473rd Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards - June 8, 2000

                       UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
                     NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
               ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON REACTOR SAFEGUARDS
                                  ***
       MEETING:  473RD ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON REACTOR SAFEGUARDS
     
                              U.S. NRC
                                                       Two White Flint North, Room T2-B3
                                                       11545 Rockville Pike
                                                       Rockville, MD
                                                       Thursday, June 8, 2000
     
               The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 8:30
     a.m.
     MEMBERS PRESENT:
               DANA A. POWERS, Chairman
               GEORGE APOSTOLAKIS, Vice-Chairman
               JOHN J. BARTON
               MARIO V. BONACA
               THOMAS S. KRESS
               ROBERT L. SEALE
               WILLIAM J. SHACK
               JOHN D. SIEBER
               ROBERT E. UHRIG
               GRAHAM B. WALLIS.                            C O N T E N T S
     ATTACHMENT                                              PAGE
     INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT                                   242
     HIGH-LEVEL GUIDELINES FOR
     PERFORMANCE-BASED ACTIVITIES                             247
     STATEMENT OF LISA GUE, POLICY ANALYST                    285
     INDUSTRY INITIATIVES IN THE REGULATORY
     PROCESS                                                  301
     SAFETY CULTURE                                           339.                         P R O C E E D I N G S
                                                      [8:30 a.m.]
               MR. POWERS: The meeting will now come to order. 
     This is the second day of the  473rd meeting of the Advisory
     Committee on Reactor Safeguards.
               During today's meeting, the Committee will
     consider the following performance-based regulatory
     initiative: use of industry initiatives on the regulatory
     process and safety culture at operating nuclear power
     plants.  We will also discuss our upcoming visit to Davis
     Bessie Nuclear Power Plant, and a meeting with the NRC
     Region III personnel.  You'll also have proposed plan and
     assignments for reviewing license renewal guidance
     documents, reconciliation of ACRS comments and
     recommendation, and a discussion of future ACRS activities,
     and the report of the Planning and Procedures Committee.
               The meeting is being conducted in accordance with
     the provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act.  Mr.
     Sam Duraiswamy is the designated Federal official for the
     initial portion of the meeting.  We have received no written
     statements or requests for time to make oral statements from
     members of the public regarding today's session.  A
     transcript of portions of the meeting is being kept, and it
     is requested that the speakers use one of the microphones,
     identify themselves, and speak with sufficient clarity and
     volume so they can be readily heard.
               We begin this meeting by calling members'
     attention to a interesting debate between our Vice Chairman
     and a former member, Hal Lewis.  It's obvious that our Vice
     Chairman hasn't learned the futility of arguing with Hal. 
     But it does provide you an interesting view on revisionist
     history of the word 1400, I hope.
               MR. SEALE: It also demonstrates that Hal still
     gets a kick out of arguing with anybody.
               MR. POWERS: That's right.
               [Laughter.]
               MR. KRESS: I take exception to it being
     revisionist history.  I think the history was right on the
     mark.
               MR. POWERS: I think it's revisionist
     history--putting the best spin on it.  Things of the past. 
     I will also call members' attention to a list of major ACRS
     activities in the coming year and some proposed assignments
     for leadership on those various activities that we'll
     discuss as we get into our planning for the future
     activities.
               Do any of the members have comments they would
     like to make before the formal proceedings of today's
     meeting?
               Seeing none, we'll turn to the first subject,
     which is performance-based regulatory initiatives.  Jack,
     you're going to lead us through this?
               MR. SIEBER: Yes, sir.  And thank you, Mr.
     Chairman.  This morning's session revolves around the
     high-level guidelines for performance-based activities,
     which were initially issued January 24th of 2000; and most
     recently issued after workshop and numerous public comments
     on May 9th of 2000, including all the incorporated public
     comments.  That issue appeared in the Federal Register, and
     we all got a copy of that.  But I draw your attention to the
     fact that they have--we have each received a hand-out which
     is a reproduction of the Federal Register notice--the
     important parts of it--so that you can actually read it, as
     opposed to magnifying glasses and so forth.
               MR. POWERS: Yeah, right.
               MR. SIEBER: An item of interest here that there is
     an Internet workshop going on today as we speak, and that
     workshop may elicit further public comment.  And actually,
     that workshop will be open, I guess by telephone, until the
     close of business tomorrow.  And so the document that we
     have to review today is essentially complete.  It will not
     be complete until such time as those public comments are
     evaluated and incorporated, if any.
               I would guess that since there was a tremendous
     number of comments on the January draft, there probably will
     not be too much more to say about it.  But we have to wait
     and see.  Following the incorporation of those comments,
     which hopefully will be soon, there will be a Commission
     paper that will forward the guidelines to the Commission. 
     And I would suggest that we would need to look at the final
     copy of the high-level guidelines, along with that
     Commission paper.  It would be good if we could get some
     kind of schedule from the staff as to when that would occur,
     so we can conduct that review and make our own comments as
     appropriate.
               Now, we will have a presentation from the staff,
     and also we have been given notice that Mr. Biff Bradley of
     NEI would like to make a presentation.  And Ms. Lisa Gue, of
     Public Citizen, would in addition like to make a
     presentation, so we will save out sufficient time from our
     schedule to allow these individuals to speak.
               MR. POWERS: I am particularly interested in both
     of those presentations because they seem to have slightly
     different spins to the staff on their view towards these
     things.
               MR. SIEBER: Right.
               MR. POWERS: And I think that the--a view from NEI
     probably can be accommodated.  The public citizen in a
     different view, and I'd like to understand that better. 
     So--
               MR. SIEBER: I would point out that if you look
     through the packet that you were sent about 10 or 15 days
     ago, there were two letters in that packet from Public
     Citizen, which I think deserve reading.
               With that, I'd like to introduce Jack Rosenthal,
     who will introduce the speakers for the staff.  Jack?
               MR. ROSENTHAL: Thank you.  I'm Jack Rosenthal,
     Branch Chief of the Regulatory Effectiveness, Assessment,
     and Human Factor Branch in the Office of Research.  The
     principal spokesperson is Prasad Kadambi, who is the team
     leader for reg effectiveness within the Office of Research. 
     Ashok Thadani, the Office Director, asked that we always
     relate our work whether orally or in writing to the agency's
     goals.  And this activity to make our regulations more
     performance-based is under the general goal vector of making
     our regulations more effective and efficient.  And in our
     budgeting, we have in that category.
               It's an agency-wide effort, which you'll hear
     about with participate.  The lead is with RES, but NMSS and
     OR have substantive roles in the agency effort.  With that,
     I'll turn it over to Prasad.
               MR. POWERS: Jack, before you turn it over.  I
     wonder has the agency been able to identify metrics for
     either efficiency or effectiveness?
               MR. ELTAWILA: This is Farouk Eltawila.  No the
     agency has not provided that metrics yet.
               MR. POWERS: Okay.
               MR. KADAMBI: Thank you, Jack.  Mr. Chairman,
     members of the Advisory Committee.  As was mentioned, the
     topic for this morning's presentation is the high-level
     guidelines for performance-based activities.  What we mean
     by high-level is the level of conceptualization and
     generality in these proposed guidelines.  The result is that
     they apply to all three of the NRC's arenas of activity;
     that is, reactors, materials, and waste.
               This is an outline of the presentation I wish to
     make this morning.  The ACRS last heard from the staff on
     this subject almost to the day about a year ago.  The ACRS
     also wrote a letter June 10th, which we'll refer to.  And
     this is roughly the third presentation that the staff is
     making to the ACRS on this subject.  And I think we're
     developing a modest level of history in what I still think
     is a fledgling initiative as we go forward.
               We'll talk about the SRM and the direction from
     the Commission, the actions taken for stakeholder input, and
     I must express gratification at the level of interest shown
     by stakeholders.  They have devoted considerable time and
     effort to this.  We'll talk about the use of risk
     information, and some considerable time probably on the
     discussion of the high-level guidelines and staff's plans.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: So this is not just an initiative
     to define performance criteria in the absence of risk
     information.  This is everything.  Is that what you're
     saying?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, the presentation that I'm
     making is primarily the performance-based initiative, but it
     has been recognized, and the Commission has directed us to
     make sure that we integrate the activity into the other
     ongoing efforts.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Is there any--somebody else who's
     developing performance criteria when I have a PRA?  Or you
     are doing that as well?
               MR. KADAMBI: That is part of what we are trying to
     do, yes.
               By way of an overview, I believe that the staff is
     fulfilling the Commission's directions up to now on the
     matter of performance-based approaches.  We are making
     steady progress in this direction.  It must be recognized
     that the degree of progress is related to the resources
     allocated.  So it has been rather incremental progress, but
     we are I believe meeting the Commission's direction.  What
     we now have developed are high-level guidelines, which you
     mentioned.  And what we plan to do is go through a
     validation effort, and these represent I think significant
     milestones in the progress towards what the Commission wants
     to accomplish.
               We hope that we'll be able to validate and test
     these guidelines over a range of regulatory issues, and gain
     confidence in their use and identify key challenges which
     may limit their application, recognizing that more
     specialized guidelines would be set at a lower level than
     the high-level guidelines.
               The staff will eventually integrate the
     performance-based activities into the mainstream of the
     regulatory improvement activities.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Is it appropriate to ask you now
     what is the overall objective of the performance criteria? 
     I mean, if I have the indicators that you will define, what
     conclusion can I reach?  What is it I'm trying to conclude?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I believe that the general
     objective is to make our regulatory activities as--and the
     Commission has indicated what is meant by performance-based
     in the white paper.  And we are using that kind of a--sort
     of a--direction of progress.  I'm not sure that this point I
     can define very clearly what the end point will look like in
     terms of performance criteria as a generalized--you know,
     something that we can define clearly at this point for all
     three of the agency's arenas of activities for example.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: But what you just said really
     refers to the administrative part; that the agency wants to
     do this, and the Commission has directed you to do it.  I
     think that's fine.  But what I meant by objective is--I
     received the information, okay, from the things that we're
     monitoring.  Now, what is it I'm trying to see that--for
     example, one objective might be that indeed the facility
     meets its licensing basis.  That might be one objective.  Or
     I don't know what else.  So what is the picture that I'm
     trying to form in my mind by having this set, and receiving
     the information, you know, from the performance or the
     facility.  Is this to make sure that what I license is the
     way I thought it was.  Or is there something else?
               MR. KADAMBI: I would take as a given that
     licensees are meeting their license conditions and the
     licensing basis.  What we observe is that a lot of the
     licensing basis at this point is--has a lot of prescriptive
     and some consider unnecessarily prescriptive elements to it. 
     So what I would see as the overall objective is if we can
     decrease the level of prescriptiveness and increase the
     level of performance-based application, then there will be
     an overall increase in the effectiveness and efficiency,
     which is one of the agency's goals.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: But isn't it a little bit
     contradictory to say that you start with the assumption that
     they meet all the requirements, and then you collect
     information, you know, from performance criteria.  To do
     what?  I mean, why should you do that?  If you assume that
     they meet their commitments, then leave them alone.  I mean,
     that's a pretty drastic assumption.
               I thought the whole idea of a performance-based
     system was to form an opinion regarding how well they meet
     their commitments.  Otherwise, I don't see why you should
     monitor anybody, if you assume that they already do.
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I mean, you know, this may be
     something that we will explore a little more in-depth as we
     get into the guidelines.  But as a general concept, what I
     would suggest is that some of the performance monitoring
     that is being done now will help us define what new
     performance criteria may be.  You know, and what may be--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: To achieve what?  Why would you
     have--
               MR. KADAMBI: To achieve greater effectiveness and
     efficiency.
               MR. WALLIS: If you're at a high level, I think it
     would help me a great deal if you applied the high level,
     and had some success.  If you could say, here's an example
     where we used our thought processes and our principals, and
     we actually applied them to a particular area of the
     regulations.  And what we came up with is somehow better on
     some scale than what we had before.  So you've
     actually--instead of philosophizing about what you might do,
     by example.  I know you're at the high level, but if you
     stay at a high level too long, you may come up with just
     words and waffle.
               MR. BIRMINGHAM: My name is Joe Birmingham.  I'm in
     the Office of NOR.  We don't exactly assume the licensees
     are meeting the license requirements.  We have ongoing ways
     of inspecting to see that they are.  And what we've been
     getting are reports and inspections that tell us how
     licensees are doing, and then what we do after that--once we
     get a report or inspection, and we see a licensee is failing
     or something, we then pursue an avenue of enforcement, which
     ultimately is months, possibly a year, later in the
     enforcement action.
               What we want to do is become more
     performance-based, which is a more timely way of analyzing
     how licensees are doing.  We believe we can do this and
     still maintain that the licensees are meeting their license
     requirements, and in fact that we can help them focus their
     efforts in areas where the need is the most, where the risk
     is the most.  An example might be in the radiation
     protection area.  We know that licensees have determined
     that some of their greatest risk are in the high rad rather
     than in the low rad areas.  Therefore, they're concentrating
     on performing better in the high rad areas.  Based on this,
     I think that, you know, going to a more performance-based
     way of regulating these activities. They're--not all
     activities can be performance-based, but those that can--we
     can do it on a more timely and a more effective basis.
               MR. SHACK: Yeah, and I think, George, this is not
     just an oversight process.  I mean, your licensing basis
     would become a performance-based rule.  So that instead of
     your licensing basis, meaning you would have a process or
     some description of doing thing, your licensing basis would
     be meeting this performance measure.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Well, that's why I am here.  I
     mean, where is the staff going with this?  Is that where
     they're going?
               MR. SHACK: Well, it includes both kinds of things. 
     I mean, you know, but I think that you would make the
     licensing basis performance-based, as well as making the
     oversight process, which is where you were coming from,
     performance-based.
               MR. SIEBER: Well, I guess there's a couple of
     questions here.  I agree with Bill, in that there are two
     aspects to it.  One is the oversight process, and we already
     have about 20 performance indicators that are being
     monitored on a regular basis and reported as colors--you
     know, green, white, red, what have you.  And that's a
     supplement to the inspection program.  On the other hand,
     you have rules, like the station blackout rule, where there
     is a performance aspect to it.  Your diesel generators have
     to operate at a certain reliability in order to have the
     risk profile that that particular sequence of events would
     engender.
               On the other hand, my question is, is it the
     intent of the staff to add to the group of performance
     indicators that they now monitor on a regular basis to
     supplement the inspection program.  Or, is it your intent to
     say I'm going to look at risk based rules and incorporate
     performance indicators as a part of satisfying the
     requirements of that rule to assure that I meet the risk
     goals?  It's got to be one or the or both, and I'm not sure.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Yeah, that's what confuses me,
     Jack, because if the objective is to make sure that the
     current licensing basis is satisfied, then one way of doing
     it is to go through each requirement and say, well, gee,
     what performance indicator can I have for this one to assure
     myself that they're meeting.
               If, on the other hand--which means now, according
     to what Dr. Shack said--I would also change the licensing
     basis, then I might want to make sure that certain risk
     criteria are satisfied, in which case now my approach would
     be different.  And, in fact, I may start changing the
     licensing basis and maybe eliminating some requirements and
     impose some others.  But these are different objectives.
               MR. SIEBER: Yes.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: And when you talk about the
     high-level approach, I think that has to be cleared up.
               MR. KADAMBI: But I do hope that I will be able to
     clear up some of these questions, but perhaps, you know,
     what this points to is the fact that we do need to really go
     one step further in an actual application mode before we can
     really know how much value added comes from applying these
     high-level guidelines.  As Dr. Wallace said, you know, we
     can't remain at a high level for very long.  But right now,
     that's where we are, and it's part of our plan to, you know,
     make it into a practical application.
               MR. WALLIS: No, no.  There are two sides to this. 
     I would say performance-based regulation, where instead of
     having a whole lot of prescriptive things, like
     temperatures, pressures and so on, you have to meet some
     objective, which is at a higher level and more general and
     can be met in many ways.  That would mean rewriting the
     regulation.
               On the other level, performance-based enforcement
     it seems to me just enforcing the prescriptive regulation in
     another way, and may even impose extra work, because you're
     now doing it in the prescriptive way and the performance
     way.  You know, that doesn't seem to help very much.  The
     first objective I thought was to look at the risks really
     are.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: I thought so, too.  But again,
     the objective of doing the--
               MR. WALLIS: That's tough.  That's tough.  You have
     to look at one of those regulations, and say, what is the
     real objective of this regulation.  How do we define some
     performance to replace what's in the regulation.
               MR. KADAMBI: I believe ultimately that's where we
     want to go.
               MR. SIEBER: Well, it seems to me, though, that the
     objectives with regard to the high-level guidelines as they
     stand today are not clearly stated.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: They're not.
               MR. SIEBER: That would be my comment.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Let me give you the--
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I take that as something that
     we would seek to correct--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: One last comment on this.  There
     are two extremes.  This Committee has heard some people from
     the industry claim that the only business that the NRC has
     is to make sure there are quantitative health objectives on
     that.  That could be one objective, to start with that.
               The other extreme is to take every piece of
     regulation and try to define some performance criteria for
     every single one to make sure that it's met.  There are two
     extremes.  Now, somewhere in between there, you probably
     will end up being--
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I--I mean, I don't want to, you
     know, jump the gun too much, but I believe it's very
     important to keep this sense of a hierarchy--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Sure.
               MR. KADAMBI: In mind, and that is incorporated
     into the conceptual framework of the guidelines.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: And my question is related to how
     far down in the hierarchy you're going to.
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, in fact, that was a question
     that we asked for public comment on, and we did receive
     comment, which I think to me makes sense, you know, that we
     can deal with.  So, anyway, going through the historical
     background, I believe that the Commission has expressed a
     firm commitment to, you know, taking this concept as much as
     is feasible, recognizing that, you know, we are not where we
     might want to be right now.  The strategic plan mentions
     performance-based approaches in each of the three arenas. 
     While significant progress was made in the risk-informed
     initiatives, the initial focus of the performance-based
     initiatives was in those issues not amenable to PRA, which
     is the way sort of dealt with this in the SECY-98-132, about
     which the ACRS also had a briefing.
               The most paper was SECY-99-176, and frankly it was
     not received favorably by the Commission because their plans
     lacked specificity, and I believe the magnitude of progress
     that the Commission perceived was considered insufficient. 
     But again, we are trying to do what we can right now to
     correct that also.
               The ACRS wrote a letter in June, on June 10, 1999,
     in which the performance-based activities was one of the
     subjects covered in this letter.  And the ACRS suggested
     that the diverse activities should be better focused.
