraph to you and we have, in a
     previous letter telegraphed to you, is especially in these areas where
     you're talking about fairly radical things, that, yes, layout some
     specific objectives, quantify it, do the best you can, so that you can
     answer the questions that Professor Wallis brings up -- have you really
     done what you think you've done -- and talk to us some about the
     uncertainties and perhaps over-optimistic interpretations you might have
     on these pilots.
         I think there was a time when pilots seemed to me to be
     relatively unusual events and now there doesn't seem to be a single
     thing that comes up that doesn't have the word pilots attached to it.
         I think we have to be a little more circumspect in how we
     apply them and not just say, well, we've had a pilot and assume that
     that somehow anoints this with the aura of respectability, when, in
     fact, you may not have shown anything at all in the pilot.
         Is that a fair summation of all the concerns about pilots,
     Graham?
         DR. WALLIS:  Well, I feel you're rather like the professor
     trying to explain the words in a different way to see if the student
     extends.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Maybe we need to --
         DR. POWERS:  One of the reasons I have no interest in
     becoming a professor, I guess.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Maybe we need a little project that you
     guys should undertake one of these days on the design of pilot projects
     and have some broad guidelines and maybe a framework, which does not
     have to be quantitative in every single respect.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  A pilots pilot.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Then you have a pilot to test the pilot
     designs, but that certainly would help a lot, because I agree with Dana
     that this is now something that we are doing routinely and we don't seem
     to think as if there is no evidence, I'm sure you guys are thinking
     about it, that there is no evidence that there is some systematic
     thinking about the pilots beforehand.
         I'm sure there is -- as I said, you think about it, I mean,
     definitely, and you worry about certain things, but the appearance is
     that this is done in an ad hoc way and it wouldn't be much of a deal to
     really put it down on paper and refine it to the point that it will
     satisfy the people who are more skeptical.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I think that's a very legitimate issue and
     maybe we can do something on that.  But part of, a very substantial part
     of the pilot activity is, in fact, the people who are volunteering and
     as a practical matter, most of the pilot activities, at least that we've
     been involved with and discussed with this committee, are things that
     licensees volunteer to do and we have, sort of in a reactive sense,
     accepted them as being reasonable ways of testing pieces of the
     questions we are interested in.
         And clearly they are not always structured to do exactly
     what we might want to test.  They're not always complete.  They don't
     test every aspect, because almost always, by their nature, these pilot
     activities are voluntary.  You can't always control that well the people
     who are volunteering.  So you accept what they offer and you get what
     best information you can out of it.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.  But surely, I mean, if the licensee
     sees a document that's well reasoned that says this is what we would
     like to learn from this pilot, I mean, the technical part, nobody can
     object, unless they feel that some parts of it may be will impose
     additional excessive burden.
         But this is something you can negotiate with them.
         DR. BONACA:  And it seems to me that 1.174 gives you a lot
     of control on the approval and evaluation, doesn't it?
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Not for the pilots, though.
         DR. KRESS:  Not the pilots.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Not the pilots.  The pilots are completely
     voluntary.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Well, I think the principals and the thought
     process could be applied to many of these issues.
         MR. BONACA:  The way I see some of this, the self-evaluation
     provided the support for those that seemed to spring out directly from
     1.174.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  You are still on page eight, Mark.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes, sir.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  You are really going very slowly.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  I apologize to the committee for that.
         DR. KRESS:  It's because he talks so slow.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  If I could finish the last point on page
     eight, which is the Commission approved us to go ahead and develop the
     guidance saying go back in September.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  This is new, right?  We haven't seen this
     before.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes, that's correct.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That's correct.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Correct, you have not seen this before. 
     This lays out the organization given that the Commission had approved
     option two and option three to run, in effect, parallel.  What you've
     got is, in effect, two parallel organizations working the problem.
         On the left-hand side, you have the option two part of it. 
     NRR has the lead for that.  On the right, you have the option three
     part, which Research has the lead on.  Over top of each of those, you
     have two levels of management review here on the picture.
         The risk-informed licensing panel is a collection of
     division directors who are going to try to work a lot of the issues that
     come up and coordinate what happens between option two and option three.
         DR. WALLIS:  I don't understand why one option is assigned
     to NRR and one to Research.  I don't see what this has to do with
     Research.  It seems to me you're trying to get regulation.  I'm not sure
     what this has to do with Research.  It seems to be all NRR's job.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  A lot of the work that will end up being
     done as part of -- it's anticipated that a lot of the work that will
     done in option three is the revisiting on the new development of a
     technical basis for specific rule changes.  That development of a
     technical basis is the responsibility or Research.
         DR. WALLIS:  I could see Research providing support.
         MR. KING:  When we get into the details, it will become a
     little more obvious.
         DR. WALLIS:  There is a Research task?
         MR. KING:  Research has the lead for this.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Did you mean Research with the small "r" or
     Research with a capital "R?"
         DR. WALLIS:  I'm trying to determine the difference between
     the Research branch of the agency and the Regulatory branch.
         MR. KING:  Remember, option three is a study.  Research has
     the lead to do the study.  What comes out of that study will likely be
     recommendations for rulemaking.  At that point, there will be a handoff
     to NRR.
         DR. WALLIS:  So it's a more preliminary state.
         MR. KING:  Right.
         DR. WALLIS:  You're not going to actually make changes.
         MR. KING:  No.  Research won't make the changes.  There will
     be a handoff to NRR to do that.  You'll see that later in the viewgraph.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  It's analogous to the generic issue program in
     which Research studies an issue and makes a recommendation about whether
     there should be a new requirement.  That's passed off to NRR to do the
     regulatory application.
         DR. WALLIS:  But I think there is a difference.  Sort of the
     administrative part of the agency has got a job to do, they do it,
     they're asked to risk-inform something and they do it.  Research is
     going to be more at the level, I hope, of asking questions about do we
     do this at all, what do we really mean by it, how do we measure things,
     all that kind of stuff.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes, that's right.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  It's making recommendations and that sort
     of thing.  The implementation of the rule changes will be NRR's
     responsibility.
         Over top of the two groups, again, is the risk-informed
     licensing panel, first.  Above that, for more of a policy type of
     overview, is the PRA steering committee, that's basically composed of
     office directors.
         DR. WALLIS:  What is this RIP-50?  Rest in peace 50?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I haven't noticed any rest and I don't expect
     any peace.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Implicit on this, by the way, is the fact
     that policy issues will come up inevitably.  We're sure policy issues
     will come up.  There's a set of those policy issues that will have to go
     to the Commission.  So implicit on top of all of this is the Commission
     and the EDO for their decision-making.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So who is the lead?  Is there a single
     person responsible for option two?
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Let me answer that.  DRIP, right there,
     regulatory improvement program, we're the outfit that has led and had
     the lead for 50.59, FSAR.  This is being handled the same way.  We are
     the lead.  The project management function in NRR to coordinate with all
     the technical divisions and the different people here to complete this
     activity.
         If the Director of NRR has a question on this activity, he's
     going to come to Dave Matthews or Scott Newberry in DRIP and we'll have
     to get the answer for him.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And how about Research?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  The parallel is --
         MR. KING:  Is me.  If Thadani has a question, he comes to
     me.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Let me -- constructing this diagram was no
     small task, since we got the SRM, and various options were considered. 
     An option was proposed somewhere for a dedicated task force, things like
     that, to create a separate organization, and we thought about that and
     decided -- we recommended to the steering committee that we not do that.
         We felt that we should retain the responsibilities in the
     organization and truly struggled with the risk-informing of the
     regulations that are in the line.  It's just in the longer term, you
     would not get the payoff and the buy-in and the understanding of
     changing the fundamental regulations and the regulations that are in
     Part 50.
         So that's why we've constructed an organization like this. 
     There will be engineering staff, there will be inspection staff, there
     will be project management staff all involved, depending on what
     regulation is being changed and their staff being -- I'll use the word
     dedicated, a team effort here.    Tim is one of the key project
     managers on that team.
         DR. WALLIS:  It looks pretty -- I can't evaluate it at all
     because I don't see a sort of breakdown of the tasks and I don't see why
     you need to do it this way.  So I can just say it looks pretty. 
     Presumably someone looked at the job and figured out what needs to be
     done.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  We'll get into some of the tasks in the next
     viewgraph.
         DR. WALLIS:  In making up this diagram.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Move on.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  I'll turn it over to Tim now to talk about
     the details on option two.
         MR. REED:  Okay.  This is our plans right now for option
     two.  What you can see in the overview, we have planned four tasks that
     we want to build into rulemaking plan, that we're on the hook to give to
     the Commission at the end of October this year.
         I'd preface this first by saying these are just our thoughts
     of this core team that you just saw in that diagram, the slide before,
     and I guarantee you that the next time you see it, it will be different,
     because the more you think about the stuff, the more you find it's a lot
     more complex and things change quite a bit.
         In the overview -- and I have a slide on each of these tasks
     that will follow.  The way we see it breaking out right now is the first
     task, of course, will determine which rules in Part 50 are these
     so-called special treatment rules that we're going to revise the scope
     for, risk inform the scope of these rules.
         So first of all, we've got to determine what's in option
     two.
         The second task, we broke out one rule which is difficult, a
     burdensome rule, and it's complex because the scope is intertwined with
     the body of the regulation itself, and we have to look at this one by
     itself, and that's 10 CFR 50.59.  So we broke that out as a separate
     task.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.  We haven't looked at that in a long
     time.
         MR. REED:  I understand quite a few people have lined up and
     talked to the committee on that.  It's one that's near and dear to my
     heart, from my past life.  But anyway.
         Task three then would be really -- it should just say that's
     the rulemaking approach.  What that is is how are we going to go about
     actually doing this in Part 50.  As you'll see, we're going to use some
     new terminology and our plan is to try to phase it in rule by rule.
         DR. WALLIS:  Excuse me.  You're making decisions here. 
     You're determining which rule is to be considered, the best approach. 
     Presumably, you're going to have some sort of a measure.  You're going
     to look at the rules and have some measure of whether they're worth
     doing.
         MR. REED:  Yes.  Actually, when we get to this slide --
         DR. WALLIS:  And what's the payoff for doing it.  The best
     approach has got to be measured on some scale, so we're getting back to
     quantitative measures.
         MR. REED:  It will certainly be -- no.  I was going to say
     qualitative, but we'll do what we can here.
         Let me just give this overview here, and then you can take
     shots at me on each of the tasks I have a slide on.
         DR. WALLIS:  I'm just saying it would be nice to see, when
     you do this, some very clear criteria about how we determine the best.
         MR. REED:  Actually, we have to develop criteria to
     determine what's in scope and what's out of scope.  We've recognized
     that, first of all, because we have to defend, if something is not in
     scope, why is it not in scope.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I remember that we had the presentation or
     an earlier effort to risk-inform 50.59, headed by Mary Drouin, and there
     was a list of criteria there, as I recall; not quantitative, but there
     was a list.
         So presumably you guys will do the same thing or better,
     right?
         MR. REED:  Absolutely.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Do better.
         MR. REED:  Always try to do better.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.
         MR. REED:  Then the last task there is we attempt to try to
     identify the requirements that would govern the method for identifying
     this risk-informed scope of structures, systems and components, and I'll
     talk a little bit more about that later.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I'm a bit confused here, Tim.  It seems to
     me that task four really should be task one or two.  Is it not?
         MR. REED:  Actually, wait till I get there, but basically
     what were thinking of, jumping ahead a little bit, is maybe having, for
     example, a new definition in Part 50.2, called something, and then that
     would be supported by, say, an appendix to Part 50 that would go about
     describing a box or a set of requirements that would tell you how to
     actually go about risk-informing or looking at the systems, structures
     and components and deciding what is the real scope.
         It would talk about things like PRA quality, whatever that
     is, how much defense-in-depth you have to have.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Are these tasks to be pursued in parallel?
         MR. REED:  Yes.  This is all going on at the same time. 
     Basically, we have developed this enough to make a rule-making plan,
     that's what we're thinking now, and, of course, that's the immediate
     product rulemaking plan, but we're thinking about it for the whole
     effort, too, of course.
         Anyway, let me go to a slide on each task now.  Task one,
     then, determine which of these so-called special treatment rules will be
     in the option two effort.  We think we need -- I think it's obvious we
     need to develop some sort of criteria that defines what's in and what's
     out.  We do not have a criteria at this time.
         What we have here, and you will see that I'm kind of jumping
     ahead a little bit in terms of you're going to get some of the answers
     to task three here real quick.  But what we've done is we've kind of --
     if it looks like it should be in, it should be in, kind of thing.  This
     is really the thoughts of the team at this point over the kinds of rules
     that we think are in scope for option two right now, and they're on this
     slide and the next slide, and I've grouped them into two bunches.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Now you have new terminology.  You haven't
     talked about phases yet.
         MR. REED:  Right.  That's actually -- I'm combining two
     things on the one slide here, unfortunately.  I should probably not have
     done that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Can you tell us real quickly what is a
     special treatment rule?  What is that?
         MR. REED:  The special treatment rule, if you read from
     SECY-98-300, and most people in this room are probably more familiar
     with that SECY than I am, but it talked about treatment of quality, of
     reference quality, and then it went to a parenthetical that said that
     special treatment refers to things like quality assurance, 50.59, tech
     specs, ASME code, and it listed those regulations as regulations that
     apply special treatment to SSCs that are --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So they're safety-related.
         MR. REED:  Yes.  Safety-related equipment, if you will. 
     Okay.
         DR. POWERS:  All the things that don't fit well with PRA.
         MR. REED:  It's a lot more stuff than that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  What?
         DR. POWERS:  All the things that don't fit well with PRA.
         MR. REED:  Basically, things that get on the Q list at a
     plant get a lot of care and feeding, some which may not be really
     required or should not be required, I should say.  It is required today.
         So these are the kinds of things we see.  For example, one
     that's not there, obviously, the first one, new definition, we think
     we're, jumping ahead again, we're already assuming we're already
     assuming, we've already concluded that we think we need new terminology. 
     We don't even want to go basically try to redefine something that's been
     used for the last 30 years, it's got a lot of baggage with it, that
     creates a lot of confusion.  We think it's a lot better approach, and I
     believe industry does, too, to use actually new terminology and try to
     stay away from creating that kind of confusion.
         So we'll probably have a new definition.  It will probably
     be in 50.2, I believe the section is.  We also see these regulations
     right now listed there as special treatment regulations that we would
     try to do perhaps in a first phase and, again, task three will talk
     about why we believe it's -- we think it should be phased in, instead of
     doing all the regulations at once.
         DR. WALLIS:  Excuse me.  Are you going to do all these as
     first phase?
         MR. REED:  That's the concept at this point, yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  Have you done one?
         MR. REED:  I mean, this could change very quickly.
         DR. WALLIS:  I would be tempted to say do one and do it well
     and show it worked.
         MR. REED:  Yes.  Like the maintenance rule or something like
     that.  Yes.  These are very preliminary thoughts.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  These phases you're talking about are
     related to the NEI phases.  I saw somewhere four phases.  Or are these
     different phases?
         MR. REED:  I don't believe -- yes, these are different
     phases.  These are phases that -- I didn't make any effort to try to
     correlate them with NEI.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I'm really perplexed why you didn't ask
     yourselves the question that Dr. Wallis just asked.
         MR. REED:  Actually, we did.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It looks like a big job here.
         MR. REED:  It's a huge job and we will do things in the
     first phase, the rules that are simple to do, things that perhaps the
     pilots are doing, we've got some experience from doing, things that fit
     together well, things that give a lot of bang for the buck, perhaps, and
     things that are more complex and more difficult and less experience we
     would save to phase two, if you will, or whatever phase.
         After we get some experience, we get better at doing this. 
     And we may have more than two phases and we may do one regulation at
     first.  Again, this is just our thoughts.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Are these five items you have there
     candidates for evaluation or all of them you -- the intent is that you
     would do all of them?
         MR. REED:  I think candidates is a better word, actually. 
     We're not that sure about --
         MR. HOLAHAN:  There is a difficulty -- it would be easier to
     pick one and do it, but there is a difficulty in doing that.  What we
     would like is to have a definition and approach that ultimately apply to
     all of these and maybe some others.  And when you do them one at a time,
     what you might find out is that the third one doesn't fit very well with
     the definition and the approach that you established the first time.
         So in order to make these things work well together, and
     these are all rules that have to work well together in an integrated
     sense for plant operation, I think you have to -- when you first begin
     to look at definitions and using risk information for equipment
     qualification, you have to worry about the implications of that on other
     rules.
         So we might like to do them one at a time, but there are
     potential problems with doing that.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Let me just -- maybe Gary said this, but he
     can correct me.  But I think the South Texas folks will be talking to
     you eventually and their experience with the graded QA program, where
     we, through considerable effort on their part and the staff's, we
     approved their proposal.  Yet they did not get the benefit from that
     approval that they had hoped nor we had hoped.
         And I think that lesson is a large driver here in that we
     need to look in an integrated way, which is what Gary was saying,
     because if you just modify one regulation which affects that specific
     component, it could be a series of other multiple regulations that cause
     the utility to invest in carrying of that component.
         So we're going to have to look at the whole suite to see
     what makes sense here.  My feeling right now, it's going to be a rather
     broad set of regulations that we're going to have to tackle here or it's
     not going to be worth doing.
         DR. WALLIS:  While someone should look at the broad picture,
     I agree, it seems that each one of these is a fairly big job.  So that
     while some group is looking at it broadly, drafting out everything,
     saying how do you make consistency is going to be a major effort on
     getting something finished.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Wouldn't you take -- speaking of South
     Texas, the GQA, the QA and start with that and see what other
     regulations are affecting it and then go there and go there and
     eventually develop a network of rules that are in harmony?
         MR. REED:  Actually, that's a lot of the thought here.  When
     I put those tasks out there, I could have put pilot plant beside every
     one of them, because we're going to be looking at what South Texas is
     doing and also what the industry is doing, of course, and trying to
     understand the interrelations between these different regulations.
         South Texas, as just was mentioned, ran into problems in
     graded quality assurance, the ASME code and 50.55(a) and other
     regulations tied them up and basically stopped them from fully
     implementing it.  That's the kind of thing we need to understand, so we
     can get those regulations out of the way and that our people aren't
     tripping over them trying to do it.
         That's what I mean by kind of grouping them together, those
     that fit together, so you can implement a coherent piece that can
     actually do it.  That's the idea conceptually, and I agree, each
     regulation is very difficult and very complex.  We've already reached
     that conclusion.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  You know, I keep coming back to this.  One of
     the things we've discovered is, the problem is each of these regulations
     was developed at a different time, by people trying to do the right
     thing, and developing a different scope, different approaches, which, in
     some ways, conflicted with each other, and I think in order to avoid
     that, we need to keep our thinking on all of these regulations as
     integrated as possible.
