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Transcript of 980601 ACRS Subcommittee on Safety Research Program Meeting in Rockville,Md.Pp 1-138.W/reporters Certificate
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Issue date:	06/01/1998
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N GXA_ ERf/~338 OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS y) NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION ADVISORY. COMMITTEE ON REACTOR SAFEGUARDS

Title:

SUBCOMMITTEE ON i SAFETY RESEARCH PROGRAM l 4 TRC4 ArRs IDOCket No.: Reran x:3:sn T: B.NH : TE M5 ~ ;E;( i 4;E .;3 - Work Order No.:- THANKS' I ASB-300-312 1 l ). ~.f l l 1 l LOCATION: Rockville, Maryland ) DATE: . Monday, June 1,1998 PAGES: 1 - 138 ) AORS :j.[cTC0)yWEy. o j ( 0 T e 2 8 0 i 3 0 0l d tta a ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. 1250 I Street, NW, Suite 300 Washington,D.C. 20005 1 (202) 842-0034 9806100293 980601 j PDR ACRS i T-3038 POR q LL.L-.

O ~ DISCLAIMER l-l UNITED STATES NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION'S l ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON REACTOR SAFEGUARDS I JUNE 1, 1998 i The contents of this transc2ipt of the proceeding i of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Advisory . Committee on Reactor Safeguards, taken on June 1, 1998, as reported herein, is a record of the discussions recorded at the meeting held on the above date. i ~ 1 ) This transcripc had not been reviewed, corrected ) and edited and it may contain inaccuracies. L I I i h L J

1 1 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 2 NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION 3 ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON REACTOR SAFEGUARDS 4 5 3 SUBCOMMITTEE ON 6 SAFETY RESEARCH PROGRAM 7 8 9 10 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission 11 Room T-2B3 12 11545 Rockville Pike 13 Rockville, Maryland j 14 15 Monday, June 1, 1998 16 17 18 The Committee met pursuant to notice at 8:30 a.m. 19 20 MEMBERS PRESENT: 21 ROBERT E. UHRIG, ACRS Chairman 22 MARIO FONTANA, ACRS Member 22 THOMAS KRESS, ACRS Member 24 DANA POWERS, ACRS Member 25-WILLIAM SHACK, ACRS Member ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters w 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 I

2 l 1 PROCEEDINGS . ( 2 [8:30 a.m.] 3 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: This meeting will come to order. .This is a meeting of the ACRS Subcommittee on the Safety 4 5 Research Program. 6 I am Robert Uhrig, chairman of the Subcommittee on 7 the Safety Research Program. 8 The ACRS Members in attendance are Mario Fontana, 9 Thomas Kress, Dana Powers, and William Shack. 10 The purpose of this meeting is to discuss with the i 1 11 NRC staff core research capabilities and related matters. 12 The Subcommittee will gather information, analyze relevant 13 issues and facts, and formulate positions and actions as 14 appropriate for deliberation by the full committee. ) l 15 A session on this topic will be held Wednesday, l 16 June 3, 1 o' clock to 2:30 at the regular ACRS Committee 17 scheduled this week. l 18 Medhat El-Zeftawy is the Cognizant ACRS Staff 19 Officer for this meeting. 20 The rules for participation in today's meeting ) 21 have been announced as part of the notice of this meeting 22 previous.'" published in the Federal Register on May 12, i . 23 1998. j 24 A transcript of the meeting is being kept and will l 25 be made available as stated in the Federal Register notice. I / ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\'- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

i 3 1 It is requested that the speakers first identify themselves () 2 and speak with sufficient clarity and volume so that they 3 can be readily heard. 4 We have no written comments or requests for time 1 5 to make oral statements from members of the public. 6 We will proceed with the meeting, and I call upon 7 Mr. L. Donnelly of the NRC Office of Research to begin. 8 MR. DONNELLY: Good morning. 9 Back on March 5 we met with the full Committee and -10 discussed in some detail the work that we'd done on core 11 capabilities, but at that time we had not completed our 12 analysis and sent the results to the Commission. We've 13 since done that. And as I understand it, at least part of 14 this meeting is aimed at responding to a Commission request I) 15 that the ACRS review that material and provide a report to 16 the Commission. So I hope what we're doing here today will 17 be helpful to you. 18 I've revised the presentation from the time I 19 briefed the full Committee to have more detail on the paper, 20 and I've in talking with Ned understand that there are a 21 couple of particular issues, and I'm going to try to focus 22 on those to help you in your review. 23 I thought I would start again by reviewing what I 24 call the paper trail here so we can kind of keep things 25 straight as to what's happened over time. The core research Ox ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 l (202) 842-0034