               The SRM for SECY-99-176 I believe clearly provides
     the Commission's expectations, and most of the actions
     described in this presentation I believe do meet those
     expectations.
               I would like to quickly go over the SRM to
     SECY-99-176.  In the SECY itself, we wanted to learn some
     lessons from ongoing performance-based activities before
     developing the guidelines, but the Commission directed the
     staff to, as it says, develop high-level guidelines to
     identify and assess the viability of candidate
     performance-based activities.  Essentially, what the
     Commission said advanced the schedule significantly. 
     We--this was considered.  We were thinking of it as a
     downstream activity.  They said, no, just get it done.  You
     know, the original schedule was actually by February of
     2000.
               In addition, the SRM also said that we should get
     input from stakeholders and the program offices.  I believe
     we are doing that.  The guidelines should include a
     discussion on how risk information might assist in the
     development of performance-based initiatives.  And I think
     this goes to some of the questions that have been brought up
     here.  The guidelines should be provided to the Commission
     for information, and that's our plan to do it.  The schedule
     is, by the way, August 21st to the Commission of the
     commissioned paper.  And the staff should periodically
     update the Commission on its plans and progress in
     identifying and developing performance-based initiatives. 
     We plan to do all these, and I believe the high-level
     guidelines do accomplish what the ACRS had wanted as--I
     would think develop a framework within which we could focus
     some of the performance-based activities, which are going on
     in all the offices.
               Now, very quickly, for internal and external
     stakeholder input, we created a performance-based regulation
     working group, which includes NRR, NMSS, two of the
     divisions in research.  We now also have a result of public
     comment a representative from the regions, and we plan to
     include as, I'll discuss--describe later all the advisory
     committees also as stakeholders in this.  As was mentioned,
     we issued Federal Register notices, publishing the comments. 
     We had a facilitated workshop on March 1st.  The transcript
     for this workshop is on the Web.  We had people from UCS,
     Public Citizen, utilities, radiopharmaceuticals
     representatives, people from medical applications area, NEI,
     and others participate in this workshop.
               We had written comments from a range of external
     and internal stakeholders.  On May 9th, we published the
     response to the comments, and the revised high-level
     guidelines.  And, as was mentioned, we are going through
     another workshop today, which is an on-line workshop.  And
     we'll be looking to see what comes out of that.
               In terms of the stakeholder input, I would say
     that it was not necessarily unfavorable to the guidelines in
     the sense that those who favored performance-based
     approaches, seem to favor the guidelines.  Those who were
     opposed to performance-based approaches had significant
     problems with the guidelines.  But it seems like uniformly
     there were some what I would characterize as implementation
     and trust concerns.  By implementation, I would--I mean
     that, you know, the level of objectivity that would be
     exercised in actually implementing these guidelines.  And by
     trust, I mean that some stakeholders had a concern whether
     the NRC would in an even-handed application use the
     guidelines to increase as well as decrease regulatory
     requirements as justified.
               MR. SEALE: Excuse me.  In your internal
     participation, how many of the people directly involved
     would you appropriately characterize as being inspection
     oriented people?
               MR. KADAMBI: The representatives from NRR and NMSS
     are primarily--Joe, you can correct me if I'm wrong--but I
     believe in the rulemaking end of the offices.
               MR. SEALE: Yeah, that's why I asked the question.
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I mean, the idea is that
     through these representatives, you know, the other
     activities in the office would also find, you know, a way to
     be reflected in--
               MR. SEALE: In several other activities in the
     recent past, we've been impressed, or at least I've been
     impressed by the more than proportional contribution to such
     joint efforts that have been made by people who have an
     inspection background.
               MR. KADAMBI: Right, and that's the--
               MR. SEALE: And I was wondering if this effort
     might benefit from such participation as well?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, that's the reason primarily
     that we got a regional representative.  In fact, this was a
     point that was made at the public workshop, and we
     immediately took action to--
               MR. SEALE: And this regional person is
     specifically an inspector and not a senior reactor analyst
     or something like that?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I don't really know what Steve
     Reynolds does, but Steve Reynolds from Region III is our
     regional representative.  And he certainly, you know, in our
     discussions brings the--I think--the inspection perspective
     into, you know, whatever we're trying to accomplish.
               MR. SIEBER: I'd like to ask a question by way of
     stating a very short hypothetical situation.  Let's say, for
     example, the NRC and the industry wanted to take a
     deterministic rule and make it a risk-informed rule.  And,
     as part of doing that, they wanted to have performance
     indicators that would determine and assure that the
     parameters that go into the PRC gave the right risk profile
     for that sequence.  And after the rule was imposed and the
     data was [sic] was collected, some licensees data showed
     that they weren't meeting the objectives, would that not
     result in an increase in effort, work, and requirements on
     the utility to meet that risk profile?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I think if we found that, you
     know, the risk profile was not meeting the performance
     objectives, that's when we would take action.  And, you
     know, maybe that goes into the next slide where I--
               MR. SIEBER: Yeah, well, I guess there's a
     conclusion that comes of that is that it is not a good
     expectation to believe that moving to risk-informed and
     performance-based regulations automatically results in a
     lowering of requirements.  I don't believe that, and I can
     see it going both ways.
               MR. KADAMBI: I certainly see it going both ways,
     also.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Now, if, again, if we're dealing
     with the licensing basis, why would we care about risk? 
     That's not part of the licensing basis.  Why would we impose
     performance criteria requirements that are based on risk
     profiles, when the risk profile was not part of the
     licensing basis.  So, you see, that's why it's very
     important to make it very clear up front what the objective
     of the whole effort is.
               MR. WALLIS: Well, it seems to me that if you're
     going to have performance-based, you've got to have a scale
     for measuring performance.  The only scale which is more or
     less universal is risk.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Yes, but the legal problem there
     is that it's not part of the licensing basis, so we have to
     somehow define the objective in a way that allows that.
               MR. SIEBER: I think that this is why they made
     moving to risk-informed regulation an option.  If you accept
     and elect to do that, then that becomes part of your
     licensing basis.  Or, that's one way to interpret it.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Well, not so far.  I don't think
     so.
               MR. SIEBER: Okay.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: I don't think that any PRA or IPE
     has been incorporated into the licensing basis--
               MR. SIEBER: Not yet.
               MR. MARKLEY: No, but if you look at a licensing
     submittal, if it was approved based on risk, then that part
     of it is linked in an informal way.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: That is correct.  But this
     are--these are, you know, specific isolated instances.
               MR. MARKLEY: Right.
               MR. SIEBER: Well, that could be another
     problem--is establishing that chain.
               MR. MARKLEY: But the performance-based is also
     voluntary as well, according to the guideline, correct?
               MR. KADAMBI: Yeah, I would think unless we find a
     reason to increase the set of regulatory requirements that
     addresses the safety issue and then subject to the backward
     rule, we would impose it, you know, mandatorily if that is
     justified by the regular process that the staff has in
     place.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: So, again, are we trying, then,
     to develop performance criteria for the two tiers that
     presumably we will have.  One will be the risk-informed and
     the other the present one?  Or are you using risk
     information wherever you find it?
               MR. KADAMBI: The short answer, Dr. Apostolakis, is
     I don't know.  But I hope as we go forward on this, we will
     be able to better define what the course might be.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: But if we're talking about
     high-level requirements, though, these are the kinds of
     questions that it seems to me have to be resolved before we
     proceed to the specific cases that Dr. Wallace asked for.  I
     mean, these are really important questions, high-level
     questions.  Anyway.
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, anyway, if I can--
               MR. WALLIS: I think you want to do that.  You
     would think look at something.  I mean, I'm sort of
     imagining suppose that I were to replace the LOCA rules by
     performance-based.  It's very difficult, because no one has
     LOCAs, so you can't say, I happen to have LOCAs, therefore,
     it's a good plan.  You've got to go back to initiating
     events or something way down the chain, which is a very
     small measure of overall performance really.  So you'd
     probably fall back on prescriptive regulation.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Oh, in some cases, for sure,
     yeah.
               MR. KADAMBI: I think that's true that in some
     cases, you know, prescriptive regulations really make the
     most sense, so that's part of what might fall out of the
     discussion that will happen when we go to apply the
     guidelines.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: By the way, do you have a
     definition of performance?
               MR. KADAMBI: In fact, I don't.  All I can say is
     I've participated in many discussions where that has been
     one of the most difficult questions.  That, depending on the
     context, it can have many different characteristics.
               MR. WALLIS: So your study might end up concluding
     there's no measure of performance; therefore, this whole
     performance-based idea is a fantasy?
               MR. KADAMBI: If what you are suggesting is that
     one has to develop a definition of performance that applies
     across the board, that may well be the case.
               MR. WALLIS: Or you're going to have to develop
     several systems--
               MR. KADAMBI: Correct.  May I add we believe that's
     possible.
               MR. ROSENTHAL: Perhaps my pragmatism will come
     through.  The--clearly, where risk-informed--the reactor
     oversight process we believe is the most risk-informed,
     performance-based approach.  And that was done well in
     advance of these formal guidelines.  We have another major
     activity at the NRC, and that's to risk inform regulations
     that you've been briefed on separately.  We have this
     initiative to come up with some guidelines which will
     hopefully be a--some unifying principles and something to
     check our work against to make things more
     performance-based.  We have clearly an obligation to link or
     coordinate all these efforts together.  But we're clearly
     not doing a hierarchical process where we're starting out
     the guidelines, and, you know, clipping through them.  So
     why do this effort now?  Because we moved ahead with the
     reactor revised oversight process.  We're moving forward
     with risk informing the regulations.  We're moving ahead on
     individual regulations in areas from QA and fire protection
     and fitness--I mean, just all over the place.  And this
     provides some sort of unifying, at least thought processes,
     to test our ideas.
               So pragmatically, it's a good time to do this.
               MR. BIRMINGHAM: I'd like to also say in those
     individual areas--emergency preparedness, radiation
     protection, fire protection--we find that the definition of
     performance varies in that it has to be very specific to the
     attitude, you know, to the context.  And a general, we
     probably could develop a general definition of performance. 
     In fact, Prasad had a paper developed that talked about how
     do you measure performance.  But we find that it has to be
     specific to the context or to the activity that it's being
     applied to.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: See, Jack, the reactor oversight,
     the revised reactor oversight process has defined the
     cornerstones as something that the staff cares about.  So
     they have defined some high-level objectives.  But there is
     also the problem of objectives there.  I mean, if you
     recall, there was an ACRS letter where there were
     differences of opinion as to the thresholds, and I think
     that stems from the fact that the objective, the overall
     objective, has not been clearly stated.  And I think we have
     to do this here to avoid controversies of this type in the
     future.  What exactly are we trying to do to assure
     ourselves that something is satisfied?  What is that
     something?  And you have several ideas, you know, meeting
     the current basis, changing the current basis to meet
     something else.  What is it?
               MR. BARTON: Something measurable and calculable.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: As long as it's measurable or
     calculable, we will accept it.
               MR. WALLIS: Unless there's something that actually
     happens.  Not having a ability to fight, Greg, it's not very
     measurable.  It could be something measurable.
               MR. SHACK: I mean, just take a good example.  In
     the steam generators, you know, your performance measure is
     thou shall not have a tube at the end of the cycle that has
     a strength less than three delta--you know, three times the
     pressure across it.  And if the licensee comes to the end of
     the cycle, and he's got a tube that doesn't meet three delta
     P, he's--you know, he's in violation of his performance
     measure.  He's in trouble.  He's going to have to--you know,
     he's going to have maybe do extra inspections.  He's going
     to have to be more conservative.  But, you know, he has a
     clear performance measure that he has to meet.
               MR. WALLIS: Sounds prescriptive to me.
               MR. SHACK: Yeah, no, it's a performance measure.
               MR. WALLIS: But it's also prescriptive.
               MR. SHACK: Yeah, but in the sense that it
     prescribes a performance measure, yes.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: No, but the question is why that
     measure and not something of the higher level?
               MR. SHACK: That's a different question.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: No, it's not.  It's not.  Because
     setting up the criteria is exactly that question.  I mean, I
     can always give--have well-defined performance objectives,
     but the question is why this and not that?
               MR. SHACK: Well, we've had this discussion before
     on performance-based--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Yeah, I know.
               MR. SHACK: Criteria.  How you pick the criteria is
     one subject.  Whether having a performance-based rule is a
     different subject.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: But I thought that the high-level
     objectives that we are discussing today is how to pick them?
               MR. SHACK: No, because I think he's been careful
     to distinguish that in some cases, he will have, you know, I
     think everybody agrees that the most desirable performance
     measures are those directly linked to risk.  The question
     is, is it useful to have performance-based measures in other
     cases that you can't link so directly to risk?
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Yeah, yeah.  That's exactly the
     problem here.
               MR. SHACK: And he's saying yes.  And he's giving
     you guidance for both cases.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Where is the guidance?  I missed
     it?
               MR. WALLIS: Well, we're going to get to it.
               MR. KADAMBI: Mr. Chairman, may I ask how much time
     do I have?
               MR. POWERS: I think you've certainly got another
     15 minutes.  Right.
               MR. KADAMBI: I see.  Well, then I'm going to have
     to zip through these because I think you do have other
     speakers also on the agenda.
               Well, the Commission asked us to discuss how risk
     information might assist in the development of
     performance-based initiatives.  And our preliminary cut
     right now is to categorize areas--these are three categories
     of areas where risk information may assist in the
     development of performance-based initiatives.  That is, risk
     information may provide the basis for undertaking an
     initiative.  And under that, it could be a safety
     enhancement.  It could be a reduction of unnecessary burden,
     and it could be the sort of things that are going on under
     options two and three and the risk-informed initiatives.
               Risk information could be used in the metrics and
     thresholds or regulatory response.  This is the framework
     for the revised reactor oversight program.  And the third is
     the category of areas where one could classify as not
     amenable to PRA.
               But what is common about this I believe is that
     risk information helps determine what is important.  And
     performance-based considerations form the basis for assuring
     that the systems, functions, or whatever else provide the
     requisite level of performance.  So it is in that sense that
     risk- and performance-based initiatives I believe come
     together.
               Now we go to the guidelines themselves, and if you
     don't mind--you know, I'd rather use the sheets in front of
     you on the guidelines if there are--if one wants to look at
     the actual wording of the guidelines, because this wording
     was arrived at with some discussion and, you know, it could
     be important what it actually says.
               Now, first of all, the high-level guidelines are a
     starting point, and they don't represent, in my mind, a
     roadmap of how to get from here to there.  It's a way to get
     started on, you know, what might be possible, and how
     worthwhile is it to undertake a performance-based
     initiative.  The other point is that there is a high degree
     of context specificity that should be expected during the
     application of these guidelines.  So, although they are at a
     high level, really you need to define the regulatory issue
     in some level of detail before we can really get much out of
     the guidelines, I believe.
               Now, the guidelines themselves are divided into
     three categories, and they are the viability, the
     assessment, what we call guidelines to assess
     performance-based regulatory improvement, and the guidelines
     to assure consistency with regulatory principles.
               The guidelines to assess viability are directly
     out of the Commission's white paper.  They are the four
     measurable, calculable attributes--the objective criteria,
     which would constitute the demarcation between what is
     acceptable and what is not acceptable.  And then the two--
               MR. WALLIS: These are other questions in the white
     paper?
               MR. KADAMBI: Yes.
               MR. WALLIS: They're not the result of your work?
               MR. KADAMBI: No, these are the result of the
     Commission's white paper.
               MR. WALLIS: I see.
               MR. KADAMBI: But they--they meet the needs for
     high-level guidelines, and so we've chosen to use them.
               MR. WALLIS: Chosen.  What is the--why has the
     staff had to commission this white paper? 
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Would you say again?
               MR. WALLIS: What did the staff add?  I mean,
     you're just repeating what's in the Commission's white
     paper.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: I think that part of the matter
     is the next viewgraph, where you talk about consistent, the
     appearance with overriding goals.  Everything else we have
     seen before I believe.  So if you go to--I mean--
               MR. KADAMBI: Okay, I'll go to the next slide.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: That's really where a lot of my
     questions are directed.  No, the next one.  So under roman
     III.  First of all, there is an A, and I don't see a B
     anywhere.  Is there a B someplace?
               MR. KADAMBI: No, there isn't.  This is just to
     keep a consistent notation.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: So this is really where I guess
     my questions, you know, belong.
               MR. KADAMBI: Certainly.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: I would expect to see more
     guidance, because the rest of it really has been discussed
     in the past and so one.  What does it mean to assist them
     with regulatory principles?  I mean, how far down will you
     go?  How do you decide these things?  That's where you need
     guidelines in my view.
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I--I guess the structure that
     we have offered over here in the guidelines is that, you
     know, the questions that you ask are part of the kind of
     inquiry that these guidelines would lead us into, and then,
     at the end of it, we would, you know, make sure that we're
     consistent with the overriding Commission's goals.
               Now, there's no reason why this could not, and, in
     fact, if we expect that it will be an iterative process
     whereby, you know, we would begin at some point; and perhaps
     it will be with, you know, the Commission's goals; and then
     allow the guidelines to lead us through a process where we
     would see where it is in the hierarchy.  And, for example,
     the kind of hierarchy we may think about or, you know, would
     it be the component train system or release or dose where
     you would apply the performance criterion.  And it may be a
     different type of regulatory requirement that attaches at
     those, once you define that kind of performance criterion.
               You know, and that's the reason why in the
     regulatory framework itself, you know, we would consider the
     regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations.  We would
     consider regulatory guides and new regs and standard review
     plan, technical specifications, inspection guidance.  You
     know, depending on where it is that, at least in my mind, I
     would say the unnecessary prescriptiveness occurs, which is
     what is the situation that needs to be corrected as it were.
               MR. WALLIS: Can I call in on this A, 3-A?
               MR. KADAMBI: Sure.
               MR. WALLIS: Now, I think the overall objective of
     what you're doing sounds very good.  But this doesn't tell
     me anything.  This is just eliciting what I say is invoking
     the names of the saints.  I mean, these are phrases which
     everyone uses to justify anything they're doing.  It doesn't
     tell me anything about actually making something happen.
               And that's where you've got to go.  You've got to
     show you've got some vision or creativity or some view of
     how you're going to make something happen.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Are you planning to develop
     guidance as to how one can be consistent and coherent with
     overriding goals?  How one will handle defensing that
     uncertainties?  I mean, this is really the issue here: A, B,
     C, D, E.  You do this, you do this, you do that.  Is that
     part of your plan?