         So from my point of view, what I would like to see is to
     attempt to do as many as possible which are closely related.  And when
     we find that there are some regulations which are perhaps not so closely
     related, perhaps most of Part 100 doesn't need to be risk-informed at
     the same time, maybe just a little piece of it.
         We should avoid dealing with related issues at separate
     times and what we're trying to do is lay out these regulations that seem
     to be closely related and do them together.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I think that perhaps what you need is
     instead of showing these little arrows there, to show some logical
     connection.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Relationships.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Relationships.  That might be a more
     convincing argument.  But you are looking really at defining something
     that will replace safety-related classification, right?  Is that what
     you're doing?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  You may have risk-significant,
     risk-insignificant, and something in between, or four classes.
         Now, is it reasonable -- maybe it's not such a big task then
     if you only do that.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  If we find that the same concept applies to
     all these regulations, then it's not so difficult.  We want to test that
     relatively early.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I understand.  So why wouldn't you use
     them Fussel, Vesley and RAW to do it for all of these?  What is it
     that's stopping that?  Is that what you're going to test?
         If I use these and I did it, would I have any problems with
     50.49 or 55(a)?  That's really the question you are asking.  You already
     know of one way of doing this.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  You are just not sure whether that way is
     applicable to all of these and that it will not create new problems.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I don't want to endorse Fussel, Vesley and RAW
     as a way of doing that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I'm not endorsing it either, but that's a
     way that has been used.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Well, that, no.  What has been used is that in
     combination with expert panels and all that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It's never risk-based.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Right.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I know, I know.  But, I mean, that
     approach.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So you have a starting point.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.  Certainly.  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So it's not as big a job as I thought it
     was.
         MR. REED:  Actually, I think technically, it's a lot more
     straightforward than doing the legal changing to Part 50 and all of the
     ramifications therein.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I forgot that this is only task one. 
     You're not risk-informing each one of these.  You're just looking at the
     scope.
         MR. REED:  The scope.  That's the idea.  The second slide,
     the next slide then is some more regulations that, for the time being,
     we see as more difficult and see these coming in later.  Again, this
     could move around.  As we get smarter and figure out which regulations
     are really intertied with each other.
         And, of course, pointing out a separate task is 50.59, and I
     have a slide on that coming up.
         And the reason we pointed this one out is this one was
     pointed out in the SECY.  This is a very difficult one to risk-inform,
     as I'm sure this committee is well aware, and the reason being is the
     scope of 50.59, what's described in the FSAR is throughout 50.59, as
     well as words like previously analyzed accidents.
         So once you try to start changing the scope of systems,
     structures and components to which 50.59 applies, it starts unwinding
     and pretty soon you end up changing the whole regulation.
         So if we can do it in a clever manner, some clever simple
     scope change and get some benefit, we'd like to do that, of course.  So
     that's a potential option.
         But if it starts unwinding and we have to basically do the
     whole rule, then you've got the second option there, I see simple
     options to deal with this regulation.
         DR. WALLIS:  It would be the same intent, the same purpose.
         MR. REED:  Yes, but basically you find you have to do the
     whole --
         DR. WALLIS:  But the fact that you may have to redo the
     whole thing --
         MR. REED:  That's right.
         DR. WALLIS:  -- may be a good thing.
         MR. REED:  Perhaps.
         DR. WALLIS:  It would be consistent.
         MR. REED:  It could be a good thing.
         DR. WALLIS:  It wouldn't give you terms which were undefined
     and could be argued about forever and that sort of thing.
         MR. REED:  Not to get into 50.59 too much, but I --
         DR. WALLIS:  I think it would be beautiful to streamline
     50.59.
         MR. REED:  50.59 is so intertwined with the actual Chapter
     15 accident analysis and the words mean things for that and only that,
     that I don't know how you do this, to be honest with you, because risk,
     almost by definition, goes beyond Chapter 15, multiple failures and the
     like.
         So we'll have to look at it and see what we can do.
         But the last option then is another more expedient approach,
     if you will, and this I think is line with what South Texas is actually
     asking for right now, and we'll see if that turns out to be the case.
         But if you, for example, look in terms of the final product,
     you have a Q list at a plant.  Basically, what they're doing is going to
     take some things off the Q list and make it a smarter Q list, is what I
     like to view it as.  You'll know exactly why something is on the Q list
     and if it doesn't need to be on there, it will come off.
         To do that, though, a lot of the stuff is described in the
     FSAR and you're going to need pieces of paper for all this stuff, 50.59,
     and you're going to have to kill a lot of trees, it could be, because
     the Q lists are gigantic.
         So you may want a one-time exemption to 50.59 to allow these
     things to be reclassified and taken off the Q list.  So it's that kind
     of thing.  It's more of an exemption type approach, not what we're
     thinking in terms of actually changing the scope.
         So I put it on there as an option.  I think it could be very
     well what happens in the short term.
         MR. SIEBER:  It's my understanding that the PRA standard
     that ASME is working on is not approved yet.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  That's correct.
         MR. SIEBER:  And so the quality of licensee PRAs probably
     goes from 100 down to some lower level.
         MR. MARKLEY:  Sixty-five.
         MR. SIEBER:  And you're going to rely on licensing PRAs for
     all this reclassification about the standard.  Wouldn't developing and
     approving the standard be the very first step in the process?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  When we get to the issues, that's PRA
     quality is one of the issues we have to face early on in this whole
     process, yes.
         MR. SIEBER:  It would seem to me that that should be the
     first one.
         MR. REED:  Actually, we have it as one of our tasks here
     you'll see coming up.  We mention it.  We know it's a big -- it's an
     issue.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So this is not risk-informing 50.59.
         MR. REED:  This is trying to risk-inform the scope of 50.59.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So when are we going to risk-inform 50.59? 
     Is that another project?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Remember the way the options are set up. 
     Option two is supposed to become more -- make the regulations more
     risk-informed by changing scope, not technical content, yet, and option
     three should identify those regulations where we would change technical
     content.
         I think what you heard Tim say is that we're finding it
     difficult to talk about 50.59 in terms of just changing its scope.  In
     fact, in order to risk-inform 50.59, you may be forced to change not
     just the scope of what it applies to, but to how it does its tasks.
         We may find that we're forced to pull 50.59 as maybe the
     earliest example of risk-informing the content of the requirement, as
     well as the scope.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So that would be from option three, then.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  In effect, it would be instantaneous transfer
     from three to two.  We start out seeing how much can be done in the
     scope context and whether that makes sense or not.
         MR. REED:  Task three, this slide could be much simpler just
     saying it's the rulemaking approaches and really not determine, I guess,
     more develop the approach for revising the terminology of Part 50 and
     how to basically insert that into Part 50 and get it done; how do you
     actually do this.
         We've already evolved a little bit, I think, in our thinking
     and have already determined that we need terminology, whatever that is. 
     We throw some words out, like essential equipment or safety-significant
     equipment or SSCs or risk-significant components, or whatever words you
     want to come up with.
         We've got to be careful, of course, because there's a lot of
     words out there that mean stuff and meant stuff for the last 30 years. 
     So this is a lot more difficult than it appears, believe it or not, just
     to come up with the terminology.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That's why we're just aliatory, by the
     way, in a different context.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes, that was very helpful.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That was the reason, but everything else
     was used in different courses, random, uncertain, I mean, you find those
     words everywhere.  So maybe you need a good Greek and Latin dictionary.
         MR. REED:  Then, also, as you've already seen earlier on,
     we're going to evaluate the option of doing everything at once, more
     phasing in, and you can obviously tell that we're thinking in terms of
     phasing in by regulations and perhaps groups of regulations that make
     sense to do together.
         But we'll look at trying to do the whole thing at once and
     if we can come up with a solid definition and a good methodology and it
     makes sense and it can work, perhaps there's a way to do this all at
     once.  But practically, I don't see how we can do it and I'm not sure
     how anybody at a facility could do it either.  I mean, it would be
     changing the whole rule overnight.
         So I see that this phased-in approach seems to be the most
     practical and I'm not sure exactly how that will work out at this point.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Perhaps we should be identifying an alpha list
     of most important components.
         MR. REED:  Okay.  Then the final task, as we see it --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The alpha factor model, though, conflict.
         MR. REED:  We'll have to get the ACRS' advice on the new
     terminology, we can see that right now.
         But the last task then is developing some requirements that
     would control the method or describe the method for identifying
     risk-informed systems, structures and components and some ideas would be
     this could be in a reg guide or could be in the appendix to Part 50. 
     Right now, those are the kind of ideas, and it would include elements
     like PRA quality, for example, risk considerations, scope, quality,
     detail in the PRA.  You can go on and on about PRAs.  You guys are very
     familiar with that, of course.
         What part of the old deterministic defense-in-depth part do
     we need?  This goes back, unfortunately, to some of the conversations
     that started this meeting off, and this is risk-informing.  So we need
     to try to blend two things together here and that's what that refers to.
         Of course, we'll address all modes of operation.  We've
     learned in the last ten years, I guess, that shutdowns, for example, can
     be pretty important risks.  As a matter of fact, just as an aside here,
     when you look at all modes of operation, you may find things coming onto
     the Q list that weren't there before.  There are shutdown modes, as a
     matter of fact, when you apply this methodology.
         Since this is a new thing, obviously, we would like feedback
     or some sort of strategy that measures how well it's working and if it's
     gone out of kilter, to -- if you move too many things out of the, quote,
     special treatment category, to have some sort of mechanism to bring it
     back in if you see the overall risk of the plant increasing from
     whatever measurement you might have.
         And if you do this right, I think, at least conceptually, is
     my thought, is if you build this into Part 50, perhaps you could do this
     without licensees coming in for prior NRC review and approval, and that
     goes along the lines that we don't want to burden industry and we don't
     want to burden the staff with all these guys coming in here.
         So if we could do this right, perhaps it will work as far as
     the most efficient way to implement.  So that's what this says, the last
     bullet there.
         That's what we see right now as our tasks for option two and
     we're going to try to build these into a rulemaking plan.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Before we proceed to option three, though,
     I think we should think about the schedule again.  The industry was
     supposed to go first and there are some visitors from out of town.  Do
     you have any planes to catch later?  So there is no reason for us to
     interrupt this and give the industry time to talk, or shall we continue
     with the staff's presentation until they're done.  Is that okay?
         MR. ROSEN:  That's all right with us.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  All right.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  We'll turn back now to option three and
     talk a little bit about what we have in mind for performing that. 
     Basically, there's two phases that we see in the option three work. 
     First is the study phase that we talked about in SECY-98-300.  The
     second phase then is the development of the technical basis and actual
     rule changes.
         In the first phase, we've got four tasks identified. 
     Basically, one, we want to look at -- first, identify some alternative
     approaches for making Part 50 more risk-informed.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Can we stop calling this -- saying for
     including quantitative risk information in Part 50?  Because we seem to
     be using this more risk-informed expression all the time.  What we're
     really talking about is using quantitative risk information, is it not?
         MR. KING:  Yes, but it's not clear that it's going to be in
     Part 50, that those numbers will show up in Part 50.  They may show up
     on a reg guide somewhere.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes, but you're still using quantitative
     risk information.
         MR. KING:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Those PRAs.
         MR. KING:  Yes.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  You're using the information.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Instead of saying more risk-informed, it's
     already sent the message.
         DR. WALLIS:  It's one of those opaque expressions.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Or just using PRA.
         DR. WALLIS:  That makes sense.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That would be simpler even, because you're
     right, you're not always using the numbers.  You may be using other
     concepts from PRA, not necessarily the numbers.  I think so far, in
     several letters, there is quantitative risk information.  So including
     quantitative risk information.
         DR. WALLIS:  The risk-informed means using quantitative risk
     information and to make better decisions.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  No, because it's already risk-informed. 
     But when they designed it the first time around, they did have some
     qualitative notion of risk.
         DR. WALLIS:  But making it more risk-informed, the measure
     of success is how risk-informed it is.  So you have some sort of meter
     of how risk-informed is it.  I don't quite understand what the measure
     of success here is.
         The more PRA we have in the regulations, the better, is that
     what it means?  Making them more risk-informed?  When you come back and
     say it's more risk-informed, what would be the your measure of it being
     more risk-informed?  This is the key thing, isn't it?  This is what
     you're trying to do.  Or is it to try to see what PRA can teach you,
     which might make Part 50 better on some other basis?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Again, going back to what we talked about
     originally, what we're trying to do is get to the issue of making
     requirements within Part 50 commensurate with their safety significance.
         DR. WALLIS:  The assumption seems to be if you put more PRA
     into Part 50, that you will be somehow better.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  So let's inject it everywhere with PRA and be
     best.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  That's a good point.
         DR. WALLIS:  Is there some other ulterior measure of success
     other than how much PRA is in there?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes, I think there is.  Sure.  The clarity and
     efficiency of the regulations, how easy they are to implement, how well
     they are understood, how inspectable they are.
         I mean, there are other qualities to the regulations.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Not all of these are improved by the use
     of PRA.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Not all of these are improved.  But we have to
     find some optimum level.
         DR. WALLIS:  So you have a measure of clarity and you say
     here's use of PRA, here's not use of PRA, with the PRA, it's clearer,
     therefore, it's a better criterion then.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I think that's part of it.  Sure.
         DR. WALLIS:  I think eventually you're going to have to say
     we've got some measure of public safety, got some measure of
     cost-benefit, and on the cost-benefit basis, this is better than that.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  I think there is general agreement with those
     comments.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  If you go back to the original PRA policy
     statement in 1995, it identified three objectives and we currently deal
     with another objective of making better safety decisions, and I think
     that, in my mind, that's comparable to using more risk information in
     the decisions, being more effective and efficient in the use of staff
     time and resources, reducing unnecessary burden on the licensees.
         In our current regulatory scheme, we're also concerned about
     maintaining or improving public confidence by having a more transparent
     and understandable regulatory process.
         So if you lay those things out, not every one of those is
     increased by putting the maximum amount of risk information in every
     regulation.
         DR. WALLIS:  So somewhere along the line, then, you're going
     to make judgments about how much --
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  -- how much PRA is enough.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes, of course, we are.  Yes.  Now, I think
     what you're pushing us --
         DR. WALLIS:  How safe is safe enough, how risk informed is
     risk informed enough.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes, of course.  Wherever we stop we will
     think is the right place.  You're going to help us find it.  That's the
     way it works.
         DR. WALLIS:  I think you have to have a rationale that is
     deciding what you're getting.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I don't know what how much PRA is enough
     means, by the way.  I mean, you don't mean that some pieces of the PRA
     you will not use.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  You might not model things at a level of
     detail that are wasteful of your efforts.  People do truncations now. 
     Why?  Because it's not really improving your understanding commensurate
     with what it costs.
         DR. WALLIS:  Eventually, it's risk-benefit.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  And you make some decisions about being
     conservative in some of the criteria because it's not worth doing all
     the analysis to find out the answer much better.
         I think the only thing that, Dr. Wallis, you're pushing us
     to that we really weren't doing is to think more carefully and maybe
     quantitatively about each of these measures, which subjectively we're
     saying we're trying to achieve these three or four objectives.  In some
     decision theory, you could put numerical values on those.  You could say
     which of our options go how far in each of those.
         You could weight each of those in how important they are and
     score them in a way.  We haven't been doing that in that level.  But the
     thinking is in there.
         DR. WALLIS:  I guess what I'm groping for is more the public
     perception and the public value that -- it's not clear to a member of
     the public that making regulations more risk-informed is good, bad or
     indifferent.  It's just that somewhere along the line, there has got to
     be something in terms of measures which mean something to the public, it
     seems to me.
         You have a bit of sales task.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I understand.  That's very difficult to do. 
     The best explanation I can give them is that we are working towards
     making sure that the staff and the licensees are focusing attention on
     those things that the risk analysis says is most important.  A step in
     the right direction.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And, again, there isn't such a thing as
     the public.  I mean, there are many publics, and a good part of the
     publics think that using quantitative risk information improves the
     process.
         So anyway, the message is very clear that perhaps we have to
     do a little better job telling people why this is better.  And I think
     the criteria that you mentioned, Gary, are pretty good, clarity,
     consistency and so on.  It's just that you haven't really thought about
     them enough to put them on a viewgraph.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  We do in a few pages, but we'll come back
     in a few pages to that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.  That's why I say you haven't yet.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes, correct.  We haven't yet.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  We didn't think enough to put them on the
     first viewgraph.  We put them on the 20th viewgraph.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.  So what's the message here on
     three?  Did we exhaust three -- I mean 16?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  On 16, we're starting to say we've first
     got a set of alternatives and we want to evaluate those alternatives
     using some criteria that we'll get to.  Then we want to look and we're
     kind of presuming that that's going to come into some sort of a
     screening of Part 50 for the regulations where it's most important to
     change.  Those regulations that are most important to change, we're
     going to revise them, we're going to make recommendations to the
     Commission in the first phase as to what regulations to go after.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So far, you have not really touched the
     content of any of the regulations.  So it's all scope.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Option two deals with the scope.  Three is
     where we would get into the content.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But even in three, phase one.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Phase one is the study phase, which the
     Commission approved, to say, now, which ones should we -- in which
     regulation should we change the content and how should we change that
     content.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  You're going to talk about the timeframes
     somewhere?  Is this is in six months, a year?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  We'll come back.  Yes, we're coming back.
         DR. POWERS:  Let me, before you turn pages and so we don't
     go through the viewgraphs too quickly, understand the objectives here
     and particularly 1.2 and 1.3.
         Is the objective to be complete or to get an adequate
     sample?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  An adequate sample of regulations or --
         DR. POWERS:  Requirements for revision.  Candidate
     requirements for revision.  Are you trying to get them all or are you
     trying to get some large number or some tractable number?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Could we come back to that in a couple --
     we touch on that in a few slides down.
         DR. POWERS:  I'm willing to come back and I bet you can even
     anticipate what question I'm going to ask.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Okay.  Tom will be covering that slide, so
     it's okay.
         DR. POWERS:  I bet he can anticipate what question I ask.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Can I just throw something in?  From the point
     of view of the office that has to turn these into regulations and
     realize that it's not easy to do that, one of the most important things
     is that there is a screening process and a study approach that
     identifies -- that prioritizes them, not just that collects the 50 that
     you might want to do, because that could take you 100 years.
         The point is what -- we need to identify the ones that are
     most important to do, that have the most value in terms of what criteria
     to set up, so that we can do those early.  So I'm not so concerned about
     the completeness of capturing them as I am of capturing the most
     important ones.
         DR. POWERS:  I am not sure that that's an easier task to
     identify the most important ones versus being complete.
         MR. KING:  I think there has to be a cutoff here.  You could
     go through and probably make a lot of modifications that aren't going to
     make much difference in terms of reducing unnecessary burden or
     clarifying and simplifying things, and we have to find some way to not
     put those on the list, to really pick out the ones that are going to
     represent some substantial change, either improving safety, reducing
     burden, or clearing up something that is not very clear now.