l 4 1 capability subject was first brought up during the strategic { 1 ( ). 2 planning started by the Commission almost two years ago now, I 3 and direction setting issue DSI-22 focusing on research 4 discussed a number of topics, one of which was the issue of 5 core capabilities. Then the Commission issued an SRM, j 6 COMSECY-96-066, in response to that issue, and I'll go over 7 the content of that in a moment. 8 The first step in our process was to propose to 9 the Commission a methodology for doing the core capability 10 analysis, and that was in SECY-97-075. The Commission 11-approved that with some guidance, which again I will review 12 with you in a moment, and then finally we have resoonded j 13 with SECY-98-076, which actually contains the core 14 capability assessments that we did, contrasts them with the l (~~) l q_j 15 '98 budget. 16 I'd like to also mention another document I 17 don't know that it's particularly important to your review, 18 but COMSECY 96-027, which was focused on DSI-18. Now that 19 was an internal strategic issue. I guess the key word there 20 is " internal" in that it was not issued for public comment. 21 It's relevant because its title was " Staffing and Core l 22 Capabilities." In there the Commission asked for the Agency l 23 to identify a process for identifying Agency skills and core 24 capability requirements across the entire agency. 25 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Could you repeat the second O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

5 j 1 number? l( ) 2 MR. DONNELLY: Yes, 96-027. 3-CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Thank you. 4 MR. DONNELLY: Research actually is sort of a 5 pilot for the entire Agency. DSI-22 got out ahead of thr 6 work being done on DSI-18, and now in part the work that we 7 have done is sort of serving as a prototype for what the 8 rest of the Agency might do. 9 DR. POWERS: One part of the Commission's comments 10 Lon DSI-22, at least in its draft form, was that they asked 'll some of the issues that were raised by Commissioner Rogers 12 to be thought about, and he had written a draft paper that 13 spoke about a knowledge-based Agency. Those particular I 14 words really don't show up in anything you've done, but, I J ( 15 mean, how did'that influence what you've done? 16 MR. DONNELLY: I believe -- and I'd have to go 17 back and if your give me a moment to look at the first SECY l 18 paper we sent up. I thought we addressed that in that l l 19 paper. I can't spot it. I think it's consistent with the 20 expertise-driven concept. In other words, that is a 21 knowledge base, and that represents skills and capabilities 22 that would provide the Agency with that knowledge base to I 23 deal with a broad range of issues. l '24 IIR. POWERS: When we think about the -- cne of the l l 25 troubles that comes up immediately it seems to me when the [ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

i 6 1 word " core capability" comes up is there's a management fad () 2 by the same name, but it seems to me that that fad and what l 3 you're trying to do here in this program are two distinct i 4 things. Can you compare and contrast what you're trying to 5 do against that fad -- and you don't have to do it right 6 now, but as you go through your presentation? 7 MR. DONNELLY: I can do it now from my fairly 8 limited knowledge of the topic. I would think what is being 9 done more broadly in industry is more focused on areas of 10 strength, where a company might focus its attention to 11 maximize its profits and perhaps even divest itself from 12 areas where they didn't really have a strong core 13 competency. Foreign markets might be a core -- or the 14 ability to tap into and exploit foreign markets might be a () 15 core competency for some companies, where other companien 16 might not even be interested in foreign markets. And if l 17 that's where their niche was and their strength was, they'd i 18 want to focus on and nurture that core competency so they 19 maintain their competitive edge in that area. 20 Of course we're not doing that. We're focusing on 21 a capability and a broad range of capability as opposed to a 22 narrow range of capability, and it doesn't necessarily 23 pertain to any kind of competitive edge obviously, it's just 24 designed to put the Agency in a position to respond in a 25 timely and independent and knowledgeable way to issues that ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

i i ) 7 1 might arise in the future. j ( 2 DR. POWERS: It seems to me one of the underlying 3 assumptions when you undertake this core capabilities is 4 that'the Agency in reviewing submissions they get from the 5 licensee is going to continue to pursue an independent 6 analysis on some types of issues. I mean there's some that 7 they just review with the licensee. Then there are others 8 where they do truly independent analyses of the same issue 9 and see if their numbers come up compared to the numbers in 10 the submission. 11 What I have never understood is how they decide 3 1 12 which ones we're going to do independent analyses on and { 13 which one we're just going to review the submissions. Is i 14 there some criterion there that I have never understood?