               MR. KADAMBI: The short answer is yes.  We do plan
     on doing it.  We are not there yet, and what it requires is
     for us to be dealing in a specific arena with a more
     specific regulatory issue before we can get to that level of
     the guideline as it were.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: So you will do a few--several
     case studies perhaps, to gain more insights?
               MR. KADAMBI: Right.  
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  That's what--and this will be
     released by August?
               MR. KADAMBI: That's right.  What we call them are
     the validation and testing of the guidelines.  I mean, you
     can as well call them case studies.  That's the proposed
     plan.  You know, what I would say is that we're planning to
     really apply these to new initiatives, but, in the meantime,
     in order to gain confidence in the guidelines, we would plan
     to validate and test the guidelines on either ongoing
     activities or, you know, I don't know if even hypothetical
     situations can be generated where we can test these.
               But what we need to do as the next step, and this
     is what we would offer the Commission as part of our
     immediate plan is what--how we would validate and test them,
     and what we are doing to integrate this into the regulatory
     improvement activity, a big part of which is the
     risk-informed initiative.  So--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: So when will this happen?  By
     August?  You said that it is a--
               MR. KADAMBI: The obvious time frame is for the
     commissioned paper--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Which will not have the case
     studies?
               MR. KADAMBI: I hope by then that we are able to
     conduct case studies.  The commissioned paper may report on
     these.  But to cut to the conclusions, you know, we do have
     a paper that's due August 21st, and in that paper, we will
     describe how we have met each of the elements of the
     Commission's SRM.  And, by then, if we are able to have
     conducted some of these case studies or validation
     exercises, we will also report on that, and we will
     certainly inform the advisory committees.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: How many committees do you have? 
     Advisory committees?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, all three of the committees I
     believe will be--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: ACNW is involved?
               MR. KADAMBI: ACNW as well as ACMUI.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: ACNW, they are very familiar with
     the term performance assessment.  Is that what you mean by
     performance, too?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I can't answer that yet,
     because I'm not sufficiently familiar with what they're
     talking about right now.
               MR. POWERS: Let me ask a couple of questions about
     a slide you skipped over--that was your guidelines to assess
     performance-based regulatory improvement.  It may be similar
     in nature to Professor Apostolakis' questions.  You have a
     variety of items listed down here.  It says, ensure adequate
     safety margins.  Is there going to be guidance that gives me
     some idea of what an adequate safety margin is?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, the adequacy of the safety
     margin has to be based on the analysis methodology and the
     assumptions that go into it, and, of course, the uncertainty
     associated--
               MR. POWERS: It has all of those things?
               MR. KADAMBI: It includes all those things.
               MR. POWERS: Alright.  Suppose I have all of those
     things.  And I have an analysis methodology.  I have a
     result that comes out of that.  I have an uncertainty on
     that result.  Now, how do I decide whether the margin is
     adequate or not?
               MR. KADAMBI: That is where the particular--
               MR. POWERS: Let's say the number is 12.
               MR. KADAMBI: Regulatory issue has to--
               MR. POWERS: The number is 12.  The uncertainty on
     that number is--has a--the square root of the variance is 3. 
     Now, what is an adequate margin.
               MR. KADAMBI: It depends on whether this is a
     transportation issue, you know, whether you're talking about
     transporting a package of radioactive materials.
               MR. POWERS: Okay, you're transporting--
               MR. KADAMBI: Whether it's a reactor.
               MR. POWERS: We're transporting a package of
     radioactive materials.
               MR. KADAMBI: Okay, then I can give you, you know,
     my off the cuff assessments right now.
               MR. POWERS: That's fine.
               MR. KADAMBI: That's all.  I would say one has to
     consider the level of risk associated with this package of
     material and what this number 12 means relative to the risk
     to the public from--
               MR. POWERS: Okay, so you do not, then, make any
     use of my number 12 rule--or the uncertainty that I have?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I mean, the number 12 may mean
     that this transportation meets the regulatory requirement or
     it does not meet the regulatory requirements.  I mean, one
     would have established what is the acceptance criterion
     ahead of time, and you would compare this number 12 with the
     acceptance criterion.
               MR. POWERS: Okay.  For understanding, let's say
     the acceptance criteria, and is 10.
               MR. KADAMBI: Is it good to be more or bad to be
     more?
               MR. POWERS: It's good to be more.
               MR. KADAMBI: Then the regulatory requirement is
     met.
               MR. POWERS: Twelve is good enough, and it doesn't
     matter that my--the square root of the variance is three?
               MR. KADAMBI: I--
               MR. POWERS: Suppose the square root of the
     variance is 12?
               MR. ROSENTHAL: You know, we did have a fair amount
     of discussion, recognizing that it would be very, very
     context specific, because, you know, you have to think of
     this not only in terms of your DMB criteria, the 95-95
     level, but you also have to think about if you were
     developing a rule on fitness for duty.  I mean, you know,
     will you allow one drunk in the control room, but not two? 
     And I--if I'm being rude, I apologize in advance.  I didn't
     mean to be snippy.  But rather, we use that as an example of
     just how context-specific these considerations require.
               MR. POWERS: Except that you're planning all these
     problems, and you're not giving me anything on anything. 
     Okay.  I mean, you're telling me, I can find cases where it
     would be difficult to use a mean and the square root of the
     variance for any kind of decision, because it would be
     difficult to calculate those.  But I can find cases where I
     can do those sorts of things, and I don't have any guidance
     on either one of them.  I still don't know what an adequate
     safety margin is for any case, let alone the difficult case.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: At the plant level, I mean,
     typically when you have goal sets and criteria, it meant
     that if the licensee, for example, failed to meet the
     criterion, margin meant that you do not have an immediate
     safety concern; that you had enough time to recover from it. 
     You have--
               MR. POWERS: If that is the case.  And this
     particular entry is superfluous because that's covered in
     another entry.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Okay.
               MR. POWERS: So, I--that--and I think there's a
     redundancy in here that has not resulted in the
     clarification.
               Let me ask you another question: on your item B,
     you say increase public confidence.  And it says an
     assessment would be made to determine if the emphasis on
     results and objective criteria can increase public
     confidence.  Can you tell me what you mean there?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well--
               MR. POWERS: I mean, it seems to me the answer is
     unequivocally yes on this.
               MR. KADAMBI: I think it ought to be yes, but I'm
     not sure that we can be confident that having objective
     criteria and the ability to measure, let's say, for example,
     in a waste application.
               MR. POWERS: Well, what's the word can in here.  I
     mean, it says, yes, in principle--it seems to me that in
     principle it is possible given the right alignment of the
     moons and the suns and things like that that some--this
     thing could, indeed, increase public confidence.  Isn't what
     you what you know is if it does or doesn't?
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, I, hopefully it's a little bit
     lower than that level of moons and the stars, but what this
     should drive us to is at least ask the question how it
     affects public confidence.  And if there is a way to
     structure the regulatory requirement in such a way that it
     does increase public confidence, that is what the staff
     should be thinking about when it looks at this set of
     guidelines.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: I think that you're entering a
     territory that's minefield.  Who is the public?  Whose
     confidence are you talking about?  I'm not sure we want to
     get into that too much, but I mean, I don't know.  I mean,
     what if one stakeholder disagrees?  Have you increased
     public confidence?  I don't know.  I mean, I always have
     problems with this public stuff.  I don't understand who the
     public is.  Well, anyway, I think we are running out of
     time.
               MR. KADAMBI: Well, these are--yeah, these are
     difficult questions.
               MR. WALLIS: Can I make a statement here.  I'm
     trying to verbalize it.  It seems to me that you have a
     wonderful opportunity to be creative and innovative and bold
     and visionary and all that, and something about the way in
     which you have to operate in a regulatory agency, with all
     its baggage, seems to me making it difficult.  And I don't
     know what it is, but I wish somehow you could sort of get
     free from all the shackles and actually go out and do
     something that was exciting.  I don't know how to make it
     happen, but there's got to be somewhere that can happen in
     this agency.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: The problem, Graham, is that you
     can't do that.
               MR. WALLIS: You can't do that?
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: You can't just ignore, you know,
     50 years of regulations.
               MR. WALLIS: I know that.  But someone, at some
     level, has to do that; otherwise, nothing eventually happens
     which is new.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: That's correct.  Yeah.
               MR. WALLIS: And it doesn't have to be presented
     because you're in a public forum and all that kind of
     stuff--need to be careful what you say.  But, at some level,
     there's got to be a way in which that sort of activity
     happens in this agency it seems to me.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: What would be the platonic
     regulatory system?
               MR. SIEBER: Are there any other questions or
     comments?
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: There are but they will not be
     asked.
               [Laughter.]
               MR. SIEBER: Okay.  Thank you.  According to our
     schedule, we are to hear from Biff Bradley of NEI.  Is he
     here?  I don't see him.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: No, he's not.
               MR. SIEBER: Anybody from NEI who is to speak?  If
     not, we have a request from Lisa Gue of Public Citizen, who
     would like to address the committee.  And, Lisa, if you
     would come up here, please.  Thank you very much.
               MR. KADAMBI: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
               MR. POWERS: You may want to turn that thing off. 
     Lisa, this is your first opportunity, I believe, to speak
     before the Advisory Committee.  And we traditionally ask our
     rookie speakers to give us a little background on themselves
     before they give us their prepared presentation.
               MS. GUE: Okay.  Well, good morning.  I have just
     recently began in the position of policy analyst with Public
     Citizen's Critical Mass, Energy, and Environment Program. 
     And I've previously been working in another campaign of the
     same group within Public Citizen, the Campaign on Food
     Irradiation.
               So I do thank you for allowing me to comment today
     on the proposal for high-level guidelines for
     performance-based regulation.  As I mentioned, I am
     representing Public Citizen's Critical Mass, Energy, and
     Environment Program.  And Public Citizen is a non-profit
     research, lobbying, and litigation organization founded by
     Ralph Nader in 1971.  As you may be aware, and with
     reference to the comments and questions about who the public
     is, in this case, we advocated for consumer protection and
     for government and corporate accountability, supported by
     our 150,000 members throughout the country.
               I'd like to begin by noting that it's
     disappointing that, as of yet, our previous comments in
     opposition to the proposed guidelines have generally been
     dismissed.  The process for public participation, which
     would purport to be open and responsive, has, in fact, only
     been able to integrate comments which can be incorporated
     within the basic paradigm of a performance-based regulatory
     framework.
               Our more fundamental concerns with the framework
     itself have been systematically excluded from consideration. 
     Nevertheless, I want to reiterate that Public Citizen has
     grave concerns about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's
     proposed high-level guidelines for performance-based
     regulations, not least in terms of how they would affect the
     regulation of nuclear waste.
               We have also submitted written comments detailing
     our concerns with performance-based regulations as they
     relate to reactor safety.  And unfortunately, my colleague,
     Jim Riccio, who submitted those comments, is unable to
     attend today.  But please take them into consideration,
     nonetheless.
               I will focus my comments on the implications for
     waste management.  We feel that it's important for this
     Committee to take into account these considerations, given
     that the proposed guidelines would inform all Commission
     regulations concerning the entire nuclear cycle.
               Maintaining safeguards in the transport and
     storage of nuclear waste requires the NRC to take a more
     proactive approach to waste management than the proposed
     guidelines would suggest.  Once a waste storage cannister or
     a transportation cask leaks, public health and environmental
     safety are already threatened.  There is no margin of safety
     to protect the public if part of the already flawed system
     fails.  In this respect, a performance-based approach is
     clearly inadequate, since it can only respond to failure,
     not predict or prevent it.
               As well, the many uncertainties associated with
     waste management make it difficult to adequately assess the
     risks involved, including the entire range of probable and
     improbable events affecting the control of radioactive
     materials.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Excuse me.  Didn't the staff say
     that when they set the performance guideline, one of the
     criteria is that there would be no immediate safety concern
     if the criterion is not met?  So, in that case, having a
     cask leak could not be acceptable.  I mean, that
     cannot--there could not be a criterion related to that
     because you will have an immediate safety concern.  So, it
     seems to me the staff has covered your concerns.  They would
     impose prescriptive requirements at a much lower level
     before, in fact, it leaks.  So I don't understand where the
     disagreement is.
               MS. GUE: Well, I agree that that is the concern;
     that as soon as--that at the larger scale, a
     performance-based method would seem to beg the question in
     that way.  And I guess to us it seems difficult to imagine
     how, again, in terms specifically of waste management, how
     performance-based criteria could be established in a
     meaningful way that would not immediately threaten public
     safety as soon as they are violated.  It seems difficult to
     envision how the bright line on the margin of safety can be
     applied to risk--or to waste management scenarios.
               MR. POWERS: So let's take an example from the
     reactor field that might be applicable here.  Dr. Shack
     pointed out that you've got a criterion on a steam generator
     tube that says at the end of the cycle, the strength of this
     tube cannot be less than three times the delta pressure that
     it experiences during operation.  Assuming it hasn't leaked,
     but it has got a criterion such that, based on a variety of
     information, says it has some probability of leaking if we
     ran it in the next cycle.  But right now, it hasn't.  And
     that seems to have met the requirement that no catastrophic
     failure has occurred, to find out that the tube has failed.
               MR. SHACK: And, if, in fact, the tube is only 2.5
     times delta P, the probability that you're going to actually
     have a failure is still very, very small, so there is, you
     know, there is a margin built into the performance
     indicator.
               MS. GUE: Again, my comments are focused more
     specifically on the effect for this--of this approach, on
     the waste side of the scenario.  And I realize that's not
     the specific focus of your committee.  And yet, as I began,
     we do feel it is important for your committee to consider
     these implications, and that these are high-level guidelines
     being proposed; and that the reactors do inevitably generate
     waste material.
               And I think I was just about to get into another
     relevant aspect that I think applies to that scenario, which
     is that the many uncertainties in terms of dealing with
     waste and perhaps also with reactor safety make it perhaps
     difficult to adequately, to target what the risky situations
     are before we have experience in them causing failure.  And
     so, in general, we fear that this general outlook will set a
     precedent, a dangerous precedent that results more in
     responding to failure than ensuring safety.
               MR. POWERS: It seems to me that if I was thinking
     about a very, very uncertain situation, from my ability to
     quantify and characterize all of the threats, I would be
     tending toward a more performance-based criteria and away
     from a prescriptive base, because I don't think I could
     prescribe everything that threatened a system.  But I'd want
     to back up a little bit and take a more holistic view and
     say, here are your performance criteria.  Don't threaten the
     integrity of the barriers here.  Or install multiple
     barriers so that if one of them does fail, it's okay.  I've
     got another barrier to prevent then.  I mean, it seems to me
     that performance is not inconsistent with a highly uncertain
     situation that you probably have in particular things like a
     waste repository, or even a transportation situation.
               MS. GUE: Of course, it's not our intention to
     suggest that we disagree that the overall performance should
     be towards safety.  It's just in terms of what the
     implications of these guidelines would be for--at a high
     level for the regulatory outlook that's adopted.  And from
     our reading of the proposals, it would seem that this
     relaxes the regulatory conservatism that we feel is
     necessary to guarantee as much as possible the safety; and
     that once again, while we can say that safety is the--you
     know, is at the end of the day, the performance criteria; in
     order to guarantee that--just to identify that as a
     performance criteria is not enough to be able to guarantee
     it, I guess.  And in this case, excessive conservatism would
     be a virtue.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Now, let me see if I understand. 
     I believe what you're--the message you are sending us is
     that you're concerned that when the time comes to implement
     these things, maybe some of the conservatisms would be
     eliminated, and some of the criteria would be set at a level
     which you find unacceptable.  But in principle, because the
     staff really spoke at a very high level earlier, you don't
     seem to disagree with the principles they have set, like,
     you know, no immediate safety concern if the criterion is
     not met.  They have objective criteria and so on.  It's the
     future implementation that seems to be of concern to you.  I
     mean, am I understanding it correctly?  Because, you know,
     principles are principles.
               MS. GUE: Well, I think as you yourself pointed out
     in some aspects of the previous presentation that, you know,
     these words are very nice to have, but the comments that I'd
     like to put forward have to also address what kind of
     precedent they would be setting; what kind of orientation
     they would be putting the regulatory structures towards.
               Of course, I'm not going to tell you that I
     disagree or that Public Citizen disagrees with the objective
     of safety.  At the same time, reading some of the language
     in terms of lessening some of the regulatory burden,
     allowing the agency, or the licensees to focus attention on
     certain safety concerns, where it can be most efficient--it
     seems clear that the objectives, as they are being stated,
     are coming, of course, out of a specific direction.  And we
     do have concerns with that.  And so perhaps by implication
     those are concerns with the general objectives of these
     guidelines.
               MR. KRESS: It sounds to me like you're questioning
     what seems to be a basic assumption in this process, and
     that assumption is that one can actually find performance
     indicators that are directly related to the safety and the
     risk of an activity.  That seems to me like what you're
     questioning; that such indicators are such a loose
     connection to real safety and hazard that they don't cover
     all the aspects or all the objectives that you might be
     interested in preserving.  Was that a way to interpret it?
               MS. GUE: That's certainly one element of our
     concern.  I think a related element is that we tend to be
     best able to articulate these safety criteria after we have
     experience of their failure.  And given, in some cases, the
     newness of the scenarios that we're dealing with--again, the
     many uncertainties involved, I just need to restate the need
     for conservatism and the need to not only--to not be content
     with evaluating eventual outcomes in instances where the
     eventual outcome can already be a threat to public safety.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: I think the basic position of
     Public Citizen, which has been articulated by Mr. Riccio in
     the past and today by you, is that this whole initiative of
     risk-informing the regulation and developing
     performance-based criteria is motivated by the industry's
     desire to become more efficient, and, you know, to save
     money.  And the public safety is not a concern here.  I
     think that's a fundamental position that Public Citizen has. 
     And today, you know, you're addressing this particular
     issue, but, again, coming from that perspective.  And last
     time we heard this was when we talk about technical
     specifications, when there was a letter from Mr. Riccio that
     I read that expressed that basic point of view.  Is that
     correct?  That before--
               MS. GUE: Yes, that's true.  It's our perspective
     representing our membership that public safety concerns
     should be central and integral to any policy direction.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: I want to ask another question
     before we run out of time.  This issue of public
     participation puzzles me, and I'd like to understand a
     little better how you see it.  You sort of complained
     earlier that you made a lot of comments, and the staff
     dismissed them.  So what is public participation?  I mean,
     why can't the staff dismiss them?  I mean, is public
     participation--does it mean that the staff will have to
     accept what you are telling them, or accept maybe 20
     percent?  I mean, how do we decide that we have had a
     successful stakeholder participation in the process, when,
     you know, there are so many interests and different views
     and so on.  I don't know myself, but I'm curious how you see
     this process.  I mean, if the staff rejects your positions
     then they have not really listened to the public?