         We've got some proposed thoughts as to what we would look at
     to do that, but trying to capture everything, no.  Trying to figure out
     which of the ones we want to do first, yes, and then it will be some
     judgment as to where we stop.
         DR. WALLIS:  You seem to be assuming that making things more
     risk-informed will necessarily be better, but it will reduce burden. 
     Won't there be some instances where making it more risk-informed makes
     some things worse?  It may require more effort from the licensee, for
     instance.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  So you're going to have to trade off these
     various things.  It's not as if everything is rosy.  You have to have
     some way of weighing them against each other.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  Yes.  Slide 17, you asked about a schedule. 
     At this point, the date, the only date that's set is that we owe a plan
     for phase one, a plan for the study by October to the Commission.  In
     that plan is where we will lay out the dates that go beyond that of when
     we would finish the study and that sort of thing, and at this point, I
     don't have a sense of whether we're talking about six months, a year or
     what in terms to get there.
         So the first phase one product is the plan for the phase
     one, which is October.  Then the second part of phase one will be
     recommendations to the Commission on what regulations to change and how
     to go about it.
         The Commission has told us if we come along and see a
     regulation right now that needs changing, go ahead and tell us, don't
     wait for the end of the study.  Something with 50.59 may be an example
     of something like that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But if this is scheduled TBD, do you have
     some idea when that will --
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  I don't have a good sense for it now.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Six months, eight months?  It's on the
     order of months?
         MR. KING:  I think we're probably talking one to two years. 
     That's my rough guess.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Two years?
         MR. KING:  By the time we go through and take a look at the
     technical requirements, try and assess do they have excessive margin, do
     they have things in there that aren't very risk-significant, and then
     come back and look at what's the value impact of making a change,
     package that all up and send it to the Commission, by the time you do
     that, march through Part 50 and get all of that done, that's not a
     simple task.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The Commission has told you, as Mark just
     reminded us, that if you identify something that can be done, come to us
     immediately.
         MR. KING:  Yes.  And I think what Mark is saying is if one
     of these is a really big ticket item, it's going to really reduce a lot
     of unnecessary burden or is really going to plug a hole in the
     regulations.  Yes, that kind of thing, we're not going to wait till the
     end and put that in the final paper.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But according to this, then, you will not
     work on the contents of any of these rules before two years.  That's
     stretching it out.
         MR. KING:  No.  I think according to this, we send the paper
     up October this year that says this is how we're going to approach it,
     this is the schedule, then we start doing that.  Some big ticket items
     may pop out of that that we would send to NRR at that time and so they
     could get started on rulemaking.
         But by the time we're all done and completed our study, I
     don't think we're talking months.  I think we're probably talking one to
     two years.
         We're going to be coming back to you periodically, giving
     you an update on what's coming out of the study.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  What is stopping you from deciding now to
     risk-inform 50.59?  I don't understand.  What's stopping you?  I mean,
     it's certainly something that's of great interest.  Already there have
     been some attempts.  Why do you have to go through this to decide that
     it's a big ticket item?
         MR. KING:  As Mark said, that may be one that we say we've
     done enough to know we want to risk-inform this and hand the ball off to
     NRR and they'll start a rulemaking.  We may decide that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Why don't you do it now?  I mean, is it
     just because you don't have time to think about it?
         MR. KING:  No.  NRR has been thinking about it.  You saw a
     couple of viewgraphs they talked about it.
         DR. POWERS:  The impression was already on their list.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  No.
         DR. POWERS:  Wasn't it on your list as a special task?
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  No, that's the scope.
         MR. REED:  Just the scope.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Not the content.
         MR. REED:  Our discussions are turning into content real
     quickly and like I said, if we come up with a clever way to address the
     scope, we certainly will.  But these guys in -- maybe you can think
     about it, already a lot of thought has gone into it, but I haven't heard
     anybody come up with anything I've read so far that says there's a good
     way to fix this and make it risk-informed.
         And let's say you do it, oh, no, no, no, just let me finish
     here a second -- if you do it and do make it risk-informed, then the
     question is what are you going to apply it to.  You're going to apply it
     to a different suite of events in Chapter 15, obviously, right?  The
     ones that are clearly important.
         That means they have to be in the licensing basis of the
     plant.  That means that some utility would have to take those and stick
     them into their licensing basis and I'm not aware of too many licensees
     that are going to willingly do that.
         I mean, perhaps there are, but I think they'd be out of
     their minds.  I wouldn't do it if I was a licensee.
         That's why I'm saying 50.59 is a change control rule that
     works on the old way of doing things, you know, the fission product
     barriers and Chapter 15 has analyzed for the four categories of events
     and bound the criteria for each event.  You guys have heard that over
     and over again, it works well and basically it maintains that structure,
     those assumptions.
         Now, you go to risk-informed, it doesn't really work.  It's
     apples and oranges.  It doesn't work on Chapter 15.  It works on --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I guess some of us are not convinced that
     it works.  A lot of people are saying it works.  It used to work before
     the attorneys said that zero means zero.
         MR. REED:  I agree with you 100 percent.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Now we don't know that it works.
         MR. REED:  I think it works --
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  This is all presuming that that nuance of
     zero or minimal is taken care of.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That's a big assumption you have there.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  That's option one.  They were told, option
     one, the Commission said proceed and finish 50.59 rulemaking on that
     minimal versus zero issue.
         MR. REED:  I don't know.  Conceptually, what I'm saying is I
     think you almost need like a rule, a risk-informed change control rule
     that would work on a risk-informed set of stuff, and that just isn't
     there.
         Now, as you go to risk-informing Part 50, stuff will be
     pulled into your licensing basis.  Now it starts to get a mixture of
     stuff in there, the old stuff and the new stuff, and now it starts to
     become more important.  When you do the stuff that's risk-informed, it
     doesn't really fit into Chapter 15, how do you control changes to that.
         Then it becomes more important.  That's what my thinking is
     on it right now, but that's not a lot of thought, frankly.  But I'm all
     ears, if somebody's got a way to do it, then we'll do it.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  In the context of this discussion, Research
     staff and NRR staff both have 50.59 and option two and option three and
     what's happening is it's really being looked at together to see what we
     should be doing on 50.59.  It's a separate task right now.
         I think we're calling it a 2(b).  Isn't that what we're
     doing?
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  A two and a half or a option two and a half
     or something like that.  We recognize that 50.59 is one of those ones
     that we may have to jump on quickly, but it's not -- as Tim was saying,
     it's not a straightforward change.
         DR. POWERS:  I'm sitting here thinking, gee, Tom sure is
     optimistic to get this done in two years.  So I said since obviously
     some people think that's way too long, I was thinking about why do I
     think it's so optimistic to believe it's two years.
         I think it's something that you said.  You're going to go
     through and you're going to look at these things, the existing
     regulations, and you're going to say, gee, is this in or out or change
     or not change and all that.
         It seems to me there is another aspect, when you think about
     risk-informing the regulations, that there must surely be regulations
     that one would have created, had been from the beginning, if one were
     risk-informed, that one did not create when one was more of a
     deterministic frame of mind.
         And where does that come in into the schedule that you've
     laid out?  That seems like an extraordinarily difficult job to me to
     identify a regulation that should exist, but doesn't exist now.
         MR. KING:  It's part of the study.  For example, maybe a
     requirement on feed-and-bleed for PWRs, which is important in a number
     of PWRs, that may pop out of our assessment as something that would be
     in a risk-informed structure or would be some sort of requirement and so
     on, what should those requirements be, would they pass the backfit test.
         We need to develop enough technical basis so NRR could
     proceed confidently with a rulemaking to put that in.  That takes time.
         50.46, ECCS rule, I mean, that's probably a likely candidate
     to be risk-informed.  There's a lot of stuff in there and it has a lot
     of implications for other parts of the regulations.
         I envision, in the option three study, we'll be going in,
     we'll be looking is the design basis accident, the large break LOCA, the
     right one; if it's not the right one, what is the right one.  The
     methods that are used, they've got a number of conservatisms in them. 
     So those, to me at least, seem excessive.
         If we want to take those out or trim those down, what do we
     trim them down to?  The acceptance criteria, 2200 degrees, 17 percent
     oxidation limit, are they the right acceptance criteria in a
     risk-informed arena?  What's the -- where else does this -- would a
     change affect the regulations?  What's the value impact of this kind of
     change?
         There's a number of things to look at and they're not
     simple.  That's why I'm -- a six-month study is, to me, not in the cards
     in option three.
         DR. WALLIS:  Are you just tweaking existing regulations to
     put in more risk information or are you saying if we wrote ECCS rules
     today in light of risk information, what would they look like?  That
     would be a revolutionary change.  You don't really need to depend on the
     past.  You're going to take a fresh look at this whole problem.
         MR. KING:  I think it's more the latter.
         DR. WALLIS:  Is that what you're going to do?
         MR. KING:  It's more the latter.
         DR. WALLIS:  More the latter?
         MR. KING:  Do you keep the concept of design basis
     accidents?  I mean, that's, to me, a policy question.
         DR. WALLIS:  I would be inclined not to keep anything until
     we were driven to it by our new logic and we found, gee whiz, those guys
     were smart after all, maybe.  Don't start from their basis and tweak it.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The reason why I asked the question, Tom,
     is that I really don't want us to find ourselves a year and a half from
     now still debating which rule to risk inform.  The Commission clearly
     said that you should pursue this in an aggressive way.  So perhaps you
     should be a little bit more specific that you will have some first
     results half a year after October or something like that.  Surely you
     can evaluate one or two potential candidates over that period.
         MR. KING:  I would hope.  We're going to do an initial
     screening to say, okay, these are the ones we really want to focus on. 
     I would hope that screening could be done very quickly.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Do you plan to interact with stakeholders
     on this?
         MR. KING:  Yes, we're going to have to interact with
     stakeholders.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I propose that we take a break.  We'll
     reconvene at 3:10.
         [Recess.]
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  We are back in session.  Let us continue
     with option three discussion.  So we are on slide 17.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  We were talking before the break about the
     schedules and things and maybe we can go on.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.  I think we're done with this.
         MR. CUNNINGHAM:  One last point, I guess, on schedules and
     things.  Just for what it's worth, we were talking about rules coming,
     potential rule changes coming in advance of the completion of the phase
     one study.
         I should note that tomorrow we'll be back, some of us will
     be back to talk to you about possible changes to the PTS regulations. 
     It didn't come about as a result of all this work on risk-informing Part
     50, but you'll see a flavor of the changes that we're talking about in
     PTS regulations that have this kind of a risk-informed flavor to it. 
     We'll come back to that tomorrow.
         In a sense, it's an early model perhaps of how you would
     change some of the regulations.  But we'll talk about that tomorrow.
         Let's go to slide 18.  We talked about this earlier, that
     within phase two, there are two parts, if you will.  One is once we've
     gotten approval from the Commission to change certain recommendations,
     there is a technical analysis part and then there's a rulemaking part, a
     technical analysis or developing the technical basis for the rule
     change, we would have the lead for it in Research.  The rulemaking lead
     would be in NRR.
         So these things would be in Research for a while and then go
     back to NRR for the rule change.
         So that's probably the key point on slide 18.  So we'll
     switch then and go over to some more discussion on some of the details
     of option three, and Tom is going to pick it up.
         MR. KING:  Slide 19 is probably the one we should put up
     front for Professor Wallis, who is not here right now.  Actually, slide
     20 is the one that he would be interested in.
         Slide 19 is -- when you go into risk-informed Part 50,
     there's three basic options.  You can sort of start with a clean sheet
     of paper and rewrite the regulations, the ones that would be affected by
     risk insights, or you can go through the existing set of regulations and
     pick out those things that, based upon risk insights, look like they're
     excessive or look like there's gaps and plug the gaps and change -- make
     it more realistic in those areas, and that would include not only the
     regulations, but looking at their subsidiary reg guides, SRPs,
     definition of design basis accidents, the analysis methods, assumptions,
     acceptance criteria, the whole range of things that flow under a
     regulation to actually implement it, and none of those are off limits in
     this study.
         Or the third way, which is probably very simple in terms of
     rulemaking, and that is go and pick out those rules where we feel risk
     insights could make a difference and allow the licensees to go propose
     some alternative, like is allowed now in the regulations for IST.
         The licensee can propose an acceptable alternative, the
     words are right in the regulation, we could do that in a number of
     places.
         Of course, if we did that, we'd probably have to figure out,
     if we got a bunch of applications, how would we review them.  So we'd
     have to start thinking about reg guides and SRPs anyway to define how we
     would review and find acceptable such a submittal.
         But in terms of the actual changes to the regulations, it
     would be pretty simple.
         So in the paper that goes up in October, we will select one
     of these or recommend one of these as the favored approach that we plan
     to proceed on and hopefully the Commission will agree with it.
         How are going to review those alternatives?  Slide 20 sort
     of lays out the criteria that we would use in taking a look at those,
     but these same criteria could probably also apply across the board when
     we go in and actually make changes to Part 50, how are we going to
     decide whether the change is actually an improvement or not.  There's a
     number of things we could look at.
         Probably a lot of this stuff you'd look at qualitatively,
     although some things, like safety impact, you probably could come up
     with some quantitative judgment as to whether things have improved,
     stayed the same or gotten worse.
         And these things sort of flow out of the three major
     purposes that were stated in the objectives in the PRA policy statement. 
     We'd want to look at safety impact, we'd want to look does it reduce
     unnecessary burden, does it improve clarity and consistency, the
     resources, is it practical for NRC and the licensee to implement from a
     resource standpoint, does it take excessive time, and how would you
     inspect and how would you enforce such a regulation.
         So these are the kinds of things that we will be looking at
     as part of making any decision to go propose a change to the
     regulations.
         On to slide 21 --
         DR. WALLIS:  On the unnecessary burden impact, as you said
     before, it may turn out that you examine some of these regulations and
     there may be more burden.  It goes both ways.
         MR. KING:  You're right, you're right.
         DR. WALLIS:  Thank you.  I just wanted to confirm that.
         MR. KING:  A change will mean somebody has to do something
     different, and that has a burden with it.  That's true.
         DR. KRESS:  Can you really use these criteria to evaluate
     your first alternative very well?  It seems like a difficult thing to
     do.
         MR. KING:  Resources required, I think, would be a --
         DR. KRESS:  That would be the one that would hit you hard.
         MR. KING:  Get a high score or low score, depending on which
     way you -- what's favorable.  Time required would certainly be impacted
     by the first alternative.
         DR. KRESS:  It would be tough to do some of the other
     things, like safety impact and burden impact, until you already had the
     new version in place or some idea of what it was.
         MR. KING:  Yes.  I mean, my own personal opinion is we'll
     probably go with the second alternative here, which is to go in and look
     at the existing set of regulations, identify those that are really
     candidates for change and go fix those.
         There's probably a lot of stuff in there that's okay as is.
         DR. KRESS:  Is there a possibility of a bit of compromise
     between those two?  Like if I were going to start from a blank sheet,
     what would I want to get accomplished by a new Part 50?  Maybe that's
     not as big a deal as actually putting together a new version to make
     those accomplishments, but then use those to guide what you would do
     with the second alternative.
         MR. KING:  That's a good idea.  Use it as a template to say
     --
         DR. KRESS:  A template to say this is what I want to get
     accomplished and you would have things like how you deal with
     defense-in-depth in that and how you deal with uncertainties in the PRA
     and things like that.  You'd say we want to get a certain level --
     accomplish a certain level of risk status probably would be one of the
     things we'd want to accomplish.
         MR. KING:  Yes.  Almost what you're talking about is a
     comprehensive set of objectives and framework if we were going to
     actually do that and then say, okay, how does that overlay on the
     existing Part 50.
         DR. KRESS:  How does it overlay on the existing one.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But didn't the GAO report blame the NRC
     that we didn't have a strategy for achieving objectives that we have not
     defined in going to risk-informed regulation?  Do you think your
     approach here will satisfy maybe critics like the GAO or we need to do
     something else or we decide not to heed their advice?
         MR. KING:  Actually, the Chairman responded to GAO and said
     we are going to develop a strategy.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So the PRA implementation plan will do
     this?
         MR. KING:  The PRA implementation plan will evolve into a
     strategy document.  But I view the GAO report as at a higher level than
     how do we change 50.46.  I think they were looking at what areas of
     everything we do are we going to get in and risk inform.  The NMSS
     activities, the --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But risk-informing Part 50 --
         MR. KING:  Research reactors, I mean, decommissioning,
     whatever it may be.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But risk-informing Part 50 must be at the
     same level of that report.
         MR. KING:  I think an element of the strategy would be
     risk-informing Part 50, what do you have to do, what are the goals and
     objectives, how do you measure success.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes, but in choosing, though, to
     risk-inform individual or existing regulations, then you are not really
     doing what they want us to do.  In other words, it seems to me that if
     you -- what was it -- there was a -- you had the line here somewhere
     that you could start thinking from scratch, right?
         MR. KING:  Yes, slide 19.
         DR. SEALE:  That's the clean sheet.
         MR. KING:  Slide 19.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Entirely new alternative.  I mean, if you
     attack the problem this way, then you can claim legitimately, it seems
     to me, that you are responding to criticism of that kind, like the
     GAO's.  But if you start changing individual regulations and making them
     better, then it's questionable whether there is a clear statement of
     objectives and strategy to achieve those objectives.
         DR. SEALE:  Well, it strikes me that you've already opened
     the door and received some results of part three.  I mean, after all,
     1.174 is a document that facilitates the pilots and the pilots or
     industry or the applicant derived or proposed versions of the
     regulations.
         So in certain specific areas, you've already got that and
     what you're talking about now, I guess, will be to add to that an
     organized staff approach to other elements using the second proposed
     technique, but you're certainly not going to throw the pilot results out
     the window and start over on them, I don't think.
         MR. KING:  No.  Gary and I had several discussions with the
     GAO folks who wrote the report and I can give you my impression and Gary
     can give you his.
         But I think what they saw was they saw Reg Guide 1.174, they
     saw the specific guides for IST and so forth, and they said, gee, that's
     nice, but you're just picking and choosing certain areas; what's the
     overall picture for the agency; what other areas are we going to go
     into; how are we deciding what those areas are; how are we deciding --
     do we have the resources, do we have the training, do we have all these
     higher level things that will make sure that stuff gets done.
         I think that's where they were coming from in their report
     and the strategy evolved in the PRA implementation plan into a strategy
     document is going to come at it from that level, because the PRA
     implementation plan covers NMSS stuff.  It covers enforcement, it covers
     a lot of things beyond Part 50.
         It's not going to -- I don't think GAO is interested in how
     are we going to risk-inform 50.46.
     DR. UHRIG:  But given the resources that you have available, are you not
     somewhat restricted in trying to take the first alternative here?  That
     could be a massive job and it might be a fruitless job in that a lot of
     what you would do here would have no impact at all on industry if they
     weren't interested or they perceived no benefits of it.  That's the
     beauty of coming from the bottom.