(_)

15 MR. DONNELLY: I don't think I'm able to answer. 16-that. I think probably the licensing organizations are 17 better able to answer it, because they're the ones that 18 receive the applications, they're the ones that understand 19 what the licensee submitted, and they sort of make a 20 judgment at that point as to how much additional if any 21 independent confirmatory work would be desirable. 22 Now I don't know if they specific criteria or they l

23 just do it on a case-by-case basis --

24 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: I mean, it just seems to me that j 25 when I read the materials that are prepared for the research 1 ( ANN RILEY & ASJ OCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters ~ 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

8 1 program, including this particular document, a lot of them ~T [d 2 have to do with providing those line organizations with the 3 tools necessary to do those independent analyses. A lot 4 of -- there's a lot of talk about data bases and 5 computational tools. But it is very evident that 6 computational tools aren't done for everything, just some 7 things. Now the criterion may be we do independent analyses 0 when we have the tools to do it, and we dun't when we don't 9-have those tools. I mean, that would be a p etty logical 10 criterion. But maybe not -- maybe not one that's easily 11 defended. 12 MR. DONNELLY: I think there's sort of a history, 13 with some of the tools that we've maintained for years and 14 years and years it's almost understood that that independent t ( 15 capability has been used and will be used again in the 16 future, and then there are the sort of in ad hoc cases like 17 generic safety issues where something develops and there's a 18 question about whether or not what licensees may propose to 19 do to deal with some of issues are going to be adequate or 20 not. And in that case we do an independent assessment. 21 I think -- Larry? 22 MR. SHAO: Let me try to answer the question. 23 Larry Shao, Research. 24 You say what are the criteria when you have to do j 25 an independent calculation. Usually we have extended review Ox ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

9 1 plan, we have reg guides. So you follow the theory reg () 2 guides or very similar to that. Jup* for you; you don't 3 need any independent calculation. 4 The minute the licensee submits something very 5 innovative or something very new, wants to maybe redo the 6 conservatism, just like a couple years ago on the Yankee ) 7 Rowe vessels, they want to take advantage of the latest 8 knowledge they claim they have. And really it's not in the 9 standard review plan or not in the reg guide or 10 somebody's -- don't notice that much. So then we have to do j 11 some kind of independent evaluation on their submittal which 12 is very innovative. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're 13 wrong. So we'd like to do some kind of independent 14 analysis. j () 15 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: In contrast to that approach, 16 when we look at things like Part 100 analyses of radiation -17 c'ose at the site boundary, those are nearly always done by 18 the staff in an interdependent analysis. Nearly always they 19 do something completely -- well, not completely, but i 20 approximately independent to come up with their numbers to i 21 compare against the licensee's, whether the licensee has '22 followed standard review plan or not. 23 MR. FEDERLINE: Could I just add something here. 24 My name is Margaret Federline, and I'm currently with NMSS, 25 but I'm going to be moving to Research on July 5. I'm I~' ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. (- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

10 1 looking forward to working with you all. - f')') 2' From a licensing office perspective, you know, and c 3 from a user-need perspective, we're moving to a 4 risk-informed approach to determine when to do independent 5 calculations. For instance, in our high-level waste 6 licensing program, we're going to be doing an independent 7 performance assessment. If you look at our decommissioning 8 program for the range of sites, the simpler sites don't 9 receive independent calculations. The more' complex sites, 10 'which are those on our site decommissioning management plan, 11 do receive independent calculations. 12 So to the extent that we can at this point in 13 time, we are trying to move to risk-informed. And within 14 that there's also a spectrum of what kind of calculations we 0) 15 do. Often a bounding calculation is good enough, depending t (_ 16 upon the risk significance and the degree of uncertainty 17 that's involved. So there is thinking going on in the 18 agency in terms of defining these criteria based on a 19 risk-informed approach. 20 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: When you go to a risk-informed 21 approach, what level of risk is it that I do independent ?2 analyses and what level I don't do independent analyses? 23 MR. FEDERLINE: Obviously, you know, we don't have 24 a hard and fast risk number at this point in time, but it -25 has to do more with the degree of uncertainty and the O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. V Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