               MS. GUE: I certainly agree with you that having
     public participation in a meaningful way is a very difficult
     objective to achieve and to articulate in a clear way.  But
     to the extent that these processes are being labeled as
     participatory, our complaint, the complaint that I
     articulated was actually not so much that, or not only I
     guess, but our input was rejected by the staff, but that it
     was categorically deemed out of order, if you will.  In
     looking over the Federal Register notice that contained the
     staff response to public comment, in several places it was
     noted that other comments at a more fundamental level were
     also noted, but since they didn't respond to the specific
     detail of implementation or the specific detail of how of
     wording or whatever the specifics were, they couldn't be
     incorporated.  So I guess there is a veneer of public
     participation, but it already, but it was already within the
     context taken for granted that the public was, in general,
     in favor of a performance-based approach.  And it was only a
     matter of, and the public was only invited to participate to
     the extent that they had comments on how those guidelines
     should look, rather than looking--taking first thing first,
     and looking, in fact, is a performance-based approach itself
     in the public interest.  I don't know if you see the
     distinction that I'm making?
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: No, yeah.  It appears to me that
     your complaint is really that you did not receive any
     logical arguments why your positions were rejected.  They
     were just dismissed.  Is that really?  I mean, you would--
               MS. GUE: Right.  Because that's--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: You would have accepted perhaps a
     logical argument as to why this particular recommendation
     cannot be accepted.  But just to be dismissed off-hand--
               MS. GUE: Right, that.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Is something that is a little
     offensive.  Is that it?
               MS. GUE: Not only offensive, but also I would say
     patronizing to the extent that we are being asked to
     support, to give witness to a process to be labeled
     participatory, when, in fact, the very sense in which
     participation is invited begs the question.
               And I guess just to pick up again and this relates
     to some of the comments that I've just made.  And as I was
     assessing the risk-informed aspect of this discussion, is
     just to summarize, then, a performance-based regulatory
     structure can never be truly risk-informed, but is subject
     to failure based on the opportunity for undefined
     assumptions, statistical manipulation to disguise potential
     impacts, and even the limits of human imagination to
     conceive of all potentially risky scenarios.
               Furthermore, it seems irresponsible to base
     nuclear safety standards on a probabilistic analysis of
     risk.  The probability of any particular accident may be
     minute, but the potential consequences devastating. 
     Therefore, risk assessment must not be used to justify the
     relaxation of regulatory conservatism.
               Similarly, we are alarmed that the proposed
     guidelines would allow licensees to evaluate and prioritize
     safety concerns according to measures of economic
     efficiency.  It is inappropriate to take such a utilitarian
     approach toward public health and safety.  To be viable, the
     nuclear industry must demonstrate its ability to protect
     comprehensively against both probable and improbable risks. 
     Otherwise, it should be shut down.
               Having participated in the workshop process,
     Public Citizen maintains the position that regulatory
     conservatism is desirable to ensure that nuclear materials
     remain isolated from the biosphere.  It seems necessary to
     point out that prescriptive regulations do not prevent
     licensees from acting creatively to exceed prescribed
     standards.
               On the other hand, what is being referred to as
     flexibility in the proposed guidelines for performance-based
     standards is likely to result in the industry cutting
     corners in an effort to meet minimum performance criteria
     with as little cost as possible.
               The staff response to these concerns about safety
     has been to make semantic changes to the proposed
     guidelines.  These superficial amendments, however, do not
     address adequately our concerns, which relate to the fact
     that the fundamental orientation of performance-based
     regulation is not to emphasize safety.
               With the prospect of a high-level dump at Yucca
     Mountain currently under consideration, the public can only
     fear what this regulatory approach will mean for the
     transportation campaign and the waste site if it is
     approved.
               The NRC is mandated to protect public safety. 
     Yet, this proposal for a performance-based regulations would
     shift the regulatory emphasis away from safety concerns and
     place it instead on cost reduction.  Compromising safety
     guarantees in the name of economic efficiency will certainly
     do nothing to promote public confidence in the NRC's
     policies and procedures.  Indeed, reduced regulatory burden
     for the nuclear industry effectively amounts to an increased
     and unmeasurable burden of risk for the environment and
     public health.
               With respect to waste regulations, the drive for
     performance-based standards is yet another instance of the
     nuclear industry seeking to shirk responsibility for the
     waste it has created and continues to create.  The push to
     license Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository, the move
     to allow designing and building of storage casks before they
     are certified, the plan to make it easier for licensees to
     change their procedures, the search for the cheapest method
     to decommission plants, and the push to recycle radioactive
     materials into the marketplace all show that the NRC is
     willing to grant the industry's wish to dump its
     responsibility on the public.
               The nuclear industry is not clamoring to be more
     creative in order to better protect the people and the
     environment around reactors and dumps and along nuclear
     transportation routes.  The industry wants a bail-out to
     escape the burden of dealing with its own mess, and the
     proposed guidelines for performance-based regulations
     further this agenda.
               Finally, and as I've already stated, the process
     surrounding consideration of the proposed guidelines, by
     which public comments have been categorically ignored, has
     in itself weakened public confidence in the NRC's
     willingness and ability to pursue a publicly informed
     regulatory option that protects public health and the
     environment.
               These proposed high-level guidelines for
     performance-based activities make it clear that the NRC is
     ready to subjugate these safety concerns to the economic
     interests of the nuclear industry.
               MR. POWERS: Thank you.  Do any members have any
     additional questions?
               MS. GUE: Thank you for the opportunity to present.
               MR. POWERS: Thank you.  In view of there are no
     further comments, I will recess us until 16 after the hour.
               [Recess.]
               MR. POWERS: Let's come back into session.  We're
     going to turn now to the topic of use of industry
     initiatives in the regulatory process.  Mr. Barton, you can
     guide us through this thicket of controversy.
               MR. BARTON: Thank you.  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
               The purpose of this session this morning is to
     hear presentations by representatives of the NRC staff and
     Nuclear Energy Institute regarding a proposed commissioned
     paper concerning guidelines to ensure industry initiatives
     will be treated and evaluated in a consistent, predictable
     manner.
               The guidelines being proposed contain substantial
     detail and reflect the staff's recommended approach for
     including industry initiatives in the regulatory process. 
     The staff, working with stakeholders, have developed the
     proposed guidelines for considering industry initiatives in
     the regulatory process.  These initiatives, as successfully
     implemented, would preclude the need for regulatory action.
               At this time, I'll turn it over to NRC staff and
     Dick Wessman to take the lead.
               MR. WESSMAN: Thank you, sir.  I'm Dick Wessman,
     Deputy Director of the Division of Engineering at NRR, and
     with me, on my left, is Gene Carpenter.  If you look at the
     view graphs, you see two names on there--Gene Carpenter and
     Bob Herman, and they have been principal staff who have
     worked on this initiative over the course of the past year
     or so.
               We delivered, or the EDO delivered to the
     Commission, SECY-00-116 to the Commission on the 30th of
     May.  So that SECY dealing with this subject is now pending
     before the Commission, and my understanding is it would be
     publicly available within the allotted working day period
     whatever.
               What we want to do is describe the approach and
     the guidelines that are in that particular SECY in more
     detail and share our views with you and hear your views on
     this particular approach.  We're treating it as an
     information briefing and are not seeking a letter from the
     ACRS on the subject.
               Before I pass it to Gene, I would point out that
     this whole activity has its origins back in DSI-13, which
     was entitled The Role of Industry.  DSI-13 originally had
     two parts.  One part dealt with codes and standards
     activity, and Gil Millman I think came before you sometime
     back and helped describe some of that activity.  And there
     is actually management directives and material in place on
     how we work with the codes and standards consensus bodies.
               The other half of that DSI dealt with the concept
     of industry initiatives.  Earlier, it was called voluntary
     industry initiatives.  We've since kind of shortened it to
     just industry initiatives in response to some of the
     stakeholder comments.
               But that's a snapshot of background activities,
     and let me turn it over to Gene Carpenter, and he'll take us
     through the briefing view graphs.
               MR. CARPENTER: Good morning.  As Dick said today,
     we'll be talking about the industry initiatives and the
     regulatory process.  What we will be discussing today--we'll
     be discussing the purpose of the--of this presentation. 
     I'll give you a little bit of background on this that will
     include some brief discussion on DSI-13, the SECY-99-063,
     which was in response to DSI-13, and some of the actions to
     develop the proposed response.  I'll then be going through
     the proposed guidelines, and giving you a brief overview of
     those.  Some of the recommendations and further actions that
     the staff is making to the Commission, and then we'll wrap
     up with some conclusions.
               Okay, the purpose of this meeting is to discuss
     the proposed guidelines, which we intend to ensure that
     future initiatives that are proposed by applicable industry
     groups, and I will get to that in just a moment--what an
     applicable industry group is--would be treated and evaluated
     in a consistent, controlled, and open manner.  And
     basically, what this means is that we are trying to ensure
     that we will maintain safety, reduce unnecessary regulatory
     burden, improve the efficiency and effectiveness and
     realism, and improve public confidence through these
     industry initiatives.
               Now, it should be noted here that an applicable
     industry group, if we have multiple industry groups that are
     coming in with multiple and different ways to address a
     target, we will address each one of those as a separate
     industry group.
               And it is not the intent of our proposal in these
     guidelines that we have in front of the Commission at this
     time to create any new policies or procedures in existing
     areas that the NRC already has policies and procedures in
     place.  We do reference those throughout the guidelines.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Is it inconceivable that you will
     have to impose necessary regulatory burden?
               MR. CARPENTER: Yes, it is conceivable that we will
     have to--
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: So why don't you state it?
               MR. CARPENTER: But--that--I'll be coming to that
     in just a moment, sir.  The--at the time that we come across
     an issue, if we cannot find a way around imposing additional
     regulatory burden, then, of course, that is an option that
     is always available to us.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Well, the reason why I'm--
               MR. CARPENTER: But the purpose of industry
     initiatives is to reduce the amount of regulatory burden
     that would be imposed by the staff on the industry.
               MR. WESSMAN: If we're faced with inadequate safety
     issue, or if we're faced with a clear-cut issue that, you
     know, the generic letter is compelling regardless of whether
     the industry may have taken initiative or not, we're going
     to take those actions.  Those are right and proper to do.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Right.  And I believe you.  I
     mean, I think you will do that, but the problem seems to be
     that we are--we seem to be emphasizing this reduction in
     unnecessary too much and some of the public groups have been
     complaining about it.  So it seems to me that it will be
     appropriate to also include it on the list.  But, if
     necessary--
               MR. BARTON: But really the intent of the industry
     initiative is to reduce the burden.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS: Is to reduce the burden.
               MR. WESSMAN: Right.  In some cases. But let's Gene
     go through the story a little bit, but clearly there are a
     spectrum of complexity of issues and significance of issues,
     and there are situations where if a generic letter is not
     issued, that's less burden on us, and potentially less
     burden on the industry.  If they embrace the issue and go
     forward with addressing it, it makes good sense for us to
     make sure it's all done openly and everyone understands
     what's being done, and we monitor it.  So that's this--this
     aspect of burden.
               MR. WALLIS: Isn't it completely incredible that
     industry would come in and say we've found something which
     we really need to fix up, and therefore--
               MR. CARPENTER: They have already done it.
               MR. WALLIS: I mean, to reduce the burden?
               MR. CARPENTER: They have already done it.  That's
     happened.
               MR. WALLIS: We need to have that clear. 
     Otherwise, you're going to undermine the fourth objective,
     which is to improve public confidence.  So it can both ways. 
     You've got to emphasize that it can go both ways.
               MR. CARPENTER: Yes.  Yes.  And I'll come to that
     in just a moment, sir.
               I'll do the background.  Direction setting
     initiative 13, the role of industry, as Dick mentioned
     earlier, was issued by the Commission, in fact, SECY-97-303
     on December 31, 1997.  And it directed the staff to do
     various actions, including develop guidelines to describe a
     process and submission criteria that the staff would use to
     evaluate industry activities that would be substitutes for
     regulatory actions, and also to develop an implementation
     plan that addressed a number of issues related to NRC
     utilization of codes and standards.  The--we did that, the
     second one, about codes and standards with SECY-99-029, NRC
     Participation in the Development and Use of consensus
     standards.  That was dated January 28th, 1999.
               But we also put together SECY-99-063, the Use of
     Industry--by Industry of Voluntary Initiatives in the
     Regulatory Process.  And that provided the requested
     analysis that the Commission's SRM had given us. And it also
     included review of stakeholder comments that had been
     received dealing with some of the DSI-13 public meetings. 
     It also discussed the resource implications of implementing
     industry voluntary initiatives, the staff's conclusion of
     the analysis that was performed, and various recommendations
     by the staff.
               Some of the actions that we developed for the
     proposed guidelines.  The staff met with the industry.  It
     also met with the Nuclear Energy Institute, NEI, and other
     stakeholders on multiple occasions.
               We developed a Web page to provide information on
     the guidelines.
               MR. POWERS: Thank you very much.  I wonder how
     many members got that down?  Would you repeat it, sir?
               MR. CARPENTER: And that, of course, may be gotten
     to directly from the NRC's home page, under the reactor
     systems.
               The staff issued a Federal Register notice in
     December of 1999 that solicited stakeholder comments on
     technical and regulatory aspects related to the development
     of the proposed guidelines.  And we--at that time, we had
     asked interested stakeholders to give us any comments that
     they had up and including an entire set of proposed
     guidelines.  Unfortunately, we did not receive any comments
     at all from that Federal Register notice.
               We did receive comments later on, but not
     specifically in response to the FRN.  The staff provided
     draft guidelines by letter dated February 11th, 2000, and
     that is included on the Web page.  These guidelines were
     used as discussion points and later readings.  We then
     received comments during several meetings, and we also
     received comments during the March 28th, 2000 regulatory
     information break-out session on this issue.
               Again, the following proposed guidelines went up
     to the Commission in SECY-00-0116, dated May 30th, 2000.
               Now I'll get into the proposed guidelines.  Before
     we get heavily into it, there are a couple of definitions
     that the staff put together for industry initiatives. 
     Specifically, we defined just what industry initiatives. 
     And we broke those into two basic types: Type 1 being Type
     1-A, and Type 1-B.
               Type 1-A are those developed by applicable
     industry groups in response to some issue of potential
     regulatory concern A, to substitute for or complement
     regulatory actions for issues within existing regulatory
     requirements, or B, which are potential cost beneficial
     safety enhancement issues outside existing regulatory
     requirements.
               Type 2 are those that are initiated and developed
     by the applicable industry groups to address issues of
     concern to the applicable industry groups, but are outside
     existing regulatory requirements and are not cost beneficial
     safety enhancements, or ones that are used specifically for
     information-gathering purposes.
               And again, an applicable industry group is a
     member of one or more owners groups, an industry
     organization, or two or more licensees.  And you can have
     multiple industry groups addressing an issue at one time.
               MR. WALLIS: A group of one is not allowed?
               MR. CARPENTER: A group of one is plant specific.
               MR. WESSMAN: You could have a group of one such as
     the BWU owners group with the multiple plants in it.  An
     entity of one could be a single plant, and we're dealing
     with that issue on a plant-specific basis.
               MR. CARPENTER: In fact, the BWU IP would be
     classified as an AIG, applicable industry group.
               Now this is the proposed flowchart for industry
     initiatives processes.  This was included in the SECY paper. 
     I'd like to go through some of the boxes and the decision
     points that are made in this.
               Box one is issue identification, right up here at
     the top.  Once an issue has been identified by the staff, it
     is characterized and assigned to an appropriate process. 
     Either you'd use the industry initiatives process that we're
     proposing.  It could be classified as an allegation, in
     which case it would fall out from industry initiatives.  It
     could come as a 2.206 petition, and then go into the
     industry initiatives at some point, et cetera.  There are
     multiple ways to get at this.
               The emergency issue would be documented by the
     staff, and the staff would perform a preliminary evaluation
     of the technical and policy implications, and then present
     them to the NRR Executive Team for review and initial
     dispositioning.
               At this point, it should be pointed out that the
     guidelines are written specifically to NRR.  They could be
     applicable to other offices, but at this time, NRR has the
     most applicable industry groups that would be interested in
     this.  At a future date, if NMSS or other groups decide that
     they would like to have a process similar to this, they
     could certainly make use of it.
               We would have public meetings and or workshops to
     obtain additional information as necessary and also to
     receive individual views from appropriate stakeholders on
     the issue.  This is very important.  We want to make sure,
     as this says here, that we keep all stakeholders informed of
     issues, and what we're doing at all times.
               The public will, of course, be notified of the
     issue and all meeting and all workshops, and they would be
     open to public participation.
               MR. SEALE: Will that notification occur prior to
     or following the initial NRR Executive Team decision on
     whether or not to pursue the issue?
               MR. CARPENTER: It will occur before we go out to
     pursue the issue.  If we need to gather some more
     information.
               MR. SEALE: But initially, the Executive Team will
     make a decision which could be to not look at it, in which
     case the issue is dropped?
               MR. CARPENTER: At which case if the issue is
     decided to be dropped, we will appropriately document that,
     and put it out in a public forum.
               MR. SEALE: So that the decision to drop it--
               MR. CARPENTER: Yes.
               MR. SEALE: Becomes a matter of record?
               MR. CARPENTER: Yes.  It will not just completely
     disappear at this point.
               MR. HERMANN: Bob Hermann.  The other piece of this
     that will fit in there is part of what DET is using.  Some
     of these things are going to get bounced off of basically
     5109 in terms safety enhancements, and this 5109 criterion
     in terms of that will be part of making the judgement as to
     whether or not what we do with the issue.
               MR. CARPENTER: Looking at Box 2, the decision box
     here.  If the NRR ET does take a look at the initial
     evaluation.  They review it.  They decide that the emergency
     issue of sufficient importance to either meet with
     applicable industry groups and other stakeholders to present
     the staff's view or to immediately pursue the regulatory
     action--other than an applicable industry group performing
     an industry initiative.  They will decide either to pursue
     the issue, pursue the issue on an expedited basis, pursue
     the issue via industry initiative, or not pursue at all. 
     Okay.