         As Bob pointed out, they have picked the things that clearly
     to them look like it's going to have some benefit.
         MR. KING:  I agree with you.
     DR. UHRIG:  And put your resources there and as a result, one hopes that
     there is progress being made, albeit with problems along the way, I'm
     sure.
         MR. KING:  I agree.  I think --
         DR. KRESS:  Yes, but I don't think the industry would have
     these other criteria as first priority that you have.  You have this
     list of criteria and I think starting from the bottom, you might miss or
     at least lose some emphasis on some of those others.
         DR. SEALE:  You get an incomplete product and that's why the
     second element is necessary.
         MR. KING:  But recall, in the vote sheets in 98-300, there
     was one Commissioner who said start with a clean sheet of paper.  That
     was his view.
         DR. KRESS:  Yes, I remember that.
         MR. KING:  So I think we need to address that in going back
     to the Commission and say yes, we considered that and here is why we
     don't think it's --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So there are pros and cons, there is no
     question about it.
         MR. KING:  Exactly.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  If you started with a clean sheet of
     paper, then the benefit will not be apparent for a while.
         DR. WALLIS:  This move to risk-inform is a step of faith, is
     it?  I would have thought that in order to justify the direction,
     someone must have made some preliminary calculations and an assessment
     of these things and said if we did that, gee whiz, we could cut the
     burden in half and so on, first estimates indicate that we could get the
     same safety at half the cost or something.  There has got to be
     something like that.  It's not just invoking something and hope that it
     might work, is it?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  What we're doing is we're building on the
     experience from the activities already accomplished under license
     amendments and Reg Guide 1.174.  We've seen licensees reducing burden
     and, in virtually all the cases, improving safety.
         So that's an indication that areas like QA and probably
     maintenance rule and a number of these other areas are likely to drop
     out of this sort of test with very favorable results.
         DR. WALLIS:  Just a sense.  I think if industry were doing
     this, they'd have someone look quickly at it and say we've had some good
     success with 1.174, let's see if there is any payoff to extending it to
     others; go away and come back in two months and tell me whether there is
     a payoff, where we should put our effort.
         You seem to be still not there yet, knowing if there is a
     payoff or where to go.
         MR. KING:  And I think we're going to need a lot of input
     from industry in terms of certainly the unnecessary burden reduction
     piece.  They're in the best position to know what's costing them money
     and where changes could be made that don't have any impact on risk.
         DR. WALLIS:  Are they jumping up and down saying you've got
     to do it and why are you taking so long?
         MR. KING:  You're going to hear from them later today.  You
     can ask them that question.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  They will be here in a few minutes.  In
     fact, can you finish in about 15 minutes, Tom?
         MR. KING:  Sure.  Okay.  Let's go to slide 21.
         The next three slides talk about what I call potential
     policy issues. We are still formulating the policy.  That's why the word
     "potential" is there.
         These aren't necessarily limited just to option three.  Some
     of these could apply to both options two and three, the scope and the
     technical requirement part.  Ones that we've sort of put down so far in
     terms of policy issues, the first one has to do with when we risk-inform
     Part 50, what's the basic approach we're going to take in terms of do we
     just want to make adjustments around the current risk profile of a
     plant, sort of like Reg Guide 1.174 does, tells you how much you can
     move around that risk profile, or do we actually want to go in and try
     and, on a more absolute basis, put in requirements that would tend to
     bring people, all the plants to some common ground safety goals, for
     example.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Or both.
         MR. KING:  What?
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Both?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  1.174 does a little bit of both by having
     stricter criteria on higher risk plants and generous criteria on lower
     risk plants.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So you could conceivably have a
     combination here, as well.
         MR. KING:  You could.  You could.
         DR. KRESS:  Are these things you will want ACRS to comment
     on?
         MR. KING:  We're going to get to the schedule.  Not today.
         DR. KRESS:  When you get to a paper.
         MR. KING:  I'll take any verbal comments you have,
     certainly.
         DR. KRESS:  But these are policy issues we can be thinking
     about.
         MR. KING:  Yes.  But we're not asking for a letter out of
     today's meeting.  Eventually, we're going to come back with our --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But sometimes we write without being
     asked.
         MR. KING:  If you want to write one, that's up to you.  We
     are going to propose to come back to you in September and October and,
     at that point, get a letter, where these things will be more refined and
     settled.
         Second policy issue is should we retain the design basis or
     should we risk-inform, that would even give more flexibility for
     licensees to come in and propose something for their plant.  Retaining
     design basis doesn't mean retaining today's design basis.  It might be
     some more risk-informed design basis, a better -- a more realistic
     design basis accident, for example, more realistic assumptions.
         Burden reduction revisions, should there be some test that
     the burden reduction you're getting is really worth it, you're not
     giving up a lot of safety.  I call it a reverse backfit test; do you
     apply the same rules that you would apply on a forward backfit.
         The fourth one is sort of a carryover from something that
     was said earlier, the selective implementation issue.  Remember, the
     Commission said it was premature to decide that one.  So at some point,
     that's going to have to go back to the Commission as a policy issue.
         And then the adequate protection question that came up on
     our second or third viewgraph, we go in and make all of these changes,
     how do we know we still have adequate protection.  If we're making
     changes that aren't all that great, it's probably not that big a
     question.
         DR. WALLIS:  I would hope that you would, as a result of
     risk information, you would be assured, better assured about what you
     meant by adequate protection.  It's another question of preserving
     something.  It's knowing that you really have it.
         MR. KING:  Well, by definition, we have it today.  We're
     going to go in and make a bunch of changes.
         DR. WALLIS:  I'm not sure I would agree with that.  I'm not
     sure whether all these design bases and things, which are very fine and
     have worked, really have anything to do with --
         MR. KING:  If we didn't have it, a plant shouldn't be
     operating.
         DR. WALLIS:  In terms of risk, in terms of risk metric. 
     They're all on the same scale, different planet.
         DR. KRESS:  They're in the same orbits.
         DR. WALLIS:  They may have the same effect, but we don't
     really know it until we do some risk study.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  If you tie risk-informing Part 50 to the
     Commission's safety goals, then aren't you also answering the adequate
     protection question?
         MR. KING:  I think you are.  I think you are.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  In fact, we're probably going to have to touch
     on the adequate protection definition issue in order to do the
     clarification the staff has already -- that would be the first place.
         DR. KRESS:  When you talk about -- think about policy issue
     number one up there.  Are you also going to ask yourself the question
     whether the current safety goals are the right ones to have?
         MR. KING:  That's a separate paper that's being worked that
     will be coming back to this committee in the fall.
         DR. KRESS:  But that would impact on this.
         MR. KING:  Certainly.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I still -- I'm sorry.
         DR. KRESS:  I was going to go down the list of these.  On
     the second bullet, you might consider a full PRA as the ultimate design
     basis approach and any shortening of that, where you have surrogates, is
     all right probably, because the PRA is actually a selected set of
     accidents, too.  But it's not a complete set, and they bend things.
         So you might be able to run the concept of design basis,
     this dichotomy between the two would be awfully nice to get rid of and
     this may be an opportunity to do that.  Make them comparable.
         MR. KING:  That's sort of getting into the chicken-and-egg
     question, though, and today's plants are designed and built and
     operating and have a PRA.
         DR. KRESS:  I'm obviously already getting a sort of
     backhanded answer to the question of whether you should relate it to the
     current design basis or you should start over.
         MR. KING:  One of the things we have to keep in the backs of
     our minds is what does this mean for future designs.  Whatever we do on
     Part 50, can a future designer pick it up and take advantage of it.
         DR. KRESS:  Yes.  And I don't think you ought to get into
     the backfit issue at all here on the third bullet.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Explain to me the reverse backfit again.
         DR. KRESS:  Is the burden reduction you get worth the safety
     benefit you gave up, and I think that's a problem that you're going to
     -- that's going to give you all sorts of problems, because most of these
     things are supposed to improve safety in the first place, and you're not
     supposed to be reducing safety.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  In other words, if you have a delta CDF
     that's positive.
         DR. KRESS:  Yes.  Is the burden reduction worth it?
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  He already told us what's acceptable
     anyway.  So I don't see --
         DR. KRESS:  Yes.  I would probably try to avoid the third
     bullet.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The staff has already declared that
     ten-to-the-minus-five delta CDF is acceptable, without concern about the
     burden reduction.
         DR. KRESS:  And --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So how would this be different?
         MR. KING:  There are some general words in 1.174 that imply
     the burden reduction.  They just didn't come in and make frivolous
     changes upping delta -- making changes to delta CDF without getting some
     commensurate unnecessary burden reduction.  There are no numbers in
     there.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Sure, but the licensee would not go
     through the trouble of preparing the request if they don't see a benefit
     at the end of it.  So that's sort of built into it, it seems to me. 
     They're not going --
         MR. KING:  Qualitatively.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  -- request just to change the delta CDF.
         MR. KING:  Qualitatively, it's built in.  There is no
     numerical guideline to see how well that's complied with.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I think Dr. Kress' suggestion probably --
         MR. KING:  Okay.  We'll discuss it.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I didn't expect you to do it right now.
     DR. UHRIG:  Just one comment on the application of PRA to new plants. 
     When the advanced neutron source reactor was being designed, PRA was
     used extensively in the design in order to minimize the potential risk
     associated with that plant.  It was very successful.  Unfortunately, the
     plant was never built, but it was used.
         DR. KRESS:  Yes.  I can't imagine any new plant not doing
     that anyway.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It's not clear to me, though, that even if
     you do that, if you use a PRA, that you still don't need some sort of an
     envelope, like a design basis set of accidents.  You may use the PRA to
     select them, but you will still need something.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Personally, what I would like to see
     eventually, and I don't know whether this is practical or not, I would
     like to see an FSAR with thermal hydraulic type calculations which are
     related to the success criteria in the PRA.
         DR. KRESS:  That would be --
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I mean, that's the tie-in between equipment
     performance and whether it can do the safety functions and the
     assumptions that you take from there and put in the PRA.
         The problem we have now is that there are different
     sequences and they have different criteria and they have different
     success.  So when you have a success in Chapter 15, it doesn't
     necessarily tell you that you have a success in the PRA, or sometimes it
     produces something that's a lot more successful than it needs to be in
     the PRAs.
         I think that would be a nice coherent place to be.  Whether
     it's worth all that effort of rewriting Chapter 15 to get there, I
     think, is a very practical question.
         We may be able to make a lot of progress without doing that. 
     That gets to the burden reanalysis type point.  But that might, in fact,
     get you somewhat close on the 50.59 issue, because then at least your
     accident analysis that's in your FSAR has some relationship to the PRAs
     and you could have risk-informed tests of 50.59.
         DR. BONACA:  Then you would have to deal separately with
     each of the uncertainties.  The difference between Chapter 10 and
     Chapter 15 is because of the uncertainties and Chapter 15 attempts to
     deal with them by having gross assumptions and conservatisms.  So you
     would have to -- I think what you're suggesting is attractive, because,
     again, in 50.59, the closure of the issue is more how do you then treat
     the uncertainties separate from actual modeling.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  Yes.
         DR. BONACA:  Any thoughts about that?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I think this is not a very well developed
     idea.  And if you look at Chapter 15, it has a lot of other things in it
     which are not really core melt issues.
         DR. BONACA:  That's right.  Yes.
         MR. HOLAHAN:  DNB ratios and stuff like that, which are
     important in some defense-in-depth concept.  You don't want everyday
     events be challenging to core damage.  So there ought to be other
     criteria and how you say that those are risk-informed or make sense
     isn't at all clear.  It's not clear to me.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Can we move on?
         MR. KING:  Okay.  Slide 22, potential technical issues.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  We have already discussed some of them.
         MR. KING:  Yes.  We have already discussed some of them and
     metrics and criteria for identifying candidate changes, we'll get to
     that on slides 24 and 25.  We talked about there are a number of things
     you could risk-inform in the regulation to the design basis accident and
     so forth.
         Once you decide, yes, that's a candidate for change, then
     you've got to ask yourself the question, if I'm going to change it, what
     am I going to change it to, what is this new design basis accident.  And
     there's probably a number of options or things you could -- criteria you
     could use to decide where am I going to draw the line, and I just sort
     of listed some ideas here.  We won't go through all of them.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  This is a variation of the Commission's
     SRM decision recently.  Are these issues prematurely before the
     committee?
         MR. KING:  We're not asking for a --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  We'll address them when you come up with
     something more specific, because we can talk forever about best estimate
     with uncertainty, realistically conservative, conservatively.
         DR. SEALE:  We have.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Twenty-three, Tom.
         MR. KING:  Twenty-three, process issues, we don't need to
     spend --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And there is certain time pressure.  NEI
     wants to finish by 5:15.  So it seems to me we ought to give them a
     chance, and we're getting into areas now that I am sure we will have an
     opportunity to discuss again with you.
         MR. KING:  Okay.  I think we can probably even skip 23. 
     They're just process issues.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Let's skip 23.  That's beautiful.
         MR. KING:  Let's talk about 24.  How are we going to go in
     and look at Part 50 and decide are we going to make some changes or what
     are candidates for change, and in doing that, we need to look at what
     should be added as well as what do we need to modify or remove.
         A couple of assumptions that we think probably would apply
     in the screening process.  One is we're going to focus on the technical
     requirements, although there's probably a couple process things, like
     50.59, that will be looked at.  For the most part, it's technical
     requirements.
         Another ground rule we would view is whatever the
     risk-informed scope definition is that comes out of option two, we have
     to consider that's going to be applied ultimately across the board to
     the things that are being looked at in option three.
         So given that, flip the page to 25, how do you -- what are
     we going to look at in deciding is a regulation candidate for change. 
     Well, there's a number of things thought about.  We could look at, for
     design basis accidents, particularly, whether there should be some
     cutoff on the frequency of initiating events.  Take a large break LOCA,
     for example, if it's beyond -- I just threw a ten-to-the-minus-six per
     reactor year frequency in, then the large break wouldn't be the design
     basis accident anymore, it would be something that would be more in the
     neighborhood of a ten-to-the-minus-six range break.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Is this the same thing as saying design
     the reactor so that the return period of the initiating events is
     greater than one million years?  Make sure it's greater than one million
     years.  And then I guess the licensee will have to decide how to meet
     that.  That's what you're saying here; that if their large LOCA is a
     frequency which is inverse of the return period, you make sure, if you
     can make a convincing case that it's greater -- less than
     ten-to-the-minus-six per reactor year, then it's not the design basis
     accident.  Is that what you're saying?
         MR. KING:  In effect, that's what I'm saying.  Same thing
     for when you look at a scenario, how far do you go in looking at
     multiple failures, for example.  We could put some frequency cutoff on
     scenarios so that a single failure doesn't make sense anymore when
     you're looking at realism, what does make sense.
         For deciding does something contribute to the safety or risk
     significance of the safety functions, we could use the delta CDF and
     delta LERF --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  These are deltas, they're not --
         MR. KING:  Those are deltas, yes, small deltas.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  There is a command set of characters in
     WordPerfect that has a delta, a real delta.
         MR. KING:  Okay.  Not these little triangles.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  These are bullets.
         MR. KING:  And for shutdown, CDF probably still makes sense,
     but LERF doesn't, so we'd have to figure out what to do there.
         Going in and looking at excessive margins, how would we do
     that.  Mark mentioned earlier, to me, we'd have to go in and take a look
     at the analysis assumptions, the acceptance criteria, and decide maybe
     --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  What's really missing, Tom, is what I
     think Gary touched upon earlier.  How do we make the connection between
     the physical quantities that we can measure and calculate the failure
     rates?  As we do that, you can't really use PRA design.  You're not
     measuring failure rates, right?  You are measuring flow rates, you are
     measuring temperatures, you're measuring things like that.
         And then all of a sudden, the PRA guys come and say, well,
     the failure rate of this component is this, under certain conditions,
     and that connection is not clear.  I mean, the failure rate comes
     largely from operating experience.  So there is a disconnect there, and
     I see that as an impediment.
         In other words --
         MR. KING:  You've got to look at both.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  -- we don't have good reliability physics
     models.  I would put it that way.  Because the reliability physics is
     really that relates the failure of a component, the probability of
     failure with, as I said, physical quantities, pressures, temperatures,
     flow rates and so on.  And our failure rates really do not come from
     these kinds of calculations.
         MR. KING:  No.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The success criteria use, you know, do you
     need to steam generators or one steam generator under these conditions,
     but then you go back to failure rate calculations.
         MR. KING:  Yes, but I guess I don't -- I think you can
     accomplish a lot without getting into --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  You can accomplish a lot, I am not saying
     it's useless, but I think in order to go all the way to a rational use
     of PRA in the design, you really need to make that connection, in my
     opinion.
         DR. WALLIS:  In something like ECCS, it's not failure rate
     of a component, but failure rate of the whole thing, because of
     uncertainties in the critical flow and the flooding model here and all
     these interactions of the components.  There is some probability that
     you might damage the core even though deterministically it's --
         MR. KING:  That's right, exactly.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Right.
         DR. WALLIS:  That's very difficult to assess.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes, but that's the reliability physics.
         MR. KING:  That's right.  But one thing we could do is go
     in, do best estimate analysis on a LOCA event today and compare that to
     the design basis type analysis and see what kind of --
         DR. WALLIS:  Then you'd have to be more specific about what
     you mean by best estimate.
         MR. KING:  Yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  You've got to quantify the uncertainties and so
     on.
         MR. KING:  That's right, that's right, and that's the kind
     of sort scoping analysis we're proposing to do under this option three
     study.  That's why, to me, it's not a six-month job.
         DR. WALLIS:  You might actually have to hire a thermal
     hydrologist.
         MR. KING:  We may.  That's scary.
         The defense-in-depth, I viewed using RAW and Fussel-Vesley
     as a way to determine how much do components or systems or functions
     contribute to -- well, components or systems contribute to the functions
     we're trying to perform and maybe get some measure of the contribution
     to defense-in-depth.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That's the first time I see RAW and
     Fussel-Vesley being used as measures of defense-in-depth.  I'm not sure
     that I can -- I'm not sure.  Especially the Fussel-Vesley.  The
     Fussel-Vesley is probably not a good measure.  I don't know about RAW,
     I'd have to think about that.  I mean, Vesley himself has commented that
     if you have a well balanced design, where every single component
     contributes equally to the final result, then all of them have the same
     Fussel-Vesley measure.  But that doesn't tell you anything about how
     much redundancy you have and so on, because they all contribute equally,
     right?
         MR. KING:  Okay.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So I'm not sure that that really belongs
     under defense-in-depth.
         DR. WALLIS:  However, I'm happy to see some measure of
     defense-in-depth, rather than just saying it's --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Which, in my mind, the measure of
     defense-in-depth is the PRA results.  That's exactly what it is.