11 relationship of the uncertainty to failure with compliance 1 () 2 criteria. 3 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: And this is different. Now it's 4 ' degree of uncertainty, as opposed to the degree of risk. So 5 it's some product or something like that. 6 MR. THADANI: Ashok Thadani, NRC. 7 Dana, I think simply put the answer to your 8 initial question is indeed there is what I'd I call somewhat 9 a somewhat arbitrary approach historically that we have 10 applied in terms of where we do independent calculations and 11 where we don't, and I think the simple answer is that that's 12 the way it's been. I think that's where you started out. I 13 believe that's fairly accurate. I 14 I'll give you some examples. I think in the area 15 of thermal hydraulics, for example, we've always maintained 16 independent capability. I suppose in a way that that makes i 17 sense. It's so fundamental to understanding what's going 18 on. A reactor system becomes absolutely critical. And 19 we've learned lessons over the last many years that there t 20 are surprises out there, and that by and large have that 21 independent capability is important in that it does add to 22 safety, it does add value. 23 In the area of stress analysis, for example, and on, by and large -- I think Larry can correct me -- by q 24 se 25 and large the codes have been basically the same codes that I '~ I ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. sI CY rt Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 LL____________._____________-_-___-

12 1 the industry has used, the NRC has used, but there's some [ ) 2 independence brought into play when the NRC staff does do 3 some independent calculations, recognizing that I'm not 4 talking about detailed independently developed codes. 5 If I were to stay back I think I would probably do 6 now what Margaret was talking about. If I were into issues 7 like pressurized thermal shock, for example, there's only 8 one reactor pressure vessel, I'd want to be extremely 9 confident that I have a calculational capability that I can 10 rely on, and if there are uncertainties that in some way I 11 can measure or quantify those uncertainties. 12 So from now on, and obviously for reasons of 13 resource constraints and so on, I think we would have to do 14 what Margaret was saying, make sure we (a) understand what T 15 the risk implication is; (b) understand if there are 16 significant uncertainties, how do we go about dealing with 17 them. Does that lead us to make some conservative 18 decisions, licensing decisions, or does it make sense that 19 let's make a conservative licensing decision today and 20 initiate a research program to better understand what those 21 risk implications or uncertainty implications might be. 22 I think we're just going to learn with time in l 23 that area. But historically I think you're exactly right 24 the way you put it. I think it's just been the way we've 2S done business, and the standard review plans, Larry, came g ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 WO2) 842-0034 i

I 13 1 afterwards, 1974. And the independent calculational 2 capability was started earlier than that in many cases. L 3 Hopefully that helps. 4 DR. POWERS: Well, I think you've characterized it 5 correctly that there's something of a history here. I mean, 6-you did things independently based on some fellow's 7 particular expertise some time ago, his curiosity, his l 1 8 interest, his view of what risk was. And it's been carried 9 forward in time. And we've optimized and improved those, 10 and not seen any reason not to continue those things. 11 I mean, there seems to be valid reason to pursue 12 them, and as you said, more than once we have uncovered 13 things that were new and different and unexpected that the 14 licensee was not aware of, that we were not aware of, and j A '() 15 that's created an enforcement bere. l 16 Now I think Ms. Federline has hit upon something. 17 When we're looking now at optimizing our use of available l 18 resources or preparing tools for the line organizations to 19 do analyses, I'm not sure we can go on this personal 20 interest kind of basis successfully anymore. And the key to 21 doing that is as you say I don't think you can make the 22 change tomorrow and say okay, here, by God, is the risk 23 level and here is the uncertainty level, and anything that's 24 above this, we're going to do independent calculations, 25 anything below -- but somebody's got to think about where ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. A-Court Reporters t 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 1 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 i i L____________.____________._

14 1 .those levels are. And I'm not sure that I'm not sure 2 that you can come up with a level that anybody at this table 3 would agree with. 4 On the other hand, I'm not sure that'anybody could 5 disagree with it very successfully. I think there's some 6 level that you've just got to say here's what I'll tolerate 7 in risk space and here's what I'll tolerate under 8 uncertainty space, and the two are convoluted. I can be 9 marvelously uncertain when my risk probability is 10 to the 10 minus 45 -- know that number real well. When I get up to 10 11 to the minus 5, I suddenly get real interested. It is going 12 to be something like that. 13 And I think that would have been very useful 14 thinking in saying where do I want to prepare tools for line ) 15 organizations to do independent analyses that would be l 16 scrutable and understandable by people and be a 17 reexamination, because I think we're going to find that 18 things that in the past have just been reviewed suddenly j 19 need independent analysis. And I think we're going to see 20 it in spades in the digital electronic area, that things 21 that we do now on independent analyses, for inctance, Part 22 100 analyses, we're going to be a lot less useful to do 23 independent analyses. 24 That's just my general feeling. And I think 25 that's something that this document really lacks is that ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\-- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 =