               If we determine not to pursue the issue, and this
     goes back to the question you had, sir, that based on the
     considerations, the technical issue, the policy
     implications, whatever, the NRR ET may decide that the
     safety significance and existing regulatory basis precludes
     the need to pursue the issue, and at that point, the AIG's
     may have been involved with this and other interested
     stakeholders will be informed of the decision and the bases
     for that decision.  But this would not preclude AIGs from
     pursuing this through other avenues or as an item through
     the type of--
               MR. WALLIS: Shouldn't there be a loop from down
     below.  I mean, that's the gate where you decided to pursue
     or not.  Once you decide to purse, you seem to be on track
     all the way down to the bottom.  It may be something you
     discover along the way will make you go back to Box 3.
               MR. CARPENTER: Please bear in mind, this is a very
     simplified diagram.  There are also sorts of--
               MR. WALLIS: But I don't see any loop that says go
     back to not pursue any further.
               MR. WESSMAN: Well, I think your point is very well
     taken.  It is conceivable that as either more--maybe the
     decision is made, hypothetically, I'm taking a situation
     where not to pursue it.  Some new information comes
     available, and the issue would be revisited and we would
     continue to look at the process.  It is conceivable we say
     the decision is to pursue the issue.  Information again
     becomes available that renders it almost moot, and a
     decision would be made.  I think the important thing is that
     there is this structure to the process, and that there is
     openness to the process and opportunity for participation by
     all of the possible interested stakeholders, and that's an
     aspect that we would continue to emphasize as Gene goes
     through here.
               But your concept of a revisit is certainly very
     likely--you know, very possible, and is not precluded by the
     way the guidelines are structured.
               MR. WALLIS: Okay.
               MR. CARPENTER: If decision two, decision one being
     not to pursue the issue.  Decision two being to expedite
     resolution occurs, then we will go on to pursuing an
     expedited basis to performing some corrective action.  And
     that would be based on the level of risk involved and the
     need for the prompt corrective action to occur.  And some of
     the expeditious approaches could include activation of
     appropriate owners groups regulatory response groups,
     issuances of orders or bulletins in accordance with SECY
     99-143, which is the generic communications SECY paper.  The
     staff may defer formal regulatory actions while appropriate
     owners groups, regulatory response groups are activated to
     address the issue.  And again, we will keep all stakeholders
     informed of what's going on through appropriate
     communications.
               If we decide not to pursue, if we decide that
     it--we don't need to pursue or we don't need to pursue as a
     regular expedited, just to go to industry initiatives, we
     will then move on Box 5, which we will then send a letter to
     identified AIGs, one or more as the case may be, and other
     interested stakeholders, inviting an evaluation and
     development of proposal for addressing the issue.
               At this time, we will also be developing a Web
     page to keep people informed of what's going on.
               MR. WALLIS: Who's keeping informed?  Presumably,
     this is so that, if necessary, you can listen to what they
     have to say?
               MR. CARPENTER: We--
               MR. WALLIS: Or just telling them.
               MR. CARPENTER: Keeping informed means that it's a
     two-way street.  We want communications to and from
     stakeholders.
               MR. WALLIS: Thank you.
               MR. CARPENTER: The staff will evaluate any
     proposal that the AIGs will bring to us after they've had
     the issue identified to them, and also any stakeholder
     comments or proposals before holding any further meetings or
     workshops on this issue.
               We want to make sure that we have a better
     understanding of the issue.  And once that is in place, if,
     again, going back through the do loops here, we go and
     decide to continue at this point, we'll have an industry
     initiative action setting and communication plan
     established.  And those will be done by the applicable AIGs
     with appropriate tasks, milestones, resources required,
     responsible parties, licensee commitments, as appropriate,
     et cetera, to be utilized in pursuing the resolution of the
     issue of concern.
               The staff will also establish its own action task
     plan and communications plan to ensure that we are tracking
     and monitoring what's happening and appropriately
     communicating the actions to our stakeholders.
               Some of the possible approaches for resolving the
     issue could include development and implementation of an
     industry program, voluntary licensing amendments, revision
     to industry guideline documents, modifications to code and
     standards, or even creation of a generic safety issue, and
     others as appropriate.
               MR. SHACK: These are really all applicable only to
     the Type 1 initiatives, right?  The Type 2 would more or
     less bypass this whole process?
               MR. CARPENTER: Type 2 would basically bypass this. 
     The--the action plan would be developed by the action group,
     the applicable industry group as necessary, but the staff
     would be once removed from this, because it is outside of
     regulatory concerns.
               MR. HERMANN: Well, except for the
     information-gathering ones.
               MR. CARPENTER: Except for the information
     gathering, yes.
               MR. HERMANN: That's basically an issue where there
     was insufficient information available to do something, and
     it would basically be an arrangement to work with an AIG to
     provide the information to be able to make a decision if
     something needs to go forward or not.
               MR. CARPENTER: Going on to Box 6, the regulatory
     acceptance of proposed industry initiative.  Once the staff
     has reviewed a proposal from the industry on how to address
     this, and their action and communication plans, we will
     proceed as described in Boxes 8 and 9 below.  The industry
     initiative in action, if they are found to be unacceptable,
     the issues leading to the staff's rejection of those plans
     for whatever reason will be communicated to the AIGs and
     other stakeholders in an attempt to revise the issues--I
     mean, those action plans that are not acceptable.  Then, the
     NRC will determine, if they remain unacceptable, if we need
     any further regulatory action, which could move us back up
     here to the issue resolution being expedited.
               Staff acceptance or rejection of the proposed
     industry initiative will be appropriately communicated
     either through a Federal Register notice, placing it on the
     NRC's Web page, or other communication means.
               Going on to Box 7, if we determine that
     appropriate regulatory action is necessary, that the staff
     does not accept the AIG's proposed actions, individual
     licensees that fail to commit to these accepted industry
     initiative, or if member licensees fail to implement
     committed to actions, the staff may take independent action
     at that time.
               Any regulatory actions taken will be determined
     consistent with existing regulations and NRC policies and
     procedures.  And for items requiring back-fit analysis per
     10 CFR 50.109, accrediting of industry initiatives, would
     follow latest applicable guidance.
               And we do have a SECY paper on that presently
     before the Commission.
               MR. POWERS: Doesn't that mean that once you come
     to this Box 5, and say establish industry initiative, that
     it's almost essential that there be a parallel activity
     established by the staff so that they can act in the event
     that licensees nominally susceptible to whatever
     vulnerability has been identified but chose not to accept
     the AIG's proposed solution can be dealt with?
               MR. CARPENTER: By the time you've reached Box 5,
     and you've decided that this is an issue of concern, and you
     want to present it to the industry to see if they would take
     it on an industry action, you have performed a regulatory
     analysis sufficient to move forward with appropriate actions
     from a regulatory perspective.
               MR. POWERS: Okay.  So you probably would have a
     proposed regulatory action of some sort in mind at least,
     maybe a conceptual idea, by the time you went to the Box 5?
               MR. CARPENTER: Yes.
               MR. WESSMAN: And, in fact, as Gene mentioned, in a
     sense, there are parallel action plans.  There may be the
     industry's groups action plan and our action plan.  And
     obviously, that it should have some common points to them,
     but there are slightly different motivations for certain
     things that we may do or oversight type of things, and as
     compared to what the industry may do.
               Some of this is obviously a level of detail that
     may depend on the type and the significance of the
     particular issue, ranging all the way down to the Type 2
     that we've talked about, where it's really outside our
     purview, and the industry may have its own plans or less
     rigorous activity depending on the importance of the issue.
               MR. WALLIS: Okay.  It's kind of useful to have
     that in the diagram, because the impression here is that it
     doesn't give that impression.
               MR. CARPENTER: Well, the diagram, again, is very
     simplified.  If you go through the discussion of this in the
     proposed SECY paper, we do discuss it to a greater degree.
               MR. WESSMAN: We were making the effort of keep it
     simple, and keep it on one page.  And I think we're reaching
     into nuances of the thing, and it was hard to get it all on
     one page and still be simple with the thing.
               MR. CARPENTER: Box 8, the implementation of the
     industry initiative.  At this point, we the staff have
     agreed that the industry has a good proposal of how to
     address the issue.  It basically scratches ours.  Now, what
     we need to do is just have them go out, implement the
     proposal, and we monitor what they do.  Various milestones
     in the action plan will be documented in the staff's task
     action plan.  And it will be tracked by the NRR director's
     quarterly status report and incorporated into the NRR's
     operating plan, as appropriate.
               The milestones will be monitored via periodic
     reviews, through periodic public meetings with the AIGs and
     other stakeholders, and audits and or inspections as
     necessary.
               MR. HERMANN: The other comment might be making
     general overall, to answer a little of that earlier question
     on the appropriate regulatory actions.  This diagram and the
     process--we looked at a Commission paper that went upstairs
     on preparing things for generic communications, and it's
     reasonably similar to this in terms of the way the process
     looks, and some of the other things.  So we did consider
     that in part of the development of the process and that this
     is consistent with that.
               MR. WALLIS: I go back to the issue I raised about
     Box 5.  I read the details of Box 5.  The only thing I can
     find there about what the staff is doing besides just sort
     of processing the industry's initiative, it says the staff
     should establish its own industry initiative action task
     plan.  Now that to me simply indicated a way to push this
     thing through the works.  But you indicated it was more than
     that; that it was actually thinking about the whole issue
     and whether or not staff should go off and do something in
     addition, because there was an important issue here of some
     sort.
               MR. CARPENTER: When we establish our action plan,
     one of the milestones in that--and again, forgive me for
     diverging, but we were trying to keep it as high level as
     possible when we were putting this together.
               MR. WALLIS: But I think you don't want to give the
     impression that this is just sort of--I don't know to put
     this--it's greasing the skids on something for industry to
     just push something through, and you say, yes, all the time. 
     I think you have to be careful not to give that impression.
               MR. CARPENTER: Oh, no.  That is not the impression
     that we're trying to give at all, sir.  When we go out, and
     we have an issue that we deem is of sufficient importance
     that we want something to occur on it, if the industry comes
     back and tells us that they want to do A, B, C, and D, and
     we were thinking A, B, E, F, G, we'll say, you've got part
     of it.  We'd like for you to go back and take a look at this
     over here.  There will be communications back and forth on
     this.  The stakeholders may come back and say, yes, but what
     about J and K over here?  And we'll consider that also.  But
     it's not a foregone conclusion that simply because we offer
     it up to the industry a possible industry initiative that it
     will go forth, however they present it.
               Box 9 now, inspection and or monitoring and
     enforcement as necessary.  And now Type 1 issues may
     required that AIG member licensees will implement changes in
     their programs, technical specifications, or take some other
     actions as established in the industry initiative action
     plan.  The staff will perform inspection and or monitoring
     of the implementation of Type 1 activities, and that will
     depend upon the nature of the activities agreed to, to
     address the issue.  And enforcement will be available if
     violations of regulatory requirements occur.
               Type 2 industry initiatives involve actions that
     are outside of existing regulatory requirements or that are
     used as information-gathering mechanism for the need for NRC
     overview of Type 2 activities is not anticipated and
     enforcement actions will not be available.  Need of
     inspection and or monitoring will be determined consistent
     with reactor oversight process and will be established on a
     case basis consistent with the requirements associated with
     implementation of the issue and revised risk-informed
     inspection program.
               If specific licensees or AIGs in general fail to
     adequately implement agreed upon actions, the NRC will
     address in the context of existing regulatory policy and or
     additional regulatory action consistent with the guidance.
               And, again, throughout all this we will
     appropriately document the results and have stakeholders
     informed of the issue status.  Going on to other items that
     will be involved in this process.  We will need project
     management, and basically we'll have a lead project manager
     for the initiative appointed, and it will be either from the
     Division of Project Management or the Division of Regulatory
     Improvement Programs, as appropriate.  And they'll be
     responsible for facility and staff review of the industry
     initiative, for assuring that activities described in the
     action plan above are accomplished, and acting as the
     staff's point of contact between the AIGs, stakeholders, and
     other interested members of the public.
               Also, want to--
               MR. SHACK: Excuse me, Gene.  Just a--at one point
     in this process are the technical basis documents, for
     example, for the industry initiative to be available to the
     public?
               MR. CARPENTER: As soon as we put together their
     proposal, we will have--that goes back, Bill--we go back to
     establishing the industry initiative.  They will come in
     with meetings in this point, right here.  The industry will
     come in with their proposals, and those will be publicly
     available.  If there are proprietary concerns on these, we
     will have non-proprietary versions of them available to the
     public.  So, we're trying to be as open as possible
     throughout this process.
               MR. WESSMAN: It's conceivable all the way back in
     the Box 1, Box 2 phase, there could be information that on a
     technical basis that becomes available as we are trying to
     understand the issue, and these may be part of either
     documents sent to us or part of meeting summaries, depending
     on, you know, exactly how the interactions took place.  The
     idea is always openness.
               MR. SHACK: Okay, so it will be different than the
     VIP process, where, in fact, the documents were sort of
     proprietary--
               MR. CARPENTER: Initially.
               MR. WESSMAN: Well, yeah, you can't violate the
     proprietary aspects, because--I mean, I think, you know,
     there are other laws that you run foul of, but as long as
     you're not dealing with a proprietary aspect, any of the
     interactions between the staff and the group with a
     characterization of the problem, we want to make sure it's
     public.
               MR. HERMANN: Yeah, Bill, the other piece of that
     is I think with the VIP programs, early on there were
     non-proprietary documents, okay.  But I think what this or
     any other process is going to take is judicious
     implementation of what can be proprietary and
     non-proprietary--
               MR. SHACK: I guess you always had that problem all
     the time.  I never thought about it before.  I mean, you
     know, how do you make available the information that the
     public might need to make a judgement when much of that
     information is proprietary.
               MR. HERMANN: Well, I think you need to get enough
     things in there to make sense to people versus giving a
     document where somebody just somebody just basically blanks
     out lots of pages without too much thinking.  I think
     whoever's managing the project needs to do a good job of
     control of the project in terms of making sure that the
     non-proprietary version isn't just a bunch of blank pages.
               MR. WESSMAN: And we face that with technical
     reviews now.  It may be on a thermal hydraulic code activity
     or something like that, or going back to core shroud repairs
     and the design--certain aspects of the design of core shroud
     tie rods, for example, was a proprietary aspect.  You had to
     describe it in sufficient detail to inform the public and
     the stakeholders and still maintain the proprietary.  So
     there is a balance there.
               MR. SHACK: And the person in the public who felt
     he wasn't getting enough would then go to a Freedom of
     Information Act, is that his appeal process?
               MR. CARPENTER: If necessary.  He can always
     contact the staff up front and ask us if, you know, more
     information is available, and we will try to accommodate as
     possible putting more information into the public domain. 
     But if, for whatever reason, the industry group says that
     no, this is as--the maximum that is possible, we will
     communicate that as appropriate.
               MR. HERMANN: Well, one of the things we found in
     the experience now, though, is some of the VIP reports are
     going to be used for a basis for license renewal, and the
     non-proprietary versions to say were a little skimpy.  Those
     were getting rewritten, and people can put out
     non-proprietary versions that provide sufficient information
     to be able to let people what's going on.  You don't have to
     put in all the numbers, but you certainly can describe
     things sufficiently to let people know what's going on.
               MR. CARPENTER: And just as a side note, VIP is the
     BWR Vessel and Internals Project, and we've discussed with
     the ACRS before.  It's a good example of a voluntary
     industry initiative.
               MR. POWERS: And we have another presentation from
     that particular group coming up in the next couple of
     meetings.
               MR. CARPENTER: I believe in September is when
     we're--
               MR. POWERS: It's probably when we need to move
     ourselves along if we can.  I'm not sure of how our time is.
               MR. CARPENTER: Public participation.  The
     stakeholders will be given an opportunity to provide their
     individual views on the industry initiative action plan and
     to participate as possible.  And, again, as we were just
     mentioning, the staff will disclose to the public all
     information possible.
               Communications plan.  The staff will develop for
     each issue, and the lead PM has the primary responsibility
     for implementing that.
               Resource planning.  This is a particular concern
     these days.  The staff will meet publicly with industry
     groups and other stakeholders to obtain information on the
     status of ongoing and potential future industry initiatives. 
     And we will address our industry needs using the add shed
     process as part of the PPP hand process, to prioritize
     resource needs.
               Fees.  Right now, TIMSY part 170 allows for the
     exempting of fees for generic reviews.  And we are proposing
     to the Commission that no licensee-specific charges
     associated with industry initiatives will be charged.  Sort
     of a way to sweeten the pot to do this.
               MR. WESSMAN: On the other hand, if you're in the
     license amendment process, there are certain rules for that. 
     And so sometimes you reach into a situation where a fee
     would be appropriate.
               MR. SHACK: Well, then who pays for it, especially
     if you don't get fees?
               MR. CARPENTER: Well, the fees will be charged to
     the overhead, and that's what 10 CFR part--
               MR. WESSMAN: It's a part of the industry's
     packages.  I mean, NRC is a fee recovery agency, of course. 
     The cost of our doing business is spread across the industry
     as a whole.  And in that case, when we say there are no fees
     charged, it's not charged to a specific group or it's a
     specific collection of licensees.
               MR. SHACK: So the generators pay for the fees?
               MR. CARPENTER: Yes.  And by source, as the case
     may be.
               MR. WESSMAN: Yeah.  The generators get spread
     around.
               MR. SEALE: It's called take out of the--
               MR. WESSMAN: The VIPs get spread around.  It goes
     both ways.
               MR. SEALE: You're familiar with that, aren't you,
     Bill?  Take it out of your budget?
               MR. WALLIS: But eventually then it's recovered
     from industry?
               MR. CARPENTER: Yes, it will still be recovered
     from industry.  You're dealing with multiple licensees in
     this case, and we feel that the added benefit of charging
     for a small amount will be more than offset rather than
     charging directly to these groups.
               Tracking of the commitments will be consistent
     with  existing regulatory procedures, and enforcement
     guidelines that we use throughout are consistent with the
     reactor oversight process improvements.
               Now, it should be noted and NEI will be talking in
     just a moment that we did receive some stakeholders'
     comments, mostly from NEI.  And their views on this process
     I will allow NEI to give them to you.  I don't want to
     mischaracterize those in any way.
               The recommendations and future actions that we are
     recommending to the Commission is that we are requesting the
     Commission's approval of the proposed guidelines, which we
     will issue for public comment.  After considering the
     further stakeholder comments, the staff will communicate a
     final revised guidelines and implement for future industry
     initiatives.  And we'll go back to the Commission if the
     final guidelines are of substantial difference from what the
     present proposed guidelines are to be.
               The final guidelines, as will the SECY-00-0116,
     will be posted on the NRC's Web page for public review.