         DR. KRESS:  That is a measure of how good the
     defense-in-depth does in achieving your risk objectives, but I think
     defense-in-depth is there because of uncertainties in the --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That's why the PRA is a measure.
         DR. KRESS:  Yes.  And the PRA is a measure of
     defense-in-depth if you also include the uncertainties in there and if
     you say -- and if you look for values of uncertainty that you -- if you
     can relate those to defense-in-depth somewhat, you have to tie those
     together.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.  I mean, when I say PRA, obviously, I
     mean including the uncertainties.  But also it takes a sophisticated
     analyst who would make a distinction, for example, between just
     redundancy and diversity.  In many PRAs, you really don't do that.
         MR. KING:  But you could?
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  What?
         MR. KING:  You could.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  You could, yes.  Then it's a measure. 
     Then it's a measure.
         MR. KING:  And for a new --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  If you don't have sufficient
     defense-in-depth, you will not get the numbers and the curves that you
     want.  The curves, not the numbers.
         DR. KRESS:  But I'm looking to get both the acceptable risk
     and acceptable uncertainty, and that's what I was trying to say.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Acceptable risk can be added to it, but
     the PRA itself, if done properly, is a measure of defense-in-depth.  I
     mean, you wouldn't get the ten-to-the-minus-fours and fives that you get
     now for CDF --
         DR. KRESS:  Unless you add something.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  -- unless you had tremendous
     defense-in-depth in the -- especially in the nuclear business, where you
     have all these multiple reviews and people are trying to figure out ways
     that you are wrong or you don't realize it.
         MR. KING:  But there may be some things in there that have
     the defense-in-depth label on them, which, if you really look, if you
     didn't have them, they aren't going to make much difference.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Sure.
         MR. KING:  That's what I was trying to get at with this
     criteria.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Sure.  That's certainly true.
         DR. KRESS:  RAW would certainly be a measure of that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.
         MR. KING:  Okay.  And then cost-benefit we already talked
     about.
         The last slide, schedule.  And this is the schedule between
     now and the end of October.  We've already had a couple of public
     meetings, the dates are shown here, where NEI and some of the utility
     folks have come and, in general, talked about what we're doing, although
     not in the depth we talked about it today, and then, in general, talked
     about what they're doing.
         We have another one scheduled for July 28, and we need to
     schedule some others over the summer.
         In terms of interacting with the committee, we would expect
     or are planning to draft up the Commission paper for both option two and
     option three and try and come back to the subcommittee in September to
     discuss that, and full committee in October, at which point we'll be
     asking for a letter.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So September what, the third week or so,
     fourth week?
         MR. KING:  Fourth week.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The first two weeks are out.
         MR. MARKLEY:  We can decide that here, if you want, or we
     can work it out later.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But I want to get an idea, what you have
     in mind.  The October meeting is the first week of October?
         MR. BARTON:  Yes.  It's real early, yes.  First, second,
     third of October or something like that.
         MR. MARKLEY:  It's actually September 31st and --
         MR. BARTON:  September 30th, the first and second.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  September 32nd.
         DR. SEALE:  Only in a new millennium.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  When do you think your document will be
     ready for us to review?  If you want a subcommittee meeting, you have in
     mind that you will give it to us at least a week in advance.
         MR. KING:  I'd like to get you something at least a week in
     advance.  So the later in September --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It's got to be something at least a week
     in advance.
         MR. KING:  The later in September the better.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Because the schedule after that is really
     tight.  I mean, you cannot come back with another document after the
     subcommittee meeting.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Let me comment on that.  I think Tom might
     have been thinking just option three.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  I think this is going to be a subject that I
     would propose we have some dialogue with the committee, because I don't
     know the answer to all the questions, especially when we hear the
     industry's presentation.  They're coming in with some significant
     information in the fall, and maybe NEI is going to talk about that, and
     I don't think the staff has figured out how to get from here to there
     with a product to the Commission when we haven't yet seen what they're
     doing, although we're going to meeting with them on it.
         So I think we'd need to think about that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Let's put it this way.  If we are going to
     have a subcommittee meeting, it would be nice to have a document to
     review that is in a reasonable shape a week in advance.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Absolutely.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Otherwise, we move the subcommittee
     meeting further into the future.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Absolutely.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.  Shall we hear from the industry
     now?  I'm sorry.
         DR. WALLIS:  You had an organizational chart on page nine
     here, and I'm trying to figure out, are you just working on plans to do
     things or are these -- does this organization exist and are these people
     now working on the problem?
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  What stage are we at here?
         DR. NEWBERRY:  Yes.  The SRM was dated, what, June.
         DR. WALLIS:  So these people are already working all these
     problems.  So you should not really show review of plans, basically.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  They've been working on this for about two
     weeks.
         DR. WALLIS:  You should show some progress, though.  It may
     well be you've redefined the problem, they've learned some things.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  That's right.
         DR. WALLIS:  So I'm not looking just for another plan.  I
     would be looking for some results of this rather large team doing work.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  In the fall, you mean.
         DR. WALLIS:  Yes.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Yes.  I would hope we would give you more on
     that.
         DR. WALLIS:  I'm glad you clarified that for me.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Well, the Commission has asked for a
     rulemaking plan.  I think we've got to think about what that plan is,
     would that plan include a proposed rule or a set of rules.
         DR. WALLIS:  With all this big team thinking for several
     months, you should have made a lot of progress.
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Absolutely.  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I'm glad you agree.  Okay.  You will be
     here during the industry's presentation and the discussion afterwards?
         MR. NEWBERRY:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Thank you very much.  Very informative
     presentation, as usual.  Okay.  NEI and South Texas Project, I
     understand.  I guess we can ask you to do the same thing we asked the
     staff could do.
         Would you put your name on the cover page and your e-mail,
     in the future?
         MR. GRANTOM:  Okay.  You're looking at the wrong
     presentation then.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Obviously I am.  These have the names
     without e-mail, this is nameless.  Name of the presenter, that would be
     --
         DR. KRESS:  Just assume it's stapled together.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Oh, this is NEI.  This is different. 
     Rick.
         MR. ROSEN:  I'm going to lead off, George.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Oh, I'm sorry.  Steve.
         MR. ROSEN:  My name is Steve Rosen.  Rich Grantom, from our
     PRA group, is here with me.  We're going to talk about implementation
     problems and successes at South Texas and one of the pilots that you've
     talked about before.
         We're pleased to be here, and we've been here before, and
     appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.
         You will recall that the staff gave us a staff safety
     evaluation report back in November of '97, which allowed us to change
     our operations quality assurance program to implement graded quality
     assurance at South Texas.
         Our expectations for ourselves and the staff's expectations
     for us, were that we would do it in a professional way and to meet our
     expectations, we developed a very robust risk-significance determination
     process, so that we would know the risk significance of any component
     that we were about to change the quality assurance provisions on, so
     that we would know what we were dealing with.
         And we're here to tell you about the results of using that
     process.  We also had some expectations for ourselves in terms of safety
     improvements for the plant and in terms of burden and resource
     reductions.
         With regard to safety improvements, we knew at the outset
     that there were components in the plant that were not considered
     safety-related, that had, we thought, risk significance, and there were
     many, many components that were considered safety-related that had
     little or none.  So that was our intuition and now we're here to tell
     you, after analyzing some 28,000 components, what we have found in 22
     different systems.
         We also had expectations for ourselves and our financial
     managers had expectations that this would be a cost-beneficial process
     and in the early days, we estimated that we could save about a $1.3
     million a year after we had fully implemented this program.
         Our estimates have since gone up to where we feel that we
     could, if we could fully implement this program, save on the order of $2
     million a year.
         But there are some impediments, key impediments, and we've
     talked about some of them already.  They're mainly embodied in the
     special treatment requirements and also in the use of Part 50.59.
         As you see on this next slide, the staff safety evaluation
     did not allow us to use, in any way, any exemptions in the special
     treatment requirements.  We were stuck with continuing to comply with
     the ASME code, with the requirements for environmental qualification,
     with the requirements for seismic qualification, even though South Texas
     isn't what is often called an aseismic zone, and with the requirements,
     for example, for Class 1-E.
         So while we were unable to change any of those kinds of
     things, we were allowed by the change that we were glad to make to our
     operations quality assurance program, we were allowed to change the
     quality assurance provisions applied to those components.
     DR. UHRIG:  Did you ask for special treatment in your application?
         MR. ROSEN:  No.
         DR. UHRIG:  You did not.
         MR. ROSEN:  It was considered, but we didn't do it.  It was
     discussed with the staff at the time, but we chose not to, because at
     the time, it seemed a great step to go as far as we went.
         But as you can see, we have had some of our implementation
     restricted; specifically, the procurement benefits have not been
     realized.
         And what I mean by that is that if we had a component that
     was expensive and we needed to replace it because it wore out, and it
     was not risk-significant, we are still required to purchase it with all
     the environmental qualification, seismic qualification, et cetera, on
     it, even though we have shown that its failure is not risk-significant.
         So a little more background, please.  SECY-98-300, you've
     already talked about it, recommended a phased approach to risk-informed
     Part 50.  The subsequent SRM authorized the staff to proceed.
         Now, the previously approved SDP process, which the staff
     granted us authority to use back in November of '97, had, in our view,
     anticipated the efforts required to risk-inform Part 50, because it
     really did require us to develop a robust risk significance
     determination process, which was at the heart of our comprehensive risk
     management program and provides the engine under which we use to power
     all of our approaches to risk-informed changes.
         So how do we go forward?  We don't really know for sure and,
     fortunately, we're sitting on this side of the table instead of the side
     of the table you're sitting on.  But here are some thoughts, before we
     get to talking to you about what we found.
         It seems to us that the scope of Part 50 should be amended
     by redefining safety-related, because there is really nothing wrong with
     the regulations in Part 50, as long as they're applied to the right
     things.  So we think it's largely a scope issue and, also, as necessary,
     providing selected exemptions to Part 50, and that's what option two of
     the SECY and the subsequent SRM are all about.
         We think that the process that was approved by the staff
     that we use in our graded quality assurance program are risk
     significance determination process satisfies the intent of option two. 
     It is an improved method.
         So we come to this set of equalities, which -- what did you
     call them earlier today, Rick?
         MR. GRANTOM:  Basic precepts that are important here and a
     fundamental principle here that one needs to accept.
         MR. ROSEN:  Things equal to the same thing or equal to each
     other.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Yes.  This is the transitory law here we're
     going to work on here.
         MR. ROSEN:  I couldn't remember that.
         DR. WALLIS:  What is the measure of important to safety?
         MR. GRANTOM:  The measures that we're using here are the
     traditional ones that we've talked about here in PRA, core damage
     frequency and large release frequency, for the PRA portion of that. 
     However, the risk significance determination process is a blended
     approach in which deterministic engineering information and qualitative
     information is also used.
         So the actual risk significance determination occurs after
     those two sets of information have been merged together.  Then there is
     a determination on what the risk significance is.
         DR. WALLIS:  Important means bigger than some --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It's really not CDF and LERF.  You are
     using the risk importance measures.  It's not clear really what the
     connection is to the CDF and LERF.
         MR. GRANTOM:  We have two approaches.  There is the PRA
     information, which uses a -- I will call it a risk ranking approach, in
     which we do a whole series of sensitivity studies, that use traditional
     figures of merit from core damage -- from the PRA.  That information is
     combined with a series of deterministic questions that cover areas for
     which go outside the bounds of the PRA on shutdown safety, can it fail a
     risk-significant component, can it cause an initiating event.  Other
     questions that may be outside the scope of the PRA.
         And you blend those things together, those two pieces of
     information, so the figure of merit really is a conglomerate of all that
     information there.  But at the end of there, there is actually a
     determination of the basis of why a component is important and it's
     documented in what we call a risk significance basis document.
         DR. WALLIS:  Everything is related to safety in some way,
     and you're not going to --
         MR. GRANTOM:  Everything is --
         DR. WALLIS:  Then you can cut out a lot of things.
         MR. GRANTOM:  What you find out --
         DR. WALLIS:  Everything is related to safety, even if it's
     miniscule.
         MR. GRANTOM:  What you find out is there's a lot of
     components out there that are there to help you maintain the system. 
     There's a lot of components out there that are used to facilitate an
     operator's ability to walk around to measure a certain parameter for a
     walk-around.
         And they may not have a direct nexus to safety.  They're
     there for another reason.  There are some components that are there
     merely just to drain the system and once they're restored in their
     position, they perform no function.
         So you'll see a lot of those differences.
         DR. WALLIS:  No matter how miniscule and fine-detailed your
     PRA, there are some things which would never appear in it at all.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Never, never appear.
         DR. WALLIS:  And those are what you would call
     non-safety-related.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I would call them non-risk-significant.
         DR. WALLIS:  Well, significant -- you need some sort of
     level.
         MR. ROSEN:  Yes, and those levels were defined in the staff
     --
         MR. GRANTOM:  Those are defined.
         MR. ROSEN:  -- in the staff review of our --
         DR. WALLIS:  A cutoff point, if it doesn't have more than a
     certain significance.
         MR. ROSEN:  We call certain things not risk significant,
     NRS.
         DR. WALLIS:  This would seem far more rational than I think
     the old scheme, which is anything important to safety, NRC says -- is
     that the old regulation?
         MR. GRANTOM:  Yes.
         MR. ROSEN:  We have -- I couldn't comment on that, but we
     have a threshold established.
         DR. KRESS:  I think it was if it was required to meet the
     criteria in your safety analysis report.
         DR. WALLIS:  Which was not based on risk necessarily.  There
     might have been some risk in it somewhere.
         DR. KRESS:  It had some risk thinking in it.
         DR. WALLIS:  But it wasn't specific.
         DR. BONACA:  It's coming from analysis still, but a
     deterministic analysis where you didn't have a full appreciation for the
     likelihood that they would contribute more or less.  You couldn't make a
     distinction.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  When you use importance measures, do you
     use them for both CDF and LERF or just CDF?  In other words, you
     calculate Fussel-Vesley and RAW for LERF?
         MR. GRANTOM:  Right.  We can do both.  We normally use just
     CDF, but we do provide information on LERF, because part of the reason
     is there is a matter of just practicality.
         We've pretty well defined the components that are important
     to LERF and we've set them aside.  We find that all the other
     components, for the most part, are important to CDF.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So you know already what's important to
     LERF.
         MR. GRANTOM:  We already know what they are and they've
     already been treated.  We already know that population.  So I don't need
     to do sensitivity studies on that, not nearly to the rigor that I wanted
     to do for core damage frequency.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It would be nice to have one such study,
     though, maybe from Research, see whether there is anything different. 
     In other words, find the two importance measures for both LERF and CDF
     and look at the rankings.
         I'm pretty sure what Rick is saying will be truth, but you
     never know.
         MR. GRANTOM:  You might come out with something different.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So essentially, CDF-based evaluation, the
     numerical stuff.
         MR. GRANTOM:  For the quantitative portion, yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  For the quantitative.
         MR. ROSEN:  But not everything.  Not all our decisions are
     based on model components.  We're talking about all the components in
     the system, 28,000 in 22 systems.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.
         MR. ROSEN:  And those are -- a lot of the components, the
     expert panel that I chair has to make decisions without a PRA.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Sure.
         MR. ROSEN:  Because that component has been screened out of
     the PRA and was never considered.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I do want to add that it's very important to
     know that a component was not included in the PRA.  There is value in
     knowing that information.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  See, that is a mystery to me.  For some
     reason, we've got several times that some components are not in the PRA
     and we have to do something about them, and for me, if it's not in the
     PRA, there is a reason why it's not.
         MR. ROSEN:  Of course.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It probably doesn't play any role.
         MR. ROSEN:  There were no scenarios, no sequences in which
     it played a role.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So did your panel level, Steve, take a
     component like that and put it in the safety-significant and
     risk-significant category?  Are there any examples of components like
     that?
         MR. ROSEN:  Of course.  In my next slide.
         DR. BONACA:  Before we move to that, let me understand,
     however.  So this slide, you are trying to relate a current jargon, like
     safety-related, to risk information.
         MR. ROSEN:  Mario, what I am trying to do here -- what we
     are trying to do is to get to this bottom bullet.  That not
     risk-significant should not be -- should be not safety-related, things
     that are not risk-significant ought not be safety-related.
         DR. BONACA:  I understand.  Because safety-related has a
     clear meaning in regulation today.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And risk-significant, you really mean CDF
     and LERF significant.
         MR. ROSEN:  Right.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I'm going to say that risk-significant means
     the combination of both the quantitative and the qualitative.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.  But you don't mean individual risk.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Right.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  These measures.  You are using the
     surrogate measure.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Right.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  For the quantitative.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Yes.  And this is important to buy into this
     fundamental concept here or we really don't -- we really don't allow
     ourselves to step forward any further in risk-informing.
         DR. WALLIS:  The question is what's risk-significant depends
     upon sort of the level of risk that the society accepts, because you
     could have -- if someone says, no, we're only going to tolerate CDFs of
     ten-to-the-minus-six or something, immediately other things become
     risk-significant which weren't significant before.  So the cutoff is a
     variable maybe, depending upon society's risk acceptance.
         MR. ROSEN:  Right.  And that societal risk acceptance was,
     we presumed, embodied and built into our graded QA program through the
     negotiated thresholds that we worked on with the staff that they
     ultimately approved, something that falls below -- let's see -- it was a
     risk achievement worth of two and a Fussel-Vesley less than .01 and --
     it's an and -- less than two for risk achievement worth.  That is not
     risk-significant.
         MR. GRANTOM:  It goes in from the quantitative portion as
     being low and then you still have to address the deterministic issues
     that I talked about before.  And all of that's delineated in the SER for
     the graded quality assurance program in the risk-significance evaluation
     process, how that works.
         MR. ROSEN:  So what we came to talk about was not what's on
     the prior slide and just to give you some gratuitous stuff that maybe
     you'll think about, but here the next slide is a very complicated slide
     that we would like to go over with you that shows you some of the real
     results of doing this, and it's really two slides.  It's this one and
     the next.
         As you look on the right-hand slide, it says see next slide,
     see next slide.
         This is an 11-by-17 foldout in our plant and, unfortunately,
     we can't use that 11-by-17 foldout here.  But I think you'll get a good
     feeling from looking just at this first and then go with me to the
     second page later.
         What this shows is that the first circle on the left over
     here, that we evaluated 22 systems with 28,267 TPNS.  What's a TPNS? 
     It's a total plant numbering system.  Each component has an individual
     unique number.
         So here are 28,000 tagged components at the plant and 22
     systems.  Down on the bottom, it says note one, inclusive of -- it's an
     alphabet soup here.  Those are just system designators.  AF stands for
     auxiliary feed water and CC stands for component cooling water and so
     on.
         So we analyzed many, many of the important risk-significant
     and safety-related systems in the plant and what we found right away, of
     course, is that safety-related systems, all the components in
     safety-related systems are not safety-related.