               The expected milestones are that once the
     Commission has approved the issue, the issuance of the
     guidelines that we will have these out for public comment by
     July 31st.  The guidelines will be issued for a 45-day
     comment period, and by August 31, and then the comments
     resolved and final guidelines issued by January 5th, 2001.
               In conclusion, the proposed guidelines for
     including industry initiatives in the regulatory process
     provide the maximum flexibility possible while making
     optimum use of existing regulatory processes to provide a
     framework for consistency and for efficient and effective
     use of issues.  The guidelines provide for public
     participation in the process and for making information
     available to all stakeholders.  And interactions by the
     staff with the industry groups or other members of the
     public in utilizing these guidelines will be carried out so
     that we do not run afoul of the Federal Advisory Committee
     Act.
               MR. WALLIS: What is the criterion for optimum?
               MR. CARPENTER: For optimum?
               MR. WALLIS: For making optimal use?
               MR. CARPENTER: We want to make sure that it is
     available to the extent practical.
               MR. WALLIS: I don't think it's an appropriate
     adjective to use.  I think you--that it wouldn't change any
     sense, unless you used some criterion.
               MR. CARPENTER: Okay.  Thank you.
               MR. HERMANN: Well, thank you.  We'll take that
     under consideration.
               MR. CARPENTER: And that concludes our discussion.
               MR. WESSMAN: And I guess, as I wind up, we wind
     up, I would point out a couple of things.  In the past the
     work with the industry over the last few years on industry
     initiatives I think has worked quite effectively.  It has
     been somewhat ad hoc in nature.  And yet, the communications
     with the industry and the meetings with the industry all
     follow our processes for, you know, public awareness and
     this sort of thing.  I think what we are bringing with this
     approach is a little more structure and rigor to how we do
     the process, and assure that we work such interactions with
     the industry in a consistent and very open manner.  And this
     was I think a principal motivation to develop the sort of
     process that you see.
               And I think also, as we pointed out earlier, the
     level of detail in the process may be dependent on the type
     of issue. And I think the meat of your VIP happens to be an
     issue, although handled on an ad hoc basis, is a very
     complex and a large issue and has been and shows a path of a
     lot of interactions between the staff and the industry and a
     lot of interaction that has included the public, where all
     of the proprietary rules and this sort of thing allow.  It
     may be that a less significant issue or something that may
     be focused on a--for example, a certain class of valves or
     something like that--may be, but much less rigorous and
     structured just by virtue of the nature of the issue.
               But these general guidelines help push the staff
     into a level of structure that I think provides that
     confidence to the other stakeholders and the industry that
     we are following a process, and it's an understood process,
     and it's working.
               MR. HERMANN: But it also might provide a benefit
     of some efficiencies in the process in terms of reaching
     resolution on issues so things don't drag out for quite
     maybe as long as some other things have.
               MR. WESSMAN: And quite true, and, as we mentioned,
     the efficiency may stretch to where generic correspondence
     may not be necessary or appropriate because of the actions
     being taken.
               Well, without any further questions or else we
     want to turn over the remaining time to NEI.
               MR. BARTON: Do any members have any other
     questions of the staff at this time?  If not, thank you very
     much.
               MR. WESSMAN: Thank you, sir.
               MR. BARTON: And now turn it over to Alex Marion
     from NEI.  Alex?
               MR. MARION: Good morning.  My name is Alex Marion. 
     I'm the Director of Programs at the Nuclear Energy
     Institute, NEI.
               Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to
     speak with you on this interesting topic.  I have to tell
     you that I've been involved in the stakeholder meetings
     going back to the first one, which I believe was in
     September of 1998.  And, as the staff indicated, NEI had
     submitted two letters offering comments and concerns
     relative to the NRC's process that was articulated a few
     minutes ago.  And those comment letters, along with the
     transcript of the stakeholder meetings I think represent a
     broad spectrum of issues and concerns with the NRC's
     intended use of industry initiatives as a substitute or an
     alternative for regulatory action.
               I do have one question relative to the purpose of
     the guidance that I would like to ask the staff.  It wasn't
     clear to me during the presentation whether the guidance was
     intended for internal NRC use or was it intended for another
     purpose?
               MR. WESSMAN: This is Dick Wessman from the staff. 
     The guidance is really intended to help guide both internal
     and external organizations.  It's essentially a process for
     us on the staff.  It's our document, and it's our process.
               On the other hand, as we interact with the
     associated industry groups, we would hope that they would
     embrace the concept of the process and work constructively
     with us on the process.
               MR. MARION: Okay.  Thank you.  The--one of the key
     points that we've made as a first step in any process
     associated with addressing technical and regulatory issues
     was to take advantage of the opportunities to have early
     frequent communications with the industry.  And these
     communications and interactions, of course, would be held in
     the public forum; in other words, public meetings.
               And we have found historically that those
     interactions have been extremely important, because
     fundamentally there are two types of issues that often
     arise.  They are either technical or regulatory, right up
     front.  Initially, it's a technical concern of some sort,
     and you need to understand that.  And once you get that
     understanding, then it becomes clear what the regulatory or
     associated regulatory issues may be.  Or, there's a
     regulatory concern--one of straightforward compliance with
     one of the existing NRC requirements. 
               And that needs to be understood, right up front,
     as soon as possible.  As the staff indicated, some issues
     and interactions are more complex than others.  What I'm
     suggesting from the standpoint of these interactions with
     the NRC, it may take one meeting.  It may take several
     meetings.  It may take additional information to be gathered
     to either address the technical and or regulatory concern.
               But once that's been addressed and identified and
     understood, it becomes quite clear to everyone involved what
     the proper course of action is.  And that proper course of
     action may be a complementary set of activities between the
     NRC and the industry.  And by that, I mean the NRC will need
     to pursue some regulatory action and possibly in the form of
     a generic communication.  Industry may decide to pursue some
     complementary course of action on their own, as opposed to
     waiting for the generic communications to hit the street so
     to speak.  And there may be instances where there will be
     separate and independent courses of action.  The industry
     may indicate to the NRC that this is clearly a regulatory
     issue that must be addressed by the NRC, and the NRC should
     move forward and address it expeditiously.  And, in that
     particular case, the industry may decide not to do--not to
     pursue anything, but rather wait until the NRC has
     articulated the regulatory course of action.
               Most of the times that's been in the form of
     rulemaking effort.  There may be other instances where, when
     all the information is brought to bear to support the
     understanding of the technical regulatory nature of the
     issue, that it becomes clear action on the part of the NRC
     is not warranted.  But the industry may decide to pursue
     some action to improve performance, and I think the NRC
     alluded to that framework, if you will.  And this would
     apply to areas that are outside the regulatory framework. 
     But again, you can't make that determination of what's
     inside or what's outside the regulatory framework until you
     get a good understanding of the technical nature of the
     problem--scope and magnitude--and then move forward in
     regulatory space.
               So we believe that's--those interactions and
     communications are extremely important.  And I think
     historically, we have found that to be very successful and
     very effective in terms of understanding the issues before
     us.
               However, I need to make this perfectly clear.  If
     the NRC has an expectation that an action undertaken by
     industry is subject to inspection and enforcement, then our
     position simply put is that the NRC must pursue regulatory
     action, because fundamentally if they want to hold someone
     accountable through the inspection and enforcement process,
     then there clearly has to be a nexus to safety and a nexus
     to a clear regulatory requirement that falls within the
     framework of the current body of regulations.
               That's a very fundamental principle that cannot be
     compromised.  And we feel very strongly about that.
               Can I assume for a minute that the Committee has
     copies of the letters that we submitted with our comments
     and has reviewed them?  Okay.  Very good.
               Just an observation on the flow chart and the
     presentation by staff on this guidance.  I'm kind of
     surprised, and I arrived here this morning about 10 minutes
     before the break in which the young lady from Public Citizen
     was expressing concerns about public participation,
     stakeholder input, et cetera.  And I have to admit, I share
     her concerns, because I'm interested in the NRC's
     dispositioning of the comments that we have submitted over
     the past couple years relative to NRC's use of voluntary
     industry initiatives.  I look forward to an opportunity to
     see the SECY paper, and we look forward to an opportunity to
     provide comments on NRC's--excuse me--NRC's guidance
     document.
               And with that, I complete my comments, and I would
     like to give you a few minutes to ask any questions you
     might have.
               MR. POWERS: Let me just follow up on what you
     ended with.  If I look at this flow chart, it does not seem
     to highlight that fundamental position you articulated
     concerning enforcement.  I mean, it's almost a closure
     thing.  Inspection or monitoring and enforcement.  I mean,
     it's just a box at the end.  It doesn't say--it doesn't have
     an arrow that ties off to a fundamental regulatory objective
     or anything like that.  I mean that's clearly an objection
     you had to this flow chart.  I mean, it is such a thing that
     it--it's so important to you that it really ought to appear,
     even on a highly simplified chart, is what you're saying?
               MR. MARION: It should appear on--in the first step
     of the process when we interact on the scope and magnitude
     and the technical nature of the issue, and the regulatory
     basis, et cetera.  And once you have that understanding,
     then it becomes clear that the NRC has an inspection and
     enforcement authority.
               MR. POWERS: And it may be that that's what they
     intend.
               MR. MARION: If that is the case, that should be
     determined right up front.
               MR. POWERS: Maybe that that's what they intend in
     Box 2.  Dick, can you enlighten us on that?
               MR. HERMANN: Yeah--
               MR. POWERS: Go ahead, Bob.
               MR. HERMANN: I think that we have a little history
     with working with industry initiatives, and I think the type
     of initiative that it is, for instance, let's take the VIP,
     for instance, as an example.  The activities that BWR VIP
     were in our view enforceable when those things--a lot of the
     issues that started there started as addressing things that
     were later adopted into plant-specific programs.  For
     instance, some of these items would have--if you had to went
     generic letter route, would have been probably compliance
     exceptions to the rule.  When the procedures in the
     inspection guidelines and things like that were implemented
     for those activities, they were implemented under an
     Appendix B program at the plant sites.  And those items,
     just like any other activity at the plant, were inspectable
     activities once they were implemented by the licensee under
     Appendix pre-control QA program.  Things like, say, you had
     the shut-down risk type issues that were done voluntarily at
     the plants, we would consider those issues probably not to
     be an enforceable issue because it's outside of the current
     regulatory basis.  If a utility, and this is discussed in
     the paper--if those things, say a licensee decided not to do
     a shutdown risk program, I think at that point, it would be
     incumbent on the staff to take a regulatory action if they
     thought it was necessary.  But it wouldn't be in the
     enforcement world.
               And I think some of that discussion is in the
     paper in terms of differentiating between what's inspected
     and what's monitored.  Things that are--that may be risk
     significant that are outside of the regulatory basis are
     monitored.  And if additional regulatory action is required
     based on something, then the staff will take that action.
               MR. WESSMAN: Yeah, the only thing I'd supplement
     Bob's remarks with is part of the narrative description in
     the SECY paper that deals with Box 1, which is the
     identification phase, touches on the aspects of, you know,
     is it a Type 1 or a Type 2 issue?  Are there regulatory
     responsibilities there that compel regulatory action by
     virtue of the significance of the issue or the type of
     issue?  Is there a backfit consideration?  You know, I don't
     think we should start our paper with the most important
     thing is enforcement.  The most important thing is the
     consideration of the regulatory responsibility, and we think
     that's encompassed in the discussion of the issue
     identification and characterization as part of Box 1.
               So I think we've addressed it there, and yet we've
     tried to keep the overall diagram simple.
               MR. POWERS: I know we're just a victim of optics
     here.  And when he says this is a fundamental principle of
     one of your stakeholders, I think I would pay attention to
     those optics in the flow chart.
               MR. WESSMAN: Yes, sir.  I understand, and we
     certainly hear the NEI comment.  And as we interact with
     them further after these guidelines are put out for public
     comment, from any of the stakeholders, we will listen, and
     we will, you know, disposition and respond accordingly.
               MR. BARTON: Thank you.  Alex?
               MR. MARION: That's it.
               MR. BARTON: Thank you.  Thank you very much.  At
     this point, Mr. Chairman, you've got the meeting back.
               MR. POWERS: Thank you.  We now turn to the topic
     of safety culture, and I think we have a presentation by one
     of our own fellows.  And ordinarily, I would ask Dr.
     Apostolakis to lead us through this, but he doesn't look
     like he's in any capacity, so I will take on my own weak
     shoulders this chore, and introduce our Jack Sorenson to the
     Committee, in case you don't know him; and bring up the
     issue of safety culture.
               Safety culture is an issue that we have been
     dancing around now for some three years that I know of.  It
     is sometimes a topic whose elements are a bit in the eyes of
     the beholder.  It has for a long time been considered an
     important aspect in the safety of a nuclear power plant;
     that is, the safety culture that prevails there.  There have
     been numerous attempts to try to quantify what's meant by
     safety culture, because there's a belief that our tools for
     assessing safety, that is, the probabilistic risk assessment
     ought to reflect safety culture in some way.  These
     possibilities and probabilities have been kicked around by a
     lot of people.  The Committee decided that there was enough
     rumor, innuendo, and the like surrounding safety culture
     that maybe it was an issue that should be pursued by one of
     our fellows to give us a clear picture on that subject.  And
     so Jack's here to give us a clearer picture on what's meant
     by safety culture.  Okay, we'll--
               MR. SORENSEN:  I will do my best.  For the record,
     I am Jack Sorensen.  The discussion today is structured
     around the -- basically three questions that were posed when
     we started down this path sometime ago now.  I will touch on
     what is safety culture, focusing primarily on the IAEA, your
     International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, since they
     introduced the term; talk a little bit about why it is
     important; and, finally, touch on what the NRC can do about
     it.
               The International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group
     introduced the term "safety culture" in their report on the
     Chernobyl accident in 1986.  They expanded on it later in a
     third -- I think INSAG-3 on nuclear power plant safety and
     then in 1991 wrote a -- wrote INSAG-4, which is devoted
     entirely to the concept of safety culture.  And they divided
     the concept into basically three parts:  a policy level
     commitment that reflects the intent of the regulator and the
     corporate management of the facilities; a manager's
     commitment, which is -- basically addresses middle
     management functions; and individual commitment, which is,
     you know, the response of individuals to the provisions made
     for safety and for implementing safety.
               INSAG starts off by saying that you have to have a
     policy statement at the highest level and you have to have
     management structures that provide clear lines of
     responsibility and authority.  You have to provide resources
     and there has to be an element of self-regulation.  What
     they're calling self-regulation is what we would call
     self-assessment, basically.
               At the management level, they ask for definition
     of responsibilities, definition and control of safety
     practice, adequate qualifications and training, a system of
     rewards and sanctions that promotes safety conscious
     behavior, and an audit review and comparison function that
     helps guide the program and provide feedback.  These areas,
     the policy level commitment and the manager's commitment,
     are basically what are called management and organization
     factors at other places in the literature.  The individual
     commitment, maintaining a questioning attitude, implementing
     rigorous and prudent approaches to carry out procedures or
     addressing safety problems, and communicating within the
     organization are obviously extremely important and fall more
     or less in the category of attitudes and beliefs, as they're
     addressed elsewhere in the literature.
               Interestingly enough, there's an article in the
     May issue of Nuclear News on a human performance improvement
     program implemented at Duke Power.  This was -- if you have
     not read the article, I would recommend it.  The program was
     started at the McGuire Station in 1994, after several years
     of what the management perceived to be declining
     performance, and the program was later propagated to other
     Duke Power plants.  The figure here, which I borrowed from
     the Nuclear News article, embodies a number of elements that
     they think were important to human performance improvement
     and do not use the term "safety culture."  It doesn't appear
     in the article.  I don't know if it's used elsewhere in the
     program, but it was not mentioned in the article.
               But the thing to note is that the elements here
     correspond fairly closely to the elements that the INSAG
     document I just referenced corresponds to.  I haven't done a
     one-to-one mapping of every element in the diagram, but it's
     pretty evident that it covers the same territory.  The upper
     part of the arrow corresponds to the individual commitment
     in the INSAG documents.  The lower part, the supervisors and
     managers portions of the arrow here correspond to the --
     what INSAG calls manager's commitment.  The program, as
     represented here, doesn't cover the policy level issues, but
     they're certainly implicit in the existence of the program.
               In terms of results, it's worth to comment,
     according to the article, since the program has been
     implemented, outage times at McGuire, in particular, have
     been reduced from about 90 days for a typical refueling
     outage to around 33 days, and their capacity factor has
     increased from about 72 percent to about 89 percent, and
     that is --
               MR. WALLIS:  Excuse me, words are fine in this
     figure.  The victory is strange.  I mean, this event, the
     human performance, is teetering an unstable equilibrium on
     one point.
               MR. SORENSEN:  I cannot defend the graphic.
               [Laughter.]
               MR. SORENSEN:  I simply present it as it was
     presented in the article.
               MR. WALLIS:  It looks like a very solid structure
     until you get up to the top.
               MR. UHRIG:  That's the target, the hidden target.
               MR. POWERS:  I found the article interesting,
     because, as Jack said, they do not, at any time, use the
     word "safety culture."  They did encounter a situation,
     where the management perceived there to be a declining
     performance.  They set about trying to solve that and they
     came up with a solution that involved things -- all things. 
     It seemed to be in the realm of safety culture.  You don't
     see them changing the hardware here.  It's changing what I
     would call the wet ware.
               MR. WALLIS:  The questioning attitude is
     interesting.  I mean, at some point, you want to know
     questioning obedience to the level of procedures are.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Interestingly enough, that's one of
     the -- one of the conflicts that's identified in the whole
     nuclear safety area.  You want to proceduralize all of your
     routine activities; you want people to adhere to procedures;
     and, at some point, you have to provide, through the
     culture, presumably, the freedom to go do the right thing
     when the unexpected happens.  And how you accomplish both of
     those things in an organization is acknowledged as a very
     difficult problem.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It, also, I think, questions the
     procedures, themselves, you know, why are we doing certain
     things.  It doesn't mean disobedience.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Right.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It means that people are not
     passive receptors of whatever comes down from the top.
               MR. SIEBER:  I'll do whatever you want --
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yeah.  But, I think Jack is
     right.  I mean, it's really difficult to draw the lines.
               MR. UHRIG:  Verbatim compliance is there.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Well, I think the --
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I'm sorry, you can still have
     verbatim compliance, but you can have people questioning
     what they're about to comply with.  After the law is set,
     they have to comply.
               MR. SIEBER:  And the idea is to have a questioning
     attitude such that questions are asked before the -- asked
     to be, which is all of your review procedures.  I think that
     it's available.