         I'll pause and say that again.  Not all components in the
     safety-related systems are safety-related.  In fact, if you add them all
     up, in the 28,000 that we analyzed, 54 percent are safety-related and 46
     percent are not.
         DR. KRESS:  Now, a lot of the regulations on the books are
     there to do other things, like, for example, cut down on worker
     exposure, to cut down on releases that won't hurt anybody, but are
     significant releases because they're approaching levels that might hurt
     -- they won't be risk-significant, but because the containment is not
     failed or something, but a lot of the regulations are designed to
     prevent those kind of releases at a frequency that is acceptable.
         I have a feeling that a lot of those what I would call other
     regulatory objectives, other than CDF and LERF, won't show up on here as
     safety-significant, as risk-significant components, whereas they might
     actually be of regulatory significance.
         MR. ROSEN:  Well, regulatory significance aside, we have an
     expert panel whose job it is to not take the results that come out of
     the graded QA working group without using its own expertise and
     experience to address exactly the kinds of things you're talking about.
         In fact, the working group does that before it ever brings
     to us -- we have a graded QA working group.  It's one of many working
     groups that report to the expert panel.
         DR. KRESS:  That might be a good function for an expert
     panel.
         MR. ROSEN:  The working group brings us those concerns and
     brings us those -- they have the PSA input, they have one of Rick's
     people on the working group.  But they bring us those additional
     concerns, as well, and say we increased the risk rank of this because of
     those kinds of things, so you should understand that, and then the
     expert panel considers all that before we approve the final documents.
         DR. KRESS:  That's why I was -- you know, I was going back
     to your previous slide where non-risk-significant should be equivalent
     to non-safety-related.  I don't think that's exactly true, because of
     these other considerations.
         MR. ROSEN:  If you think the earlier slide includes the
     expert panel deliberations, it's still true.
         DR. KRESS:  If you include that as -- the word
     risk-significant, but they may not be risk-significant.
         MR. ROSEN:  It is the expert panel's job.
         MR. GRANTOM:  That's what I was trying to allude to, is that
     risk significance, at this point, is after both quantitative and
     qualitative information has been blended together and a judgment has
     been passed over these components as to what they are.  That's where the
     risk categorization actually occurs, the final risk categorization
     occurs.
         MR. ROSEN:  So now let me take you past the second bullet
     here, the second circle, and talk about what we found, some very, we
     think, important things.
         The first thing we found, looking at the top, is that of the
     54 percent of the components that are safety-related, only ten percent,
     1,446 are highly risk-significant, 15,000 components come out of that
     block, 7,000 of them are not risk-significant, even though they are
     safety-related, 7,000 are not risk-significant, even though they're
     safety-related.
         We label that a commercial issue, because we're treating
     those 7,000 components with the full panoply of our QA controls.
         Coming at this block the other way is also instructive,
     13,000 non-safety-related components, of which 20 are highly
     risk-significant, 344 are medium risk-significant.  We label that a
     safety issue, because it's possible that we have not been applying our
     full controls to these.
     DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So you're saying then that currently classified as
     non-safety-related SSCs are, in fact, some of them are highly
     risk-significant.
         MR. ROSEN:  Let me tell you about what some of them are. 
     Positive displacement pump at South Texas is a non-safety-related
     component.  Its job is to cool the seals of the reactor coolant pumps to
     prevent seal LOCA, alternate seal LOCA system.
         MR. GRANTOM:  And it's kind of strange that --
         MR. ROSEN:  Excuse me.  And it's also powered by a diesel
     generator, not one of the main diesel generators, but what we call a
     technical support center diesel generator, which is a non-safety-related
     disease.
         DR. BONACA:  Why were they non-safety-related?  I'm
     surprised.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Its primary purpose, the positive displacement
     pump, was to satisfy the hydro testing that's required.  That's why it's
     put in the plant.  It also is part of the chemical and volume control
     system and it can inject to the reactor coolant pump seals and it's
     powered from a non-safety-related, on-site diesel generator source.
         So its primary purpose, although it was to hydro the system,
     the RCS, it also can be used for this alternate seal injection method
     here, which buys time for station blackout scenarios.  And as a result
     of the initiating event it relates to plays a fairly significant role in
     the risk arena.
         DR. BONACA:  What you're saying, originally, the design was
     not recognized as a main function and, therefore, was not called
     safety-related.
         MR. GRANTOM:  That's right.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Would this be an indicator that safety is
     improved, Graham?  You were asking for quantitative indicators earlier. 
     I mean, they are taking 364 components which are currently not
     safety-related and moving them up.  That would be an indicator, wouldn't
     it?
         DR. WALLIS:  Especially if you have a measure of the safety
     impact.
         MR. ROSEN:  Well, we clearly know the safety impact of those
     components, because we have --
         DR. WALLIS:  Yes, you do.
         MR. ROSEN:  -- we have the risk achievement worths.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  What you don't have is the impact of
     moving of the QA.
         DR. KRESS:  Yes, moving it up.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  If you impose QA requirements.
         MR. ROSEN:  In fact, our plant staff, when we talk about
     these things, say, but we're already doing all the important things, the
     things we think are important for those components, because we knew
     intuitively they were important.  And we said, but, yeah, but there are
     some things we'd like to be sure of, we'd like some independent
     verification of these things, we'd like some of the tools that we
     normally apply to, for example, aux feed water systems components, we'd
     like to apply them in these areas.
     DR. WALLIS:  You could show that some increased attention in maintenance
     had reduced the probability of failure of these previously identified
     SSCs, then you could really show you've got a safety impact.
         MR. GRANTOM:  The technical support center diesel generator
     is a vivid example.  It used to be basically a small diesel generator
     that sat on a skid that was open to the environment and you could throw
     a rock and hit it, you know, from here to there, it was easy to do.
         It's now enclosed in an air-conditioned building.  We had
     problems with the generator output breaker on it for years.  It
     chronically was a problem, where it wouldn't start and load.  They
     finally, because of the information that we had here about this is a
     risk-significant component, finally have repaired the output breaker. 
     The reliability of the component is much better than it was.
         As a matter of fact, at one time, it actually was
     unavailable for the better part of a year because of the generator
     output breaker component.  But because of the heightened awareness of
     this kind of a program, you quantitatively can prove its reliability and
     availability is better.
         DR. WALLIS:  This wasn't something that you did because of
     regulation, evaluated the risk-significance and then did the right thing
     to reduce the risk.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Exactly.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And you have to speak to the microphone.
         MR. SIEBER:  You had about 11,000 components that you've
     decided were worthy of downgrading the quality requirements and about
     364 of high risk or medium risk components that you felt should be
     upgraded.     
         Did you compare the end result of risk significance after
     you made all these changes to see whether the total plant risk went up
     or down?
         MR. GRANTOM:  With regard to the non-risk-significant
     components, quantitatively --
         MR. SIEBER:  It should have been zero.
         MR. GRANTOM:  -- they're zero.
         MR. SIEBER:  Right.  Okay.
         MR. GRANTOM:  They're not even modeled within the -- they're
     not modeled within the PRA and the deterministic questions that are
     asked, they ranked zero or extremely low even in those.
         MR. SIEBER:  Right.
         MR. GRANTOM:  So from that point of time, I can take the
     aggregate and I can still say zero plus zero is pretty much a zero, from
     an aggregate effect on that particular point.
         I found out that more cases than not, they were a detriment
     to safety because they caused us to remove safety systems from service
     at times.  So there was a real hit there in terms of availability of
     some of the systems.
         One of the other items that I will point to is that the
     performance feedback that goes with this, where we collect plant
     specific data, is going to be something that's going to be fed back into
     this process in which we are going to be collecting the aggregate,
     because as the question was earlier, I don't necessarily know -- I was
     able to give an example on the technical support center diesel
     generator, but these other non-safety-related components, I don't really
     know exactly what the different changes in controls might be and how
     that will work with its reliability.
         So to answer your question, part of it I can discuss.  We're
     still waiting for feedback to really give a real good quantitative
     aggregate.
         MR. SIEBER:  But there is some miniscule contribution to
     risk from each of the low risk-significant items that you wanted to
     downgrade.
         MR. GRANTOM:  From the lows, yes.
         MR. SIEBER:  And the question is, is that balanced by the
     safety improvements that you got by upgrading.
         MR. ROSEN:  We think unquestionably.  We really see it as a
     see-saw with all these grains of sand having almost no weight, versus
     two or three boulders on the other side, completely overwhelming.
         MR. SIEBER:  To me, that's significant, because when you
     talk about risk-informing regulations, the idea is that you don't want
     to degrade the safety posture of the plant in the process of
     risk-informing the regulations and it would be good to have some kind of
     feel like this if you've quantisized it instead of just having intuitive
     feel, that, in fact, when you risk-inform a program, that you end up
     safer.
         MR. ROSEN:  It's been our view --
         MR. SIEBER:  And perhaps cheaper.
         MR. ROSEN:  It's been our view all along that this would be
     a safer plant when we're done with this and will be a more efficient
     plant, as well.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I thought the question was, maybe it was
     answered, but that the risk-significance of these thousands of
     components has been determined on a component by component basis.
         MR. ROSEN:  Right.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Now you take 11,000 of them and you're
     moving them to another category, there may be a cumulative impact, but,
     again, I don't know how to calculate that, because we're dealing with a
     particular issue here that is not quantifiable.
         MR. ROSEN:  We don't think a risk-significant component, if
     its performance degrades significantly, would matter.  It's already not
     risk-significant.  We would detect it, in any event, because we continue
     our feedback loops and the condition reporting process on all these
     components.  We don't take anything out of our reporting system.
         In fact, we require it.  It's part of our operating quality
     assurance program that we look at these things.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That's an important element, I think.
         MR. ROSEN:  We would not -- we don't feel we'll have
     unintended consequences that go uncaught.
         DR. BONACA:  But you may have, at some point in the future,
     some higher component failure rate because of the replacement you're
     using, but it would take decades to really change your component failure
     rates and understand them.
         So we'll never be able to measure it.
         MR. ROSEN:  It would take decades and then we might
     ultimately --
         MR. BONACA:  But what matters is that, again, the example of
     a grain of sand.  I mean, if it is irrelevant, you don't focus resources
     on that.  You focus resources on something else which is more relevant,
     and I think that -- and the intelligence provided in the field and to
     the plant regarding what is important and what is not, I think, is an
     important contribution to safety.
         MR. ROSEN:  I think you make a very good point about the
     intelligence provided.  These results are embodied in what we call the
     risk significance basis documents, which are then transferred, not all
     the background information, but the heart of it, into our master
     equipment database, which is the tool that our work control people and
     maintenance people access on their computer screens every day.
         So when the man enters a tagged TPNS number, he gets a
     screen that tells him the risk significance of that component right
     away.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I think there is going to be a lot of
     interesting information that comes out of this, too, because there are a
     lot of competing effects, what's the value of a preventive maintenance
     activity in terms of the reliability that it gains for a component or
     another inspection.
         And I think what we're going to find is basically it doesn't
     gain very much for components that aren't worth very much.  Obviously,
     it's going to help for components that are worth more.  So, I mean, it
     becomes into a risk management perspective here in doing this.
         But there are going to be some competing effects along that
     line, which until we get the feedback and data and we start collecting
     data -- obviously, a lot of these components or most all these
     components are still embedded within the scope of the maintenance rule. 
     So there are controls that are there in place, both from a regulatory
     point of view and also our own corrective action programs identify
     non-conformances and deficiencies with these components, also.
         So we're going to have to -- there is going to be a little
     bit of a lag time, but I don't know that it would take decades, but I
     think we'll be identifying component deficiencies, just like we have
     been doing all along for both balance of plant side and NSSS sides.
         MR. ROSEN:  A few other insights that come from this graph,
     chart.  If you look at this circle, forget about these two for a minute,
     if we had designed this plant starting today with the knowledge that we
     have, we might not have a new set of regulations.  We might only have
     this circle.
         And this circle tells us only the risk significance.  It
     doesn't say safety-related or not safety-related.  It tells us that
     between low and not risk-significant.
         Eighty-six percent of the components in these systems are
     either not risk-significant or of low risk significance.  Only this one
     and this one, 14 percent together, the yellow and red, are the
     components upon which we should focus our attention, from procurement,
     design, construction, whatever point of view, operations point of view. 
     That's where the bang for the buck will be, from a regulatory
     perspective and from an operator perspective.
         I think that's an important insight and it's one, of course,
     we didn't have when we built this plant.
         So, now, let me ask you to make believe that this fits with
     the other slide, this is an 11-by-17 graph.  It looks something like
     that.  And pull over to the next slide and see what happens, what we do
     with this information.
         It's nice information, but the bottom line is what do you do
     with it.
         MR. GRANTOM:  This goes to implementation here.  If you can
     imagine how do we actually take this information, this risk-significance
     information, at this component level, and merge this to implementation
     in plant programs, and you're looking at one program here, just one
     program out of probably 200 that we've got at the station, this is one
     program treatment here in the maintenance control, in the work control
     arena.
         MR. ROSEN:  Right.  This is our work control program, work
     process control program.  This is the process through which our work
     control people tell the maintenance people what to do, how to do it.
         And for the things that are on the top line, which you will
     recall came across from the safety-related high risk significant
     components, what they tell them to do is do what you've been doing. 
     Five percent of the total systems, structures and components population
     continues to be restricted to the full maintenance application, continue
     to do all those things, the big package, the fully detailed work step by
     step.
         However, 94 percent of the population is now available,
     leaving this piece out, for two other forms of maintenance, minor and
     tool pouch maintenance, which are much more efficient ways of doing
     maintenance from the point of view of, first, building the packages, the
     work control packages, and from the point of view of actually
     implementing that work in the field.
         So what we see here in this chart is that a huge population
     in the plant becomes available for more effective and a more streamlined
     maintenance planning and maintenance work control.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I can add just a couple of little things here. 
     This is an important slide to realize from the implementation point of
     what it actually means to the utility at this point in time.
         When something is opened up for tool pouch maintenance or
     minor maintenance, that means I can go work on a component, I can send a
     craftsman out on a component, whereas before he had to have an entire
     pre-planned package, with QA/QC controls, he had to have independent
     verification, he has to have detailed work instructions on every step,
     initial and signoff, and it may be a job that he's done 100 times and a
     simple job, but when you open a component up to be able to do a tool
     pouch maintenance or minor maintenance, he needs very little.  Tool
     pouch maintenance needs very little, it's almost an electronic
     documentation of this is what -- I replaced the packing on the valve,
     per my training, and it goes to skill of the craft.
         We opened up more scope for the plant to be able to use
     skill of the craft, and these are the areas where the plant is going to
     grow into.  Skill of the craft will improve as a result of this because
     there is more of the station that they can apply it to.
         Minor maintenance is a little bit more complicated. But in
     the past, if it was safety-related, you didn't have the option to do
     minor maintenance, you didn't have the option to do tool pouch
     maintenance.  You had to have full pre-planned package for every job
     that was associated with a safety-related component.
         And that's a lot of money involved and a lot of process and
     a lot of burden involved in administering that.  And you can carry it
     all the way from pre-cal/post-cal of all the instruments to the actual
     archiving of the records in the records management system that have to
     be done for every one of those little jobs, but now with this type of
     grading that's allowed, well, you can handle it tool pouch, which has a
     much less restrictive and minor maintenance.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So the work processes are different.
         MR. GRANTOM:  It affects activities significantly and this
     is part of the other thing that a lot of people missed, I think, and
     initially people thought about procurement, but it goes to the
     activities.  It's how you treat that component, the strategy you use or
     that you're allowed to use to go and address a deficiency with a
     component.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Do you do any on-line maintenance?
         MR. GRANTOM:  Absolutely.  At South Texas, we --
         MR. ROSEN:  We do a tremendous amount of on-line maintenance
     using this kind of information on a basic PRA to help us understand
     configuration risk and because of the extent of our on-line maintenance,
     when we get to outages, we have a much more limited scope than we used
     to and South Texas now runs outages typically -- we hold the US PWR
     record for the shortest refueling outage, 17.5 days, and we typically
     plan the outages, sub-20 day outages.
         DR. BONACA:  How do you treat the medium risk significance? 
     Do you do it as basic maintenance?
         MR. GRANTOM:  It's allowed to be in basic maintenance.  I
     don't want to mislead you either.  They always have the option, even if
     it's on a non-risk-significant component, if the maintenance task is
     just extremely complex or complicated, they can still do it as a
     pre-planned package.  Basically you have to look at it as the spectrum
     of maintenance treatments that they're allowed on a given component.
         MR. BONACA:  I was curious, because I saw that that is
     appearing in this slide.  I mean, essentially you kept the high risk
     significance, which you do as full maintenance, and the rest you do
     really under basic.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Yes.  They can do -- full maintenance is only
     allowed on the high risk significance items.  Basic maintenance is
     allowed on the others, but you can always upgrade if you have to.  You
     could do full maintenance on a medium risk component or a low risk
     component and that would be basically predicated on the complexity of
     the task and that type of thing.
         One thing I did want to bring -- I know this is talking
     about maintenance application, but if you could think about it, if you
     could use your imagination here, just to scratch out the word
     maintenance and do design engineering or system engineering or
     operations or training.
         You name an organization --
         MR. ROSEN:  One of the key places where we've taken some
     advantage of this, it doesn't show on this chart, other than
     procurement, which we still have a problem with, is in preventive
     maintenance frequencies.  How often do you do preventive maintenance on
     a component?
         Well, someone ought to be taking into account the risk
     significance of that component, as well as its performance.  So if a
     component has been doing well performance-wise, every time we take it
     apart it's okay, and it's not risk-significant, surely we should be
     extending the frequencies of maintenance, and we have.  We've --
         MR. BARTON:  You've got the same option on a component
     that's risk-significant.
         MR. ROSEN:  We do.
         MR. BARTON:  For preventive maintenance.
         MR. ROSEN:  We do, but there we would go with more -- we
     would be a little bit more concerned about doing that with a component
     that has had a good performance history, but it's very risk-significant. 
     Maybe there we would say the reason it's had a good performance history
     is because we're doing so much maintenance.
         So let's keep on doing it there because of its risk
     significance.  On the other hand, for a component that's not
     risk-significant that's had a good performance history, we're willing to
     tolerate a little increased -- more failure in service, if we see it,
     because it doesn't matter.  It's a so what.  When it happens, we would
     say, okay, I guess we went too far with that, let's tighten the
     maintenance back up again and without having incurred any additional
     risk during that period.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I feel compelled to make one other quick
     statement here.  I know we have this word maintenance, but I'm going to
     ask you also to use your imagination and think of motor-operated valves,
     air-operated valves, whatever generic letter comes out that wants us to
     do a treatment on all safety-related components, if they use that word
     or that terminology with us, in this type of a process, what we would do
     is we would apply this type of a process to figure out what's the proper
     treatment for the high risk significant components versus the low risk
     significant components, and that's why this is -- if you can get to that
     point, you can see that this directly leads into option two and it also
     directly leads into option three.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Has the staff, though, accepted your new
     classification?