               MR. SHACK:  What you're doing, if you do it.
               MR. SORENSEN:  The element that I was referring to
     really is when one encounters an area that is not covered
     adequately by procedures or processes or whatever.
               MR. SIEBER:  Where you get the wrong response,
     different than expected.
               MR. SEALE:  Perhaps it's not an awkward fact that
     even when you do everything right, you still have to hit the
     objective at the appropriate balance point, in order to get
     this event free human performance.  This doesn't guarantee
     you won't have a problem.  It does prepare you to achieve
     that situation, if you do it right.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I wonder what kind of high-level
     guidelines they had, when they developed their performance
     monitoring system.  That would be a very interesting thing
     to pursue.  They have performance monitoring under monitors.
               MR. SEALE:  Maybe we should ask them.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Yeah.  The -- there are a number of
     interesting questions that are suggested by the article.  It
     was reasonably brief, if you will, three or four pages in
     the document.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I like this guideline, stop when
     I'm sure.  Does that apply to the operators during an
     accident?
               [Laughter.]
               MR. WALLIS:  If you applied that to PRAs, you'd
     never complete one.
               [Laughter.]
               MR. SORENSEN:  One of the comments that was made
     in the article, it quotes from one of the Duke Power people,
     was if you analyze an entire event, you'll find that it
     wasn't just one mistake.  It was five, six, or seven
     mistakes that occurred and there weren't enough
     contingencies or barriers built in to prevent the event from
     happening.  And this common cause assessment identified the
     need for focus human error reduction training for
     technicians and supervisors.  This has been observed by a
     number of people in a number of places, if you will; that a
     lot of the literature on safety culture is devoted to the
     fact that these so called latent errors can perhaps only be
     attacked by safety culture or something very much like it.
               Back in March, there was a presentation from -- by
     the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory
     on a study sponsored by the NRC staff and they looked at 35
     operating events, 20 of them using PRA techniques with the
     one objective being to identify the influence of human
     performance in significant operating events.  The events
     that they looked at using the PRA techniques, the importance
     range from one times ten to the minus six, to five times ten
     to the minus three.  What they're calling importance here, I
     inferred from the presentation, was conditional core damage
     probability and the event on the high end of that was the
     Wolf Creek drain down event.
               They, again, found that the ratio of latent errors
     to active errors was four to one, specifically in the cases
     they looked at.  Latent errors included failure to correct
     known problems, failure to respond to information notices,
     included engineering problems, design, design change,
     testing, engineering evaluations, resources of failure.  The
     main point here is that the -- it reenforces the thought
     that latent errors are important and leads one to look for
     ways to deal with them effectively.
               MR. SEALE:  Jack, I would urge you to reconsider
     one of the words -- one of the things that's not on that
     slide.  Your slide suggests that you're better off if you
     don't even do an engineering evaluation.  The point is that
     the engineer that does the evaluation has the responsibility
     to make sure his engineering evaluation has quality in it. 
     It's a faulty engineering evaluation that gets you into
     trouble.
               MR. SORENSEN:  I would not argue with that.  This
     falls in the category of a quote.
               MR. SEALE:  Yeah, but I think it's a significant
     -- you know, the suggestion is, if you -- you know, I don't
     agree, it's nice to keep the engineers out of the plant,
     because they need to run it; but, that's going a little far.
               MR. SORENSEN:  I suspect that they did not mean to
     imply -- but, I tried to --
               MR. SEALE:  Yeah, I understand.
               MR. SORENSEN:  -- quote the slide directly from
     that earlier presentation.  One of the issues with respect
     to safety culture is identified in the management and
     organization factors that are important.  There are a number
     of attempts in the literature to do that. One is from Weil
     and Apostolakis, a 1999 paper, where they identified half a
     dozen elements, management and organization factors that
     appear in other articles, other papers, as specifically
     elements of safety culture.
               MR. WALLIS:  Can I ask about this paper?
               MR. SORENSEN:  Yes, sir.
               MR. WALLIS:  I'm not familiar with these authors. 
     Some authors simply write down something that comes off the
     top of their head; others carefully research evidence and
     these things are important.  Into which category does this
     fall?
               MR. SORENSEN:  There's some evidence supporting
     this.  This is actually a reduction of a somewhat longer
     list of about 20 factors by -- that originated in some
     NRC-sponsored work at Berkhaven National Laboratory.  There
     was some preliminary work done, establishing statistical
     significance, if you will, for the 20 -- or for most of the
     20 elements.  One of the problems with 20 elements is it's
     hard to work with and the paper, which I would be happy to
     make available to you, provides the logic for reducing the
     20 to six, by combining certain factors, by looking for
     factors that are more important than others.  So, yes, it
     has some basis.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I vaguely recall, from reading
     this paper some time ago, that they relied on 15 -- about 15
     vendor inspection team reports, doing root cause analysis
     and looking for things that were -- so, and these are fairly
     significant events, is the IAEA reports.  But, I can
     certainly call up your --
               MR. WALLIS:  Well, which one of those two was the
     ultimate?
               MR. UHRIG:  Is this the URC report?
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Uh?
               MR. UHRIG:  Is this the URC report?
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Probably URC.
               MR. SORENSEN:  One of the points made in this
     paper, again, supports the previous slides on latent errors
     and many organization factors or cultural issues.  Potential
     for organization factors to lead to common cause failures is
     strongly suspected.  They acknowledge that the evidence is
     not complete, at this point; but, they do give an example
     where word prioritization led to the failure of dissimilar
     components.  In particular, they described a case study of a
     loss of feed water event at a pressurized water reactor. 
     The progress of the event and the recovery from it were
     complicated by the failure of both an atmospheric steam dump
     valve and a startup boiler availability to provide glance
     ceiling steam.
               When the authors looked at the event, the
     conclusion was that there was corrective maintenance that
     had been identified on both of those components.  It had not
     been performed.  And it seems reasonable to conclude, then,
     that the work prioritization was not correct -- you know,
     that work should have been done and that that element of the
     process led to the failure of -- or unavailability of
     dissimilar components.
               Going back for a moment to the International
     Nuclear Safety Advisory Group and pick up the issue of
     performance indicators relative to safety culture, the
     INSAG-4 approach to safety culture is, if you'll forgive the
     reference, very similar to their approach to defense in
     depth.  They write down everything that they could possibly
     think of that might have some positive influence on safety
     culture.  They end up, I think, with about 150 questions,
     you know, to be asked in a safety culture evaluation.
               Following INSAG-4, there was a -- there were ASCOT
     guidelines written, analyzing safety culture in organization
     team ASCOT -- assessment of safety culture in organization
     team.  And they wrote guidelines based on the 150 questions,
     which amount to another 300 or so guide questions.  And,
     typically, at the operating organization level, a basic
     question might be:  has a safety statement -- policy
     statement been issued.  The ASCOT guide questions addressed
     to plant personnel might be:  explain what you know of the
     company safety policy statements.  And the indicators that
     ASCOT identifies are existence of safety policy statement,
     policy reminders of statement to the staff, and so forth.
               The problem with this approach, as you might
     guess, is that you end up with answers to 450 questions and
     there's nothing in the process that I have been able to find
     that tells you how to prioritize those things or how to
     proceed to fix the most important one.
               MR. WALLIS:  I'm asking myself, what's magic about
     the word "safety?"  If you look at organizations who do
     anything, like manufacture of automobiles, or some -- in
     some mysterious way, seems to make it much more reliable
     than the other one.  It's not something about the culture
     and it's not the safety of the good.  And maybe the words
     you use here would apply to that sort of question, too.  I
     mean, a good x culture --
               MR. SORENSEN:  Absolutely true; absolutely true.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  In 1995, there was a conference
     on safety culture in Vienna and I proposed that we drop the
     current safety culture and talk about the general culture or
     quality culture at the plant, because it's hard to separate
     them.  And the suggestion was universally rejected.  In
     fact, some people from the IAEA got upset.  I don't know why
     they got upset, but they got upset.  And they said, well,
     gee, you know, the whole idea here is to focus on safety and
     you're trying to take that away.  So, the suggestion has
     been made.  It really does not -- it's non-culture; it's
     non-culture is the concept.  But, I guess, INSAG really
     wanted to focus on the safety part.
               MR. SIEBER:  And I think that everybody, who has,
     from an industry viewpoint, sponsored safety culture has
     done the same thing under the supposition that if you tried
     to put forth operating culture, then there would be a
     conflict of interest between operations and safety.  And so,
     they picked the term "safety culture" to say this is first
     and all of these other things come next.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  On the other hand, Jack, if you
     had the good culture, if you're having a conflict, you would
     try to harmonize things and make sure, because, it's a fact
     of life, you cannot forget your main mission.
               MR. SIEBER:  Strangely enough, a safe plant, a
     well-maintained plant, and a plant with good control and
     highly trained and responsive workers operates very well.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And that's what Jack told us
     about.
               MR. SEALE:  It's like discritizing integrity.  You
     know, you have integrity overall or you don't have it
     anywhere; and you have culture in the positive sense in
     everything you do or you really don't have it anywhere.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I would really like the ACS to
     make that point somewhere, because I really think it's one
     culture.  But, we have to discuss it --
               MR. BONACA:  It's more complex than that.  What I
     mean is that there are plants that -- you know, where the
     culture is not necessarily one of meaning harm or whatever. 
     It's a culture of being used to to reduce the size of the
     procedures, less prescriptive procedures, more intuitive
     processes, and that's very different from big -- that you
     have today for the way you run the power plant.  And I'm
     saying that that's what culture, to simply say, you know,
     the issue of integrity.  I mean, you find people that you
     disagree with, insofar as what they want to do or how; but,
     it's all because you tell them that integrity -- is because
     they simply don't want to move into a different world, where
     the professions are high.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But, then, I would say they have
     -- culture, period, because it's a fact -- it's a fact that
     the reason why we build these plants is to produce power. 
     You can't ignore it.  So, here, the decisionmaking processes
     and so on, I mean, that's an element of --
               MR. BONACA:  Yeah.  And it may be an issue of, you
     know -- present the fact that it's a more complex issue than
     that.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It is very complex, there's no
     question about it.
               MR. BONACA:  Yeah.  And I think that -- I
     understand where you're going, but I think that using the
     word --
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Well, I tell you, wait until you
     see Vienna.
               [Laughter.]
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But, I would like to know your
     views and I'm glad that Graham raised the issue.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Okay.  Another attempt to develop
     or identify performance indicators, there was a study done
     by the Swedish Regulatory Authority, which Dr. Bonaca
     participated in, and they went very directly to identifying
     indicators using entirely an expert opinion process.  They
     started out with a list of, I think, 75 or 80 possible
     indicators of safety culture and then using this expert
     elicitation process, narrowed that list down to the five
     that are on the view graph here:  safety significant error
     rate, maintenance problem rate, ratio corrective to
     preventive maintenance, regular problems with repeated root
     causes, and rate of plant changes not documented.  They
     actually went a step further from this and using -- by
     assigning the numerical scores to the items here, developed
     an algorithm for changing PRA parameters and PRA results
     probability of a component failing or being unavailable.
               The thing that is missing from this particular
     process, you know, appears to be the mechanism by which
     these particular indicators, you know, reflect safety
     cultures.  It's not clear what that -- what that connection
     is.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  It's just adjustment of the
     experts.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Right.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  We have one of them here.
               MR. BARTON:  What does the bottom one mean?
               MR. SORENSEN:  Number of plant modifications --
               MR. BARTON:  Oh, modifications.
               MR. SORENSEN:  -- of every system --
               MR. BARTON:  Okay.
               MR. SORENSEN:  -- that have been carried out, but
     not documented.
               MR. POWERS:  When I look at this list of
     indicators, when I go back to the Duke Power approach, what
     they did to correct them, I guess I don't see a clear
     correlation between the corrective action that generally are
     taken to and redressing these -- as a consequence of that. 
     But, they don't seem to get close -- is there any attempt to
     validate these?
               MR. SORENSEN:  I have not seen that.  Mario may
     know.
               MR. BONACA:  I think the issue here was -- the
     focus of this was more to provide some models for using --
     and that, therefore, kept -- you were discussing there of
     trying to identify linkages between culture and this
     particular indicators.  And, in fact, there was really a
     shortcut, that if you had to really use this as peer
     indicators, successfully perform -- it was a type proof.  It
     was an identified approach, to go down from 75 or 80
     recorded indicators, to five, you know, indicates that they
     were -- and so the top five were selected, as I said, as to
     the final approach.
               Second, it's so easy to do.  You eliminate a lot
     of other indicators that normally paralyze -- because they
     all stay put.  So, you are forced to an end and output five. 
     And what we felt is that these indicators for most power
     plants are seen as significant indications of poor culture.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Is anybody tracking, for
     example, the rate of performance with repeat of crew costs?
               MR. BARTON:  Yes.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The ratio of correct to --
               MR. BARTON:  Yes, everybody does that.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  So all of these are available?
               MR. BARTON:  Yes.
               MR. SIEBER:  No, they aren't.  Maybe not the
     bottom one, because the last one is because it hasn't been
     documented.
               MR. BARTON:  That's right.
               [Laughter.]
               MR. SIEBER:  Very observant; very observant.
               MR. BARTON:  There was actually the result from
     inspections, from regulatory inspections.  But, the --
               MR. SIEBER:  The rest of them are.
               MR. BARTON:  -- some of them appear the problems
     --
               MR. BONACA:  Specific problems could be root
     causes?
               MR. BARTON:  It's an indicator of --
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Mario, is, that I don't know
     what their root cause is, unless we all agree on the root
     cause analysis.  I mean, you look at root causes analyses,
     they do all kinds of -- there are all kinds of --
               MR. BARTON:  True.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I mean, unless you tell people,
     look, I really want you to go down and look at such and such
     for such and such a thing, then it's kind of open ended.
               MR. BONACA:  Well, it's, also, -- I mean, what
     that meant was that you find problems that repeated
     themselves for which root causes have been identified and
     corrective action --
               MR. BARTON:  But -- in effect, you didn't have the
     right root causes.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I mean, if you don't look at the
     prioritization part of your work, for example, you'll never
     see it.
               MR. BONACA:  I think the value of this is that,
     you know, these are just a sample of the type of issues that
     are being tracked by power plants.  They're very important
     that they track this and they are indicators.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Well, and I looked at the list
     of names of the participants and with the exception of some
     people, they were --
               [Laughter.]
               MR. POWERS:  With the exception of one.  I mean, I
     raise this -- I raised the question about the validation,
     because in your magna opus, you say that it's -- and I think
     it was in the chemical industry, where there's people, who
     looked at indicators that subsequently be able -- they were
     able to find correlated accident rates or event rates and
     that had a great deal of attraction to me, that you can
     identify indicators that had some correlation.  Those seem
     to have some particular validity and I can't remember what
     they were.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Well, the literature on the
     chemical industry is particularly interesting, because they
     do have accident rate data, which the nuclear power
     business, in general, does not have.  And there are a number
     of studies.  The best ones appear to have been done in the
     United Kingdom, that correlate -- that show a good strong
     statistical correlation between certain management and
     organization factors that we, in this business, would call
     safety culture, they call safety climate or something else,
     and actual accident rates.
               The little bit of field work that has been done in
     this country on nuclear plants has shown the same kind of
     correlation between certain management and organization
     factors and good plant performance.  But the data is pretty
     fragmented and the terminology is different and whether you
     can extrapolate between the technologies is not so clear. 
     But the evidence -- the evidence is there.  One would like
     perhaps to tie it up in a more convincing package, but there
     are enough pieces out there to make it worthwhile looking.
               MR. WALLIS:  FAA has studied airline safety.  It
     must have been very similar.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Yes, obviously, they do.  I'm
     trying to remember now what -- how they treated safety
     culture per se.  They certainly look at management and
     organization factors.  I don't think they call it safety
     culture, as such.
               MR. WALLIS:  They may not call it that, but these
     indicators would still be useful to them.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Yes.
               MR. SIEBER:  They've done a lot of work with
     crews, flight crews.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Right.
               MR. BARTON:  Most of theirs is team and crew.
               MR. SIEBER:  That's right, command and control.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I think the Navy, also, has done
     the same thing for submarine --
               MR. WALLIS:  But the maintenance problem, too, I
     mean, that comes up a lot with airlines.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Yes.  In fact, that is the source
     of latent errors in the airline industry.
               Touching on root cause analysis provides the
     transition to this slide that I was trying to figure out how
     to make a transition to.  The last point that I wanted to
     touch on was the importance of making sure that the root
     cause analyses that are done adequately cover the human
     performance safety culture issues, if you will.
               ATHEANA comes very close to doing what needs to be
     done there.  This is a selection of the certain elements
     from the ATHEANA analysis of the Wolf Creek drain down
     event, as reported in NUREG 1624, I think:  incompatible
     work activities; compressed outage schedules; poor metal
     models of systems and valves, that should read; heavier
     reliance on the control room crew to identify potential
     problems; inadequate pre-execution review of procedures.
               MR. POWERS:  One of the things that puzzles me
     about this is in the beginning, you talked about the Duke
     experience instead of this tremendous success, because they
     were able to compress their outage schedule from 90 days to
     33 days.
               MR. BARTON:  I don't think they're directly
     related, just because you don't put a lot of faith in that
     reducing your outage time.
               MR. POWERS:  There's a lot of other things --
               MR. BARTON:  Yes, there's a lot of other stuff
     that goes in to reducing outage time magnitude, other than
     the arrow chart.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But, it was a part of it though.
               MR. BARTON:  Oh, definitely; yes.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Well, I think -- in fact, the Duke
     Power article does make a point of the fact that the -- that
     their experience with reducing outage time is a result of
     better planning.
               MR. BARTON:  Right.
               MR. SORENSEN:  And the clear implication was that
     you can't simply make the schedule shorter.  You've got to
     do things to make it possible to get the work done.
               MR. BARTON:  Both control and better planning and
     all of that; a lot of preparation.
               MR. BONACA:  The other thing is that, you know,
     those elements of the Duke Plant are widespread.  I mean, in
     different forums, they'll look like an arrow or something
     else; but, everybody has tried those things.  And
     oftentimes, they're not successful, but they're elements
     that --
               MR. BARTON:  I think then what you get into, then
     you get into individuals -- individual's performance.  I
     mean, you can have the buzz words, but you have to go and
     implement that and you have to have management believing
     that and always communicating it.  And if you don't have
     that -- you can have all kinds of bullet charts or arrow
     charts, whatever.  It looks nice, but it won't work.  It
     won't happen.  That's when you get into the people aspect of
     this thing.
               MR. WALLIS:  Jack, I have one question for you
     now.  As an academic, I guess, I tend to feel that one
     understands something when one is able to teach it -- when
     one is able to teach it and you don't really know if you
     understand it, until you try to teach it.  And if safety
     culture is to be understood and useful, then, eventually,
     it's got to be taught, so that every manager, every plant
     isn't learning on the job, but can learn from other people's
     experience and can, therefore, acquire safety culture
     without learning by failures.  So, hopefully, if this is
     ever to get somewhere, these observations, which are very
     useful, have to be put into a form, which is transferrable
     to other folks and helps them develop this safety culture.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Yes, that's certainly correct.  I
     think one of the remarkable things that I took away from the
     brief description of the Duke Power program was that this
     was something that they started on the basis of their
     observation of declining performance, and they started it
     and got it working in a very positive way before there was
     any regulatory -- apparently any overt regulatory pressure
     on them.  You know, they didn't get forced into a long get
     well outage like some plants in the past have.
               I guess I would, also, make the observation that
     what works at Duke may not work at other utilities and
     that's your real challenge.
               MR. BARTON:  The culture is the people.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But, the fundamental question
     here, you know, that I think Jack is about to raise -- I
     mean, all of this is nice, the first 11 slides.  And, you
     know, you can argue about the details; but, essentially, you
     know, the basic elements have been captured.  But, let us
     not forget that this is the advisory committee to the U.S.
     Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  What -- the fundamental
     question is:  should the NRC be doing anything in this area;
     and if so, what?  In other words, what is the proper role of
     the regulator here?  So, it's not -- is it our business, for
     example, to do what Graham said, go and make sure that
     everybody understands it and, you know, teach them, or it is
     the appropriate role of -- this is the proper role for Duke
     Power, for Entergy, and so on, and we should stay out?  But,
     should we stay out completely?  Is there anything we should
     do?  I don't know.  But, we have --
               MR. POWERS:  It seems to me that the question that
     this committee has is perhaps the one you identified, but it
     is more technical than that; that is, is this a feature of
     the plant that ought to be incorporated in our attempt to
     quantify residual risk posed by plants?
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I think that's part of it.  This
     is part of it, yes.
               MR. BONACA:  I think, you know, it's a couple of
     questions, but I think it's a good presentation here,
     because on one hand, you have the model from Duke.  That's
     really management business.  Then, you have the example of
     SKI, which is really the outcomes -- potential outcomes of
     culture.  That's really a result and that's clearly
     regulatory business.  Where do you -- well, sure.
               MR. POWERS:  Where did they put the dividing line
     between the two?
               MR. BONACA:  There is a path in between that I
     think, Jack, in fact, in his paper has well outlined and I
     believe that there is regulatory involvement at someplace in
     between.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  There is another fine line,
     which is related to Dana's comment.  Whenever people raise
     the issue of is a safety culture included, the answer comes
     back, well, sure, it's in the failure rates --
               MR. BONACA:  That's right.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  -- the plants will tell you. 
     But, my answer is that's not true.
               MR. BONACA:  I agree with you.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Maybe to some extent, but it's
     not quite true, because if you have coupling -- if you're
     dependent failures and you don't have -- I mean, your PRA,
     you know, you'll never get those effects there.  On the
     other hand, you can't ignore the fact that, yes, I mean, if
     you're using plant specific, say, human performance data and
     so on, the safety culture is part of it.  So, that's another
     fine line that has to be defined.
               MR. BONACA:  But, my thought was, again, even the
     -- even Duke, although they have this program, they
     recognize the outcomes of the important things and they
     track indicators.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The question is to what extent
     indicators we all view as important to safety are excluded
     by our -- by a regulatory review.  Right now, there are a
     lot of those and those that we put out for the SKI report,
     for example, rate the problems with costs, are looked at
     very seriously by the licensees and the inspectors have to
     -- the resident inspectors are looking at them.  Somehow,
     for example, they are not an indicator in the performance
     process.  Now, I think that's really the question that we
     should be asking.
               MR. WALLIS:  So, you're saying there is actually
     some performance-based activity going on, although it's not
     formalized, as it may.  Inspectors do look at these things
     and companies do have their own measures.
               MR. BONACA:  Oh, yes.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Oh, yes.
               MR. WALLIS:  It is actually happening, but in an
     informal way.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yeah.  I mean, if you look at
     what happened the last few years, superficially, you would
     think that the NRC has never gotten involved into management
     and organizational issues.  And then you go and look at
     these operatings and how they decide it, you know, where to
     place the plants, you say, my God, you know, there is some
     conflict here.  I mean, we have been doing it for a long
     time; maybe we didn't call it that.  And the moment you use
     the word "management," you know, everybody gets --
               MR. SIEBER:  On the other hand, licensees have
     been managing plants using performance indicators since the
     early 1980s and on a big scale basis.
               MR. SORENSEN:  You know, one thing that I think is
     interesting is if you -- again, if you're looking at the
     literature on safety culture or whatever one wants to call
     it, there is a consensus, if you will, that less
     prescriptive regulatory schemes provide an opportunity for
     safety culture or management and organization factors to
     play a much bigger role in safety, where you're not dealing
     in a compliance regime.
               And if you look at the NRC's new reactor oversight
     program, you know, they identify seven cornerstones to
     provide the basis for safety inspection, if you will, and
     there are performance indicators associated with each of
     those cornerstones.  Then, they identify, in addition to the
     cornerstones, three crosscutting issues:  human performance,
     safety conscious work environment, problem identification
     and corrective action, and there are no performance
     indicators for those crosscutting issues.  And those are
     precisely the issues that are at the heart of something that
     one would call safety culture.
               The technical framework for licensee performance
     assessments includes a statement to the effect, "The risk
     informed performance-based regulation will involve a shift
     in the NRC role for improving human reliability to one of
     monitoring human reliability," and that would appear to
     imply a need for some sort of a performance indicator,
     which, at the moment --
               MR. UHRIG:  This, also, implies that they're
     improving human performance -- human reliability, at the
     present time.  Is this, in fact, in your view, true?
               MR. SORENSEN:  I didn't argue -- I didn't look at
     the document with the -- the statement with the intent of
     arguing with their articulation of it.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I think it is improving.
               MR. SORENSEN:  I think it is absolute -- but, I
     think it's correct that the intent of NRC requirements
     imposed over some period of time following the TMI accident
     was to improve human performance.  That was the goal.  Now,
     you can -- there's, I think, can be a huge argument about
     how effective it was --
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I think, Jack, what they --
               MR. SORENSEN:  -- but that was the intent.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  -- what they really mean there
     is they are switching from prescriptive regulatory
     requirements to monitoring.  But, how can you monitor --
               MR. UHRIG:  That's very different than what it
     says here.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Yeah.  But, I think that's what
     they mean.
               MR. BARTON:  The quote, I think, is accurate.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  I think you monitor something,
     if you don't have performance indicators.  It says,
     "monitoring human reliability."  It don't understand how
     you're going to do it, if you don't have something -- you
     know, some guidance as to what to monitor.
               MR. BARTON:  I tell you what -- put that back up
     again -- I'll tell you what the inspectors are -- what they
     are doing, is utilities are tracking human errors, and they
     are, and they are tracking, you know, error free days and
     all this kind of stuff.  And they got a structured -- they
     follow an impost structure, human performance models.  So,
     they track it.  So, the inspectors are going over and saying
     how come your average error free data is only down to three
     days on average?  What's going on?  So, they're digging into
     that and finding out what the utilities are doing to improve
     that item.
               I, also, know what they're doing on the bottom, on
     identification of corrective action.  They're really looking
     hard at the corrective action system and questioning as to,
     you know, times of actions, times they are not being
     resolved, and, you know -- I don't know what they're doing
     on the second one.  I have no evidence of what they're doing
     with the second one, but I know what they're doing on the
     first and third.
               MR. WALLIS:  Jack, it comes to mind --
               MR. BARTON:  The inspectors are actively looking
     at that.
               MR. WALLIS:  -- this human reliability is not just
     human, it's human plus context plus the tools available.  In
     the old days, the secretary had to type and not misspell,
     because it was a struggle to change it; nowadays, type away
     and let the spell check do it.  The context and the tools
     available make a difference.  Sometimes, humans are asked to
     do things, which is just difficult and not very reliable. 
     It's not just human owned.
               MR. SORENSEN:  Yeah.  There are a lot of things
     that go into, you know, the issue of human performance.  The
     person, machine interface, for example, is a very important
     issue.  And there are a lot of management and organizational
     factors that make it easy or difficult to do a particular
     job and that are not related in an obvious way to safety. 
     I've -- I am playing with sort of a mental model, myself,
     where you can think of -- might think of safety culture as
     the intersection between management and organization
     factors, in a general sense, and human performance, in the
     specific sense, where the safety culture is the management
     and organization factors that provide the environment that
     the human operators -- technicians operate in.
               Last slide, tentative recommendations on where one
     might go with this.  I think an important first step is to
     identify the essential attributes of safety culture, to
     bring some sort of conclusion from the fragmentation in the
     literature.  And I think it's probably not so important how
     you define safety culture, as what attributes you ascribe to
     it and then how you go about measuring those attributes. 
     Once you've done that, then I think you can take the next
     step, which is to identify performance indicators that
     provide some indication of safety culture.
               And the last item, ensure an effective root cause
     analysis process, make sure that whatever process is used in
     conjunction with the new reactor oversight program will, in
     fact, uncover and define the safety culture issues.
               MR. WALLIS:  Jack, you said first, you should, who
     is "you?"  Is "you" NRC staff?
               MR. SORENSEN:  If you're going to make it -- if
     one is going to make use of this concept, then I think these
     are the steps that you have to implement.  If the NRC is
     going to make use of the concept of safety culture, then
     it's the NRC that has to do this.
               MR. SIEBER:  Licensees are already doing this.
               MR. SORENSEN:  To a large degree, of course; yes. 
     And there's the perennial issue of, you know, to what degree
     does the NRC get involved without stepping on --
               MR. WALLIS:  Would the licensees do it better, if
     the NRC got involved?
               MR. SORENSEN:  That's a legitimate issue and one
     of the --
               MR. SIEBER:  Or worse; or worse.
               MR. POWERS:  One of the -- just to illustrate how
     poor my own thinking is about this, the two things that I
     found most remarkable about Jack's report on this subject,
     he's left out completely in his presentation of the
     highlights of his report.  The preamble, I tell you, I don't
     know squat about this, obviously.  One of those --
               MR. SIEBER:  It qualifies you to be an expert,
     then.
               MR. POWERS:  Well, one of the -- one of the things
     that emerged from his examination of this field that struck
     me as so very important was the ability to quickly get into
     a diminishing returns to scale, when there's regulatory
     involvement; that is that in the extremes, if one has a
     regulator overlooking each worker, there's no point in
     having any kind of safety culture at all, because if you
     make a mistake, there's somebody to catch it.  And so
     enhanced regulation can lead to poor safety cultures.  On
     the other hand, if you have nobody catching mistakes, then
     you will quickly evolve a very good safety culture, because
     the fellow dies, if he makes a mistake.  I thought the
     finding of quantitative evidence of that kind of what I call
     a Laffer curve relationship between regulatory involvement
     and safety culture was a singularly important discovery.
               The second one, of course, is that there are
     indicators that do quantitatively correlate with accident
     events in the chemical culture -- the chemical process
     industry, which I didn't appreciate, that our understanding
     of safety culture was so advanced that we could actually
     come down and say here's a -- here's something that you can
     monitor and as it goes up or down, as is the case, your
     accident rate should go up and down, as well.  Now, I'm
     surprised that somebody would actually be able to find such
     things.
               MR. WALLIS:  Maybe this is an area where the NRC,
     rather than looking over the shoulder, should try to reward. 
     Now, somewhere, I think this morning, I saw some other
     transparency, where someone put up something to reward
     certain behavior by industry.  I failed to ask a question. 
     It seems to me that would be very useful, if the NRC has a
     mechanism for rewarding some things --
               MR. POWERS:  We used to have one.
               MR. WALLIS:  -- rather than just punishing them.
               MR. SIEBER:  Well, that's sort of --
               MR. POWERS:  One plant didn't get inspected one
     cycle.
               MR. WALLIS:  Yeah.
               MR. SIEBER:  But that's sort of a two-edge sword,
     too, and NRC has gotten into that and then backed away, when
     they found out that they would give an reward now and two
     months later, they would have a big incident, and it lessens
     the credibility of the agency.
               MR. SORENSEN:  I think it may well turn out that
     the -- that if you go through step one and two here and come
     up with some performance indicators, that the conclusion may
     well be that the NRC doesn't do anything, except inform the
     licensee of what the performance indicators appear to be
     saying.
               MR. SIEBER:  Unless you're in the
     performance-based and risk-informed realm, you don't have a
     regulatory basis for delving into management issues, which
     all of this is.  And so, you have to approach this by
     approaching it from a risk-informed performance-based
     regulatory system.  And that won't be universal, because
     people have to opt into that.  Licensees have to decide do I
     want to be in this world or not.  It seems to me that would
     be the straightforward way to get into it.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  But the new oversight process, I
     think, is mandatory for everyone, isn't it?  You can't say
     I'm not risk informed, so use the old one.
               MR. SIEBER:  Yeah.  On the other hand, you could
     stick with the 20 indicators that they now have and what a
     power plant may use, which might be 300 indicators.  Once
     you get into that, you got burden arguments.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  No, but by point is that all
     three bullets really are directly relevant to the reactor
     oversight process.  I mean, they defined their three
     crosscutting issues and then they said, you know, am I going
     to do anything about it, because other things will tell us
     whether they are good or bad.  And here, we're telling them,
     well, others have tried.  It's not impossible.  You know,
     why don't you try to understand it a little better and maybe
     define some indicators.  Maybe these indicators really
     exist.  I mean, you told me that four of the five SKI
     indicators are already being monitored.  Maybe we reach the
     same conclusion.
               I think the problem here, Jack, is that for some
     reason, this agency is unwilling to even study these issues,
     to try to understand them, because the safety culture, or
     whatever, has been tied to management.
               MR. BARTON:  That's right.  And you're going to
     find out that if you really delve into it, that the reason
     it's not working is because of certain managers at a
     utility, and that's what the NRC doesn't want to get in to. 
     They don't want to go and say Jack and John are bad
     management, change them out.  They already tried that.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Wouldn't the performance
     indicators allow you not to do that?  Because, I don't care
     what you do or what you know; but, I'm looking at the
     performance.  But, I don't -- why is this different from
     getting a performance indicator -- I mean, ultimately, it's
     management.  Like Dana said, everything is human error, in
     the final analysis, right?  Somebody designed it; somebody
     did something.  I mean, given that the -- you know, the
     Bible doesn't say that you can -- so, humans created it and
     so, ultimately, it's -- the same way that ultimately it
     needs monitoring.
               MR. SORENSEN:  The U.K. regulator appears, at the
     moment, to be on a path, where they view their mission as
     making sure that the licensees have the right safety culture
     and making sure that they don't -- that they, the regulator,
     don't do anything to interfere with the development of the
     safety culture.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  And we should do the same thing.
               MR. POWERS:  Well, I mean, I do see a difference
     between the rate of automatic scrams and these performance
     -- these safety culture indicators, in that when I have an
     automatic scram, I know something is wrong, something caused
     that scram to occur that I hadn't anticipated.  When I know
     -- when I find out something happened to my safety culture
     indicator, unless I have some demonstration that there's a
     tie to that overall, then this indicator may not be
     indicative of anything.
               MR. SORENSEN:  That's right.
               MR. POWERS:  And we have certainly, at least
     within the DOE complex, find instances where plants with
     large amounts of maintenance backlog are the lukewarm
     performers.  On the other hand, we found facilities with
     large maintenance backlogs that were just excellent
     performers.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Maybe that not a good indicator.
               MR. BARTON:  I go through their backlog and can
     it, because it doesn't mean anything.
               MR. POWERS:  That's right.  What we're finding was
     -- all we were finding was that the threshold for putting
     things into the maintenance program was different between
     the two facilities.  That's all you'll find.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Well, that's exactly why, I
     think, the first bullet is there.  I don't think we really
     have ever spent serious time in trying to understand this
     instance.  What are the essential attributes?  Can you
     correlate into real performance when you have indicators?
               MR. WALLIS:  Who is going to do the work to do
     that?
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  The NRC staff.
               MR. WALLIS:  And I think, you know, be very
     careful, because this is the kind of area that people, who
     feel that unnecessary research is being done, pick on.  We
     should be very careful.
               MR. APOSTOLAKIS:  Well, that's certainly the major
     problem.
               MR. POWERS:  That's one of the things that we will
     discuss.  Jack, have you completed your presentation?
               MR. SORENSEN:  It's complete from my viewpoint.
               MR. POWERS:  You've run out of slides?
               MR. SORENSEN:  I've run out of slides.
               MR. POWERS:  You're done.
               MR. SORENSEN:  I did not put up the two important
     ones.
               MR. POWERS:  I'll get you for this.
               MR. SORENSEN:  I had those in an earlier draft and
     my sponsor convinced me otherwise.
               MR. POWERS:  That would teach you to listen to
     him, won't it?
               MR. SORENSEN:  Well, if you gentlemen decide which
     of you is my boss --
               [Laughter.]
               MR. POWERS:  I think that it's an appropriate
     addition and the document, I think, is really worthwhile. 
     And I think the document is worthwhile in two forms:  the
     more abbreviated form that might be useful at some
     conference; but the lengthier form -- the lengthier
     document, with its blow by blow account of the literature, I
     think, is, also, a useful document and I hope that we can
     move to get them both in the appropriate body of literature. 
     The lengthy document probably is a NUREG report and the
     shorter document I hope you can put that before some learned
     body and get some feedback on that.
               MR. SORENSEN:  The plan right now is within the
     next couple of weeks to have, you know, a short version of
     the paper available for committee review.  That's what I'm
     aiming for.
               MR. POWERS:  Well, I don't want the lengthier form
     to do into the dustpan --     MR. SORENSEN:  Okay.
               MR. POWERS:  -- because I found that extremely
     valuable as a resource document, I'll admit.  It's lengthy,
     I mean, that's all it is to it and it might be worthwhile
     seeing if some other vehicle would appreciate a review
     document, because it constitutes a good review.  But, at the
     very minimal, I hope we can get it into a NUREG report,
     because I think it's an important contribution.
               If there are no other questions, I will recess us
     until 1:25.
               [Whereupon, the recorded portion of the meeting
     was concluded.]