         MR. ROSEN:  Yes.
         MR. GRANTOM:  They've approved the SER that has the
     description of this process in it.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The process.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But have they actually accepted --
         MR. ROSEN:  The staff has not done an inspection of this,
     except as the residents have looked at it.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  According to the staff now, do you really
     have only 3,400-and-some high and medium?
         MR. ROSEN:  We have the same number of safety-related
     components.  The non-safety-related components we always have.  We
     haven't changed that.  What we've done is told ourselves what of those
     components -- which of those components are risk significant.  We have a
     new set of documents called risk significance basis documents that go
     alongside our design basis documents and we are following the process
     that we told the staff we would follow in the OQAP when they approved
     it, and they are welcome to come and look in great detail, down to the
     last element of detail with us.
         It's a fully scrutable set of processes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So are you implementing what you're
     showing right now?
         MR. GRANTOM:  Yes.  This procedure right here that does
     this, if you can see down here, it says this was incorporated in plant
     general procedure 03ZA90, Rev. 20.  This was incorporated in there.
         MR. ROSEN:  The answer is yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So the fact, then the staff has accepted
     your classification here.
         MR. GRANTOM:  They've accepted the classification, but Mr.
     Rosen points out the point, and you're where we are, I believe, is even
     though we have this information, we haven't changed anything.  All the
     components are still safety-related and we couldn't change the
     classification of them being safety-related to something else because of
     the special treatment requirements and the other things that came into
     play that we heard about earlier.
         So we haven't really been able to achieve the benefits or
     the full implementation because of where we are.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So you are still treating all 15,221
     components of the previous slide the way everybody else is treating
     them.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Sure.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Even though you have done all this
     analysis.
         MR. ROSEN:  It's required by regulation.
         MR. GRANTOM:  We can do our maintenance different now,
     though, because I didn't have -- we didn't have to go to the staff to be
     able to do a different treatment on here and we do have a graded QA
     process, also.  So we're able to implement something on the activity
     level, but I can't take the component and reclassify it to be a
     non-safety-related component.
         MR. ROSEN:  So how did -- you know, we tried to get at that
     and I think we talk about that in the next slide.
         DR. POWERS:  Before you step forward.  You have, at the
     bottom of your slide, inclusive of a variety of systems, with a lot of
     acronyms, most of which I can figure out.  Would you point out to me
     which of those are your fire protection, fire shutdown, safe shutdown,
     fire suppression, fire detection system?
         MR. ROSEN:  Those are not in there.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I can real quickly go through there.  There is
     aux feed water, component cooling water.
         DR. POWERS:  I don't need a translation of them all.  I want
     to know which ones are --
         MR. GRANTOM:  Fire protection --
         DR. POWERS:  And if fire protection is not in there, does
     that mean that in your risk assessment, you didn't include fire as
     initiator?
         MR. GRANTOM:  No.  It means we haven't analyzed the system
     yet.
         MR. ROSEN:  Fire protection equipment is still being treated
     just the way we always treated it.  We haven't applied a risk
     significance basis to any of that equipment yet.
         DR. POWERS:  I guess what I'm trying to understand is how
     complete -- when you go through and do your risk classification in high,
     medium and low, how complete is the PRA?  Does it include fire as
     initiator?
         MR. ROSEN:  Yes.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Yes.
         DR. POWERS:  And it includes operation during shutdown modes
     and things like that.
         MR. GRANTOM:  It includes -- our PRA includes external
     events, special interactions, fire PRA, seismic PRA.
         MR. ROSEN:  And we have a shutdown model.
         MR. GRANTOM:  And we have a separate shutdown model, but we
     didn't use the shutdown model for this analysis because I had not
     brought it into configuration control space yet.  We have specific
     requirements and procedures for our at-power model to be in
     configuration control space and that was done qualitatively.
         We will be bringing the shutdown model into configuration
     control space and we'll be evaluating those components. But shutdown was
     considered and is an important fact in the risk significance
     determination process.
         These represent the systems that we have analyzed. We have
     not analyzed all the systems at the plant.  When we get to fire
     protection, then it would be looked at in that light and you would get
     the fire scenarios that come out of the PRA from that point of view.
         Until the system is analyzed, there are no changes.  It's
     treated the same as it's always been.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  What's your low power shutdown CDF
     compared to ours?  Do you remember?
         MR. ROSEN:  Yes, I do.  We don't think it's as certain. 
     There's a lot more uncertainty in our low power and shutdown model than
     we think is in our at-power model.  Our at-power model for South Texas,
     remember, it's a unique plant, with three safety trains.  Right now
     we're saying our core damage frequency for at-power is about
     1E-to-the-minus six.  For the last three outages at South Texas, the
     core damage frequency that we're calculating is about
     4E-to-the-minus-five.  We think that's too high by a factor of two,
     maybe a factor of four.
         I said these same things at the lower power and shutdown
     risk workshop that the NRC conducted and my conclusion was that although
     our model for shutdown was as conservative as -- probably conservative
     by as much as a factor of four.
         If you grant that, then 4E-to-the-minus-five becomes
     1E-to-the-minus-six, by dividing, and we think we are -- well, no, I'm
     sorry.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Why?
         MR. ROSEN:  We're talking about --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  A factor of ten?
         MR. ROSEN:  I'm sorry.  The 4E-to-the-minus-five is probably
     more like 1E-to-the-minus-five.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yes.
         MR. ROSEN:  And our model now is showing around 1E to 1.3 or
     something like that, at-power model, one to 1.3, 1.5 perhaps,
     E-to-the-minus-six.
         So what we're saying is that shutdown risk is very
     significant at South Texas.
     DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It's an order of magnitude, roughly.
         MR. ROSEN:  Well, not quite so much, but at least as -- on
     the order of being important and the reason I'm hedging is because we're
     not so confident of the shutdown model and its directly comparability to
     the at-power model.  But the conclusion we were able to reach, without
     any big debate at South Texas, was -- what we could agree on was that
     these risks are comparable.
         The amount of risk we get in an outage, one outage, is about
     equal to the amount of risk we get throughout the year from the at-power
     risk.
         DR. SEALE:  That's very interesting.
         DR. POWERS:  Can you give us an insight on what your fire
     CDF is?
         MR. GRANTOM:  It runs at about close to 5E-minus-seven for
     those.
         MR. ROSEN:  Part of the reason for that very low number, Dr.
     Powers, is that South Texas is a heavily segregated plant, with three
     safety trains.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Yes.  Very separated systems and we find that
     most of the shutdown risk occurs in the one window of the front-end
     mid-loops for a PWR, and that's where you generate the most risk.
         MR. ROSEN:  One of the insights about shutdown risk that we
     have is that it's very different than character from at-power risk. 
     At-power risk tends to be relatively homogeneous.  Shutdown risk is very
     heterogeneous.  It comes in very, very distinct peaks and clumps.  There
     are periods when it's very safe to be shutdown, when you have the core
     offloaded, for example, and there are periods when it's not -- when you
     have some higher risk, for instance, at an early mid-loop operation.
         MR. MARKLEY:  But you don't do a 17-day outage offloading
     core.
         MR. GRANTOM:  We offload the core completely.
         MR. ROSEN:  We've always done that.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Full core offload.  What you don't see is all
     the train-related work that can now be done at power, local leakage rate
     test that Appendix J requires us to do that are not risk-significant,
     that we --
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Did you go, in your low power shutdown
     PRA, beyond what the two national laboratories have done for Surry, I
     believe, and Grand Gulf, or did you follow more or less the same
     approach?
         MR. GRANTOM:  I don't understand the question.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  A number of years ago, Sandia and BNL
     published PRAs for shutdown modes that were kind of selective.  They
     selected the modes and they said in our judgment, these are the most
     important ones, and they did the PRA.
         And human error, of course, was very important.  I mean, did
     you do a similar thing in your PRA or did you go start it from scratch
     and you identified all the modes of operation and initiating events and
     so on?  How complete is it compared to the power PRA?
         MR. GRANTOM:  We were able to use most of the systems
     analysis directly from the at-power portion, and adding just a few
     systems, like spent fuel pool cooling.  We did some initiating event
     screening and reviews, but it was not as rigorous as the at-power model.
         Plus, we didn't go through all of the plant modes and do
     specific plant initiating event searches during each plant mode for
     power descension and then back up for power ascension.
         Primarily looked at standard initiating events that had
     occurred at that point, and that's why I say we're still moving that
     into configuration control space and still improving that model.
         The systems analysis portion is very good.  Some of the
     phenomenology I think is still rough and I also think that there is more
     than can be done in the initiating event screening.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  How about the human performance?
         MR. GRANTOM:  Human performance is in there for operator
     actions that are included in -- currently included in our procedures and
     those are included.  So in that regard, I think we have a fairly good
     treatment of human actions.
         If you're going to expand human actions to be human-induced
     actions, such as drain-down events or other types of things, that's a
     little bit looser, rougher.
         MR. ROSEN:  That's why we have that factor of four feeling
     that we're not so sure about the exact number of shutdowns.
         DR. POWERS:  Your factor of four was going down and it seems
     to me that this looseness takes it the other direction.
         MR. ROSEN:  Potentially.  But in discussing with the staff,
     most of the people think it's conservative overall.
         MR. GRANTOM:  We do have some conservative treatment of the
     initial cool-down period and going to operator actions and losses of
     coolant during the initial cool-down.  We have some conservatism there
     that we're trying to work through.  We have a different result than
     other plants have, for some reason.
         MR. ROSEN:  Okay.  I'd like to turn to the final few slides,
     and leave a few more gratuitous points with you as you consider going
     forward.
         It seems to us that as you go forward to risk-inform the
     individual sections of Part 50, the lesson learned from our experience
     was that we really can't get the procurement benefit that we needed and
     that we intended to get and justify the endeavor on the basis of without
     the special treatment requirements being addressed.
         We tried to get at this problem -- next slide.  We tried to
     get at this problem just recently with the staff.  We had a meeting with
     Gary Holahan and his crew, when we described this problem to them, and
     the judgment we got was that we could perhaps take our not
     risk-significant components that are safety-related and change the
     classification to non-safety-related from safety-related on the basis of
     -- and you do that using 50.59.
         And that was a bit of a revelation to us that the staff felt
     that way.  We weren't so sure that that was okay. So we wrote a letter
     to the staff and posed that question, with lots of communication back
     and forth to the staff.
         And we got a letter back from them on May 28th, saying, yes,
     indeed, you can change the classification of safety-related components
     from safety-related to not safety-related if they're not risk
     significant and you can do that using Part 50.59, which means that we
     don't have to come in on a one by one basis and ask permission.
         And I was kind of elated when I got the letter and I was
     sort of surprised by the staff's reaction, my staff's reaction to it and
     the licensing staff's reaction, and the design engineering staff's
     reaction, which was it's ambiguous.
         If you read the letter, the cover letter, the first two
     pages before the signature, it didn't seem very ambiguous to me.
         When you read the nine concerns in the enclosure attached to
     it, taken together, it comes out ambiguous.
         So the fact of the matter is, the bottom line is we haven't
     done anything, because we're still on square zero trying to figure out
     what that letter meant and did it really give us the room to maneuver.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I'd like to just add one quick thing to what
     Steve said.  The good analogy that I guess our design engineering
     manager says, he thought it was kind of a yellow light that was turning
     red and we thought it was a yellow light that was green but had gone to
     yellow.
         So we weren't really -- and one of the discussions that came
     up was, well, we need to just not use safety-related, let's just leave
     safety-related and let's just call it risk-significant and just treat
     things differently, risk-significant, and just leave it safety-related,
     because we're going to get in too much trouble if we try to take
     something that's safety-related and move it to non-safety-related.
         So we're kind of stuck in this quandary with the design
     engineering group.
         DR. WALLIS:  It seems to me it's a pretty straightforward
     question.  You want to take these from this box and put them in that
     one.
         MR. ROSEN:  And we want to use 50.59.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Because when you get to the 50.59 question
     that says, well, the change may cause an increase in the probability of
     a malfunction of a component, "may" is a pretty open-ended thing.
         And they hung up and that defaults to USQ at that point in
     time and staff approval and --
         MR. ROSEN:  Plant operations review committee approval,
     nuclear safety review board approval, submission to the NRC.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Everything locks down, the whole application.
         MR. ROSEN:  We get to unreviewed safety questions, you stop.
         DR. POWERS:  Do the revisions that the staff has put forward
     and proposed for 50.59 get rid of that problem for you?
         MR. ROSEN:  I don't know yet, Dr. Powers.  We haven't really
     finished our review of that.  Our initial discussions with our licensing
     people looking at the current proposed revisions, and I guess NEI will
     have their own view of it, is they don't go far enough.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I don't believe it goes far enough.
         DR. WALLIS:  I just wonder if these are minimal changes or
     not.
         MR. GRANTOM:  It doesn't allow quantification, it doesn't
     allow the de minimus treatment, and, to me, it's not that risk-informed.
         DR. KRESS:  If the new risk-informed 50.59 came out, you
     would recommend that some measure of RAW, which is what you're probably
     -- and these other ways, would be a good way to decide 50.59 space,
     also.
         MR. GRANTOM:  We would probably say that the
     risk-significance determination process that has been reviewed and
     approved by the staff is an appropriate way to answer the 50.59 issues
     there and that we could go forward.  We don't even think we would have
     needed the clarification letter or the exemption request we're dealing
     with.
         DR. KRESS:  I'm not quite sure your cutoff value for the
     line between high, medium and low is, in terms of risk significance, the
     right one to use for 50.59.  But I certainly think that's an attractive
     thought to look at that.
         You may want to -- for 50.59, that number may want to be
     different.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Keep in mind, we wouldn't just use the PRA, we
     use the blended process.
         DR. KRESS:  Blended process.
         MR. GRANTOM:  At the end of that.  So it would still be a
     blended process that we would -- and we probably categorize things as
     non-risk-significant components, the low risk significant components
     would be candidates for this reclassification.
         MR. ROSEN:  In any event, however it's done, this bullet on
     this slide, that to be fully effective, Part 50.59 needs to
     unambiguously allow risk-informed judgments to be applied, is the
     objective.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So the statement of minimal changes is
     ambiguous, in your judgment.
         MR. GRANTOM:  The same as "may cause," the same as "may
     cause," same as "could cause."
         DR. WALLIS:  Thank you very much.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Are you dismissing them?
         DR. WALLIS:  No.  That's what I have been trying to say,
     too.
         DR. BONACA:  It doesn't allow you to make your calculation
     probabilities.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Do you want to continue?
         MR. ROSEN:  Yes.  We have only a few other points we wanted
     to make, and that -- whatever is done to Part 50.59, it must allow the
     programs, activities, structures, systems, and components to be graded
     commensurate with their importance to safety.
         That's what we have been trying to do here and have found it
     very difficult in the current environment and are only getting part of
     the benefit that we anticipate.  Of the $2 million I hope to get per
     year, we hope to get per year, we're probably getting ten to 15 percent
     of it out of some of the other things we're doing, that we could do
     within our authority, without crossing the boundary.
         DR. WALLIS:  The NRC policy only allows ten percent at a
     time.
         MR. ROSEN:  Well, it's a credit I think to our thick hide
     and our perseverance that we're still continuing, nevertheless, even
     though we haven't gotten the benefit that we expected.  We think it's
     the right thing to do for the industry and South Texas to do this thing.
         MR. GRANTOM:  I don't know exactly how it can be done, but
     I'm certain there are ways it could be, but you think about the special
     treatment requirements and you would think, in a reg guide or in some
     other guidance document, that there would be a strategy for high risk
     significant components, that there would be a different strategy for
     things that you would consider to be low risk components.
         That's not unlike the approach that's being used in the ASME
     arena for the O&M code cases that are coming up for motor-operated
     valves and pumps.  They're using a similar kind of approach there.
         And when you get to option three and you're going to go and
     look at the individual regulations themselves and change their technical
     content, the regulations, at least it's my feeling, need to have the
     flexibility in there to allow a grading to be done, a different strategy
     commensurate with its risk significance, and to address the ones we were
     talking about there from the second bullet, or have it handled in a
     guidance document.
         And I think at that point in time, option three becomes a
     very tractable thing.  You have the scoping taken care of, you have the
     risk significance process that puts them in the right classifications,
     then you have the right strategies per the regulations that build the
     risk information into it.  So I think it can work very well.
         MR. ROSEN:  Our final point is only this last one on the
     slide.  That we are preparing an exemption request, so that we can move
     ahead and get the benefits that we anticipated.  We think that is
     directly in line with what option two envisioned and we're moving in
     that direction, and Rick is holding it in his hand.  The only reason
     he's not dropping it on the table is it hasn't been signed by our
     executives yet, but I expect it will be shortly.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Maybe even today, but I was pushing for at
     least Monday to have it signed.
         MR. ROSEN:  So with that, thank you very much.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Thank you very much for your time.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Thank you very much.  This was very
     informative, again, as it has been in the past.
         Mr. Heymer, you have something to say.
         MR. HEYMER:  Very briefly.
         MR. ROSEN:  We'll stay here in case there are any questions.
         MR. HEYMER:  Good afternoon.  My name is Adrian Heymer.  I'm
     a Project Manager at NEI in the regulatory reform group.
         I apologize for not having my name on the slide.  I swung
     past this morning and picked them up and it wasn't until I got on the
     train that I realized it hadn't done the formalities.
         Steve Floyd, our Director, sends his apologies.  He had a
     conflicting engagement.  Otherwise, he would be here speaking instead of
     me.
         I think what I've heard here today is gratifying.  The
     industry is pleased to see that the NRC has decided to move forward in
     improving its regulations, and we see that it really focuses on
     improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of the regulations using
     risk insights or blended approach of risk insights, operating
     experience, and deterministic analysis.
         The NRC has moved forward as we go into a restructured
     environment, just not in this area, but in other areas.  They have been
     very proactive and we're pleased to see that.
         I think, to be frank, we would like to see a little bit more
     movement, especially on option two than we've seen to date.  But I was
     gratified to see some of the points that were made today and I think
     some of our thoughts are beginning to converge, especially when I saw
     some of the criteria that were out there.
         What I want to talk to you today is a little bit about our
     overall implementation plan we see for option two and three and we have
     a slightly different twist on things, but hopefully that will improve
     matters.
         We, in fact, believe there are four phases, we call them
     phases, perhaps that's the wrong term, because they're not really
     sequential.  They do run in parallel and we do think it leads off the
     oversight and the new NRC licensee assessment process, the oversight and
     enforcement activities that are ongoing.  There's nine pilots underway,
     as you well know.
     And to lead off into the other areas, and we think the other areas are
     the SSC scope, which is what we see as option two, and we think that is
     just, as the NRC explained, coming up with a definition and we think the
     definition is associated with safety significant.
     We have tried -- we have a small task force at NEI, along with a working
     group, the regulatory -- the risk-informed regulation working group and
     the Part 50 task force, floated a couple of suggestions for such a
     definition associated with safety significant SSCs.  We're still working
     on that.  It's not an easy task, but we hope that at the next meeting
     with the NRC staff to at least get down and start discussing what
     perhaps that proposal might be for a definition.
         And I don't think it's too far removed from what I heard
     today in some of the slides.
         Phase three is the technical requirements.  We think this is
     a longer-term action plan.  We think we can get on the move on the phase
     two, option two pretty quickly.
         On phase three, I think you've got to do it with a little
     bit more thought than just say do it.  There are some issues that are on
     the table there, which ones to go for first, where is the most benefit,
     is there consistency.  We've been really focusing on phase two.  We have
     given some thought to phase three, some of the regulations jump off the
     page at you fairly quickly, and at first sort of gut feel is let's go
     after that, but I think both the NRC and ourselves are smart enough to
     say let's wait and see.
         DR. WALLIS:  Can you give an example of the ones that jump
     off the page at you?
         MR. HEYMER:  50.46.
         DR. WALLIS:  What part of that particularly?
         MR. HEYMER:  I think when you look at that and you look at
     the risk-informing of the regulations and what is covered by ECCS and
     then look at the way we treat some of those activities and then see what
     we've come up with in some of the risk-informed pilot projects that
     we've worked on, I think that one says perhaps it's worthwhile at least
     looking at that or taking a look to say is it worthwhile assessing that
     from a benefit perspective first.
         DR. WALLIS:  I was wondering if they jumped off the page
     because you already saw there were benefits. You haven't gotten that
     far.
         MR. HEYMER:  I think deep down people say yes, there are
     benefits.  But if you then follow through and say, well, quantify those
     benefits, are you sure the benefits are there, how does it relate, if
     you really changed that regulation, really think it through, I think
     you've got to stop yourself and do that before you actually plow into
     that.  It will be a fairly intense exercise.
         Phase four is the administrative regulations and we pulled
     this out separately because we think there are some activities that are
     underway associated with 52.73, 50.72 and 50.73, with 50.59.
         That if you go forward now with a rulemaking, you've got a
     rulemaking on top of a rulemaking and we're not quite sure how that
     would turn out.    
         You've got a rulemaking exercise and then we come in with a
     petition or the NRC goes forward with another rulemaking, you've got two
     going forward, and we think that might be a little bit complex and
     difficult to handle.  So that's why we pulled those out separately.
         But we see those going on as parallel activities.  Going
     back, phase one is off and running.  We would like to -- we are
     considering moving forward and coming in with a package associated with
     phase two and we've been given a target date to look at of September the
     30th, and I will speak more a little bit about that in a moment or two.
         Suffice it to say we got rulemakings, we've got guideline
     developments, as they're needed.  We've got pilot projects as they're
     needed and as necessary.  And I think we would agree with some of the
     comments made here today that you don't need the pilot projects for
     everything, but there are some activities that it's worthwhile having a
     pilot project for to test implementation phase and to test the -- assess
     the benefits, are the benefits really there.
         DR. WALLIS:  Have you found that this South Texas project is
     useful for developing your arguments for phase two?
         MR. HEYMER:  South Texas is part of the graded QA activities
     that went on before.  They're very much seen as an industry icebreaker. 
     I think the industry -- there is a lot of activities that South Texas do
     that has its benefits on an industry-wide basis.  That is not to say
     that everybody will go down the same path as South Texas or go to the
     same extent as South Texas has done in some of their analysis.
         I think South Texas has gone the extra mile to prove the
     process, but perhaps we don't have to go there.
         DR. WALLIS:  Because they seemed to get to a point where
     they thought they had proved a lot of things and then the NRC came back
     with something called ambiguous.  I don't think you want to make a lot
     more out of that.
         MR. HEYMER:  Well, you've got to change the regulations, but
     I think what we would like to get to a position is where the industry
     gets as far as perhaps South Texas did and because of what the work
     South Texas has done, gets an acknowledgement and an understanding that
     that is satisfactory, rather than having to go and perform further
     analysis.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Is that what you said?
         DR. WALLIS:  I thought you'd be saying this is great support
     of our position.  Something needs to be come about SSC scope and look at
     the South Texas analysis and look how NRC didn't respond to it in an
     unambiguous way.
         I'm surprised you're not making it as a strong argument for
     moving things along.    
         MR. HEYMER:  I think what we would like -- what we intend to
     do is to come in and come up with a process that's very similar to South
     Texas, but as the South Texas people here have noted, that they've come
     up and running to an area where they're not quite sure if they've got
     the go-ahead of not.  And I think what they've done, many in the
     industry believe is sufficient and I think if they have to do much more
     and if the industry has to do a lot more to actually go and get the full
     measure, there may be pause for thought.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I guess the question is, or at least the
     way I understand it is NEI using the lessons learned from the South
     Texas experience.  For example, in option three, it seems to me the
     message is clear from them that you should risk-inform 50.59, at least
     one of the messages.
         MR. HEYMER:  And we totally agree with that.  South Texas is
     on our task force.  They're helping us write the guideline for an
     industry-wide guideline for categorizing SSCs into safety-significance. 
     They're totally immersed in the other risk-informed activities that we
     have.
         So I think the lessons learned are folded back in and
     perhaps tempered a little bit by some people saying, well, perhaps if we
     did it this way, it might be a little bit better, and South Texas can
     bring their insights into that with their interactions with the NRC.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.
         MR. HEYMER:  One other element that is not up there, which
     is just as important, and I think the NRC staff and the industry really
     focused on it, was a communication plan for each of these four phases to
     get the message out.
         The first bullet we've really touched on, a model improving
     safety, we really said, is improving the focus on safety in order that
     we can have a much more efficient and effective method of allocating
     resources to those things that are important.
         There has been a fair bit of discussion today about
     voluntary and selective.  I think if you look at the composition of the
     industries today, where we have four NSSS vendors with various designs,
     we have a multitude of architect engineers, consultants and contractors
     who help us improve and implement those designs.  We have 60-plus
     owners, each with a different view of where they want to go.
         There is a recognition that we are safe today.  If we're
     going to go forward, I want to make further improvements in efficiency
     and effectiveness, and I think that should be on a voluntary basis.
         I think once you've made that step and say, yes, I want to
     go down through option B to Part 50, which is risk-informing the
     risk-informed elements of Part 50, I think once you start getting into
     that, to start picking and choosing, you might run into some efficiency
     problems of your own.
         So it might be self-revealing that once you start down the
     path, you keep going.  How far you go is a matter of resources to
     implement those activities and the benefits that they have, but I think
     once you start going down that path, you are faced with do I have two
     different systems, do I have two different inspection regimes to deal
     with.  It does become a little bit more difficult, but I think the
     option should still be there.
     We think the phased approach to rulemaking and what we see is that
     probably would be the definition and introduction of the definition of
     safety-significant, the introduction of option B, and the categorization
     of SSCs into two new buckets or groups would be one rule, and then be
     applied individually to various regulations.
         That's on the scoping side.  On the technical side, it will
     be a number of rulemakings for each specific regulation.  So on one
     hand, you have one rulemaking and a phased implementation associated
     with each regulation based on benefit and need.  On the other hand, you
     have numerous rulemakings associated with specific regulations that
     would actually make them risk-informed.
         So rulemaking one, which is the scope, would just replace
     the term safety-related with safety-significant, in simple terms. 
     There's a little bit more to it than that.
     Introduce the term safety-significant SSCs and introduce the option B,
     on the technical aspects you would go into and risk-inform, for example,
     50.59 under option three.
         As we move through this, we think the scope and all these
     activities, there needs to be a consistency and what we're looking at is
     using just not PRA itself, but a blend, a blend of risk insights from
     the PRA, operating experience, new analytical techniques or new
     technologies, as they've come along in the past 20 or 30 years, that we
     can take benefit of.
         On the consistency issue, we've put this slide up a couple
     of times to try and show what we mean.  It's that if you look at phases
     one and two, the outside oval or egg is the existing regulatory scope,
     as we see it, and we have a much more focused approach, looking at the
     things that are really are important from the assessment perspective.
         It's only right that we focus on the regulations and the
     oversight process focuses on the same things.  But when you look at the
     regulations and you go to a risk-informed, it's a little bit more than
     just this oval here, in fact, because you are using risk insights,
     perhaps you're not talking about -- it's more perhaps -- you're not
     talking about just being corralled by the design basis events.  You're
     going beyond that.
         So, therefore, the more focused circle moves somewhat out of
     the regulatory scope and it's only right that once you start doing that,
     that the oversight process also does that.  So that's how we're trying
     to ensure the consistency and why we believe it's important that we move
     ahead and adjust the SSC scope and to make phases one and two, as we
     called them, consistent.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So you're introducing now a new
     terminology, safety-focused, scope and oversight process.  I haven't
     seen that before.
         MR. HEYMER:  I wouldn't say it's a new -- it's just a --
     it's a way of summarizing what we're trying to do, is we're trying to
     improve the safety focus of the regulations.
         DR. WALLIS:  I'm getting the impression that the shaded area
     is smaller than the other one.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  They're expected to be smaller.
         MR. HEYMER:  You're saying that the actual improved scope
     could be bigger than the existing scope.
         DR. WALLIS:  You gain something on the left.
         MR. HEYMER:  Yes, it does.  It's just a diagram.
         DR. WALLIS:  I don't see what it's got to do with
     consistency.
         MR. HEYMER:  What we're trying to show here is that the --
     if you're focusing on a certain set of attributes, they should be
     consistent with the attributes reflected in the regulations.
         DR. WALLIS:  The two ellipses should overlay.
         MR. HEYMER:  Yes.
         DR. WALLIS:  You take one above and overlay them.
         MR. HEYMER:  Yes.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So what would be the current --
     description of the current system using this terminology?  It's not
     focused or is it overly focused?
         MR. HEYMER:  It's focused.  What we want to do is improve
     the focus.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Improve the focus.
         MR. HEYMER:  These are some of the regulations that we're
     thinking of looking at from the complete perspective.  This is phases
     two and three and also phase four.  They're not all on here.  Some might
     call this a sunburst, some might call it a prickly pear.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Do you have any ideas how you would
     risk-inform license renewal?
         MR. HEYMER:  I think it goes along the lines of the SSC
     scope, looking at that, and then saying you -- that's just from phase
     two.  On phase three, I think if you're changing the regulations on
     phase three, it's automatically picked up in Part 54.  But I think some
     of the wording in Part 54, I think you might have to adjust a little bit
     to reduce the ambiguity of what are we really looking at here.
         I think it's a fairly straightforward and simple change. 
     We've had a brief discussion with those that NEI who deal with license
     renewal and we've put this up as a strawman to them.  We are looking at
     it.  We may or may not go ahead with it, but at least it's worthwhile
     putting on the table to make sure people recognize that we are looking
     beyond Part 50.
         One area that is a little bit difficult and we think will
     require special treatment is Part 21, and that's just the way Part 21 is
     written and relates to the term basic component and where basic
     component is defined.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Would you remind us what Part 21 is?
         MR. HEYMER:  It's reporting of defects and deficiencies.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Okay.
         MR. HEYMER:  And whether or not we want to change that to be
     associated with just safety-significant SSCs, but I think we then have
     to take a close look at the Atomic Energy Act, because it sort of all
     emanates out of there.  So that is a little bit of a unique case.
         DR. BONACA:  For license renewal, however, I mean, you
     wouldn't make a special exception for license renewal to change your
     definition of systems and components which are safety-related.  You
     would have to change it under the current license term before you move
     to license renewal.
         MR. HEYMER:  Exactly.  But I mean, just from a consistency
     perspective, if you're changing in Part 50, just make the same change in
     Part 54 what you're doing.
         DR. BONACA:  It would be an extension, of course.
         MR. HEYMER:  Yes.  That's all it is.  It's a consistency
     issue.
         As regards categorization, this just sort of is a graphic
     that depicts what we're trying to do.  On the left-hand side here is
     where we are today with the various terms.  You go through a process by
     which it's blended using very similar to what South Texas explained to
     you, PRA insights, operating experience, engineering analysis, come out
     of that, have an expert panel or plant review by knowledgeable people
     and come up with two new or three new or four new categories.
         We've put two down here.  That doesn't preclude the option
     that you might want to grade further in either major boxes.  The reason
     why I've got a dotted line there across here, you start off with this is
     where we are today with the terminology and you just come up with one
     safety-significant SSC and others you could have high safety
     significance and low safety significance, but judging by the discussions
     we had about four years ago about using such terms, we just came up with
     safety significant and other.
         But when you do this, obviously, some components are
     safety-related will end up as other, and others that are
     non-safety-related, as you heard earlier today, end up being in this
     category.
         The thing is that when some of the components up here come
     down here, they may be specifically related to a regulation and until
     you go in and change that regulation, risk-inform that regulation, you
     are still loaded with the regulatory requirements associated with that
     system or component or structure.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  What is the significance in the left
     column there of having the dotted line and then important to safety,
     significant to safety?  Are these terms that are used in addition to
     safety-related?
         MR. HEYMER:  Yes.  In regulations, you have safety-related,
     you have important to safety, you have important to safe shutdown.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And these are treated as if they were
     safety-related.
         MR. HEYMER:  Semi safety-related, yes.  You have quality
     requirements, not necessarily the full Appendix B, but certainly
     specific requirements laid on these.  So that was just a pictorial
     representation.-- using the same terms, but I think because we have so
     much familiarity with it.
         DR. BONACA:  Could you put it back?  Just for clarification. 
     I mean, that's true that the regulation had that classification there,
     but South Texas originally put in these components into that because
     they did not take advantage of the QA, and now you're going to go to QA.
         What I mean is that Appendix B always allowed you to grade
     the ranking or you didn't have a tool to do that before, now you do.  So
     your main obstacle now is 50.59.
         So I'm trying to understand how you go from --
         MR. HEYMER:  Yes.  I think 50.59 is one.  I think culture is
     another.  I mean, you could probably do this by having the same -- using
     the same terms.  But I think because we have so much familiarity with
     it.
         DR. BONACA:  You're not changing Appendix B.
         MR. HEYMER:  No.
         DR. BONACA:  You're just simply modifying your rankings.
         MR. ROSEN:  The main obstacles are two, 50.59 and the
     special treatment.
         MR. HEYMER:  This is a slide that when we discussed with the
     staff, we spent quite a bit of time on it.  The categorization is what
     we just discussed over here on the left and as you go through that
     process, you end up with basically two bins, safety-significant SSCs and
     other.
         As you come across, you can grade here, so this box at the
     top may be related to the EQ components.  The whole box here maybe
     related to the maintenance rule scope.  And in addition to that, once
     you've done the SSC scope, if you go in and look at the specific
     regulation associated with that and risk-inform that regulation, it may
     change again.
     So the regulations really relate to the safety-significant SSCs.  When
     you drop below the line, except in the -- the exception that I just
     described about safety-related SSCs that now become other or low
     safety-significant, but still are linked to some specific regulation,
     there is -- the regulations do not apply.
         However, normal business practices would still be employed
     and would still govern, because I think as you're well aware today, to
     maintain a good capacity factor, maintain operation, maintain good
     material condition, which is the only way you can do some of the things
     we do today, you have to have reasonable and good controls, from a
     business perspective.
         Those controls will be down here.  For SSCs that move up,
     you would look at those and say, well, what's really caused them to move
     up, what is the specific attribute that has caused them to become
     safety-significant, and then you would apply controls that are
     commensurate with those attributes or whatever that may be, whether it's
     seismic, whether it's pump flow or whether it's EQ, what scenario is it
     related to.
         Oversight and regulation, here we say it's just the process
     that's being put in place today.  The performance indicator and
     significance determination process.  So on safety-significant SSCs, you
     could get Nov or non-cited violations.
         You could still -- there is still NRC oversight on the lower
     category, but on event-driven basis, and if something happened down here
     in one of these that resulted in the event, obviously you would want to
     know why, from a licensee perspective, and I think that would just give
     you a notch to go back and look at the categorization, but also we fully
     anticipate and expect the NRC to be interested in that, what happened,
     was it related to some change in categorization, what controls have you
     put on that, what are you doing about trying to ensure that that doesn't
     happen again.
         That's where we see ourselves going.  In timeframe-wise, I
     told you about phase two and we hope to come in in the fall.  Phase
     three, we do see that as a longer-term effort.  We haven't really
     focused on that.  We're just beginning to think about what would be the
     criteria that we would lay down to identify what regulations we would go
     after first as regards risk-informing them.
         And the administrative requirements, such as 50.72 and
     50.73, once we see how those rulemakings are shaking out, we'll make a
     decision whether or not to include them in the SSC scope or just break
     them out and have separate rulemakings associated with those, perhaps as
     one package.
         On 50.59, we see that being linked, split, and we think some
     part of that is associated with phase two at the moment, but the real
     risk-informing of 50.59 would be an option three, phase three issue.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Is that it?  Any questions?
         MR. ROSEN:  George, I would like an opportunity to correct
     something I said earlier, just finally.  Dr. Powers asked about the
     comparison between low power risk and at-power risk, and I proceeded to
     murder the answer.
         The reason I did is I got the at-power model risk number
     wrong, just from memory.  It's between one and one and a half
     E-to-the-minus-five.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So they're comparable.
         MR. ROSEN:  Shutdown is about 4E-to-the-minus-five, at-power
     is between one and one and a half E-to-the-minus-five.  And we think the
     shutdown is too high by as much as a factor of four.  So they are very
     comparable and I could not imagine why I couldn't get that right, and
     then I realized, after thinking about it, I got it off by an order of
     magnitude.  So appreciate the opportunity to correct that.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Thank you.  Comments or questions from the
     members?  Well, we appreciate very much your coming here.  It was very
     useful, as usual.  Thank you.
         MR. GRANTOM:  Thank you for having us.
         MR. ROSEN:  Thank you.
         DR. SEALE:  It's always good to hear from South Texas.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Do you want to go around the table now and
     express some views or do you want to take a three minute break first or
     just adjourn?
         Are you going to give me advice how to brief the committee
     tomorrow?
         DR. UHRIG:  It's the Chairman's prerogative.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I chaired this afternoon.  My co-chair
     should brief me.  Do you want to go quickly around, give me some views? 
     I mean, are you happy, are you unhappy?  Are you in the middle category,
     medium happy?  I guess the enthusiasm is overwhelming.
         I don't know.  Do we want to find a+ separate meeting date
     with the staff or we do that off-line?
         MR. HOLAHAN:  I thought you were going to let us vote on
     whether we were happy or not.
         DR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I have to use objective measures.  I guess
     no volunteers.  So on that happy note, we adjourn.  Thank you very much.
         [Whereupon, at 5:31 p.m., the meeting was concluded.]
 

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