15 { 1 kind of step back, let's see what it is we're doing now, 1 .( ) . what is it we ought to be doing, is there some rationality I 2 3 can introduce into this to say where in the future am I 4 going. I think this document surprises one when one reads 5 it because it's so attuned to today and so unattuned to five 6 years from now. 7 MR. SHAO: Can I say something? 8 I think you and I should say Leroy as a matter of 9 fact and I -- we have not been consistent in the system area 10 and the engineering. In the engineering I think they do the 11 business as I said, as a matter of fact, 20 years ago when I 12 first was in this job and I was complaining to my boss, hey, 13 you want us to do the same details as systems people are 14 doing, I need about 100 more people But I never got the ( )j 1" 15 people. I suppose it's the same way in the business I'm 16 arguing right now. 17 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: 100 more? 18 DR. POWERS: That was surprising, wasn't it? 19 MR. KING: Maybe I'll add my two cents, too, Dana. 20 This is Tom King from the staff. There is one other aspect 21 to this that we've got to keep in mind, and that is the 22 burden's on the Agency if we want to make it change to our 23 existing regulations, whether it's to deal with a new 24 generic safety issue or modify the regulations or add 25 something new. We have to do the analysis and justify ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

y 1 16 1 the -- go through the backfit rule and the regulatory [G T 2 analysis kind of activities. 3 I know when we changed Part 100 we did quite a bit 4 of in-house analysis to justify making the changes to that 5 rule. We do the same thing on generic safety issues we've 6 done on other' rules. We need tools to be able to do that. 7 You can always argue well, I'll have the licensees do it, 8 but you still have to have some confidence in the fact and 9 detailed understanding of what you're doing. 10 DR. POWERS: Sooner or later you have to stand up 11 and defend it to somebody. 12 MR. KING: You've got to stand up and defend it, 13 and when you do the analysis yourself, you're in a much 14 better position to do that. ) 15 DR. POWERS: Tom, I'm delighted that you added 16 that. That is a key point. 17 MR. KING: It's a key point. 18 DR. POWERS: And it's a point that does not show 19 up in this document very forcefully, that regardless of what 20 issue we're talking about, if the NRC wants to make a 21-change, it has to defend it to the public. It can't ask the 22 licensee to go to defend it to the public. It has to stand 23 up there and say I know enough about this subject to justify 24 this change.. And that is a burden that I think we lose -- I 25 think I lose sight of it when'I read this document. ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters ~- 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l

17 1 MR. KING: I agree. The document doesn't really () 2 point that out. By the same token, if a licensee wants to 3 make a change, the burden's on them to come in and make the 4 case. Again, we have to review it, but then you can argue i l 5 well, maybe we don't need the level of independent analysis 6 capability,to do that. 7 DR. POWERS: Maybe you don't need the level of 8 independent analysis, what not, but the truth of the matter 9 is that the licensee only proposes. You're the guy that has 10 to justify that change. Somebody from the NRC is going to 11 sign the little document that goes out to the public that 12 says here it is, here's the regulatory basis for it, and 13 here's what we propose to change, and he's going to have to 14 answer all the questions.that come in. And frequently he () 15 ends up standing in front of this august body trying to 16 answer questions, and that's usually not very successful as '17 a recent experience on transportation of vitrified waste 18 demonstrated, if they don't understand the analysis that's 19 been done, if they're depending on the proposer as opposed 20 to their own. 21 MR. KING: It's been demonstrated time and again, 22 we come in front of this committee, whether it's thermal 23 hydraulics or Part 100 changes or fuel design or anything 24 else, we're expected to know the details of what was done 25_ and why it was done and why it's okay. l ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C, 20005 i '(202) 842-0034 l l

18 1 DR. POWERS: I think you've got to really learn () 2 somehow to communicate that to your managers, because I 3 really feel like I have lost sight of the point that you 4 have brought up. At some point or another NRC gets on the 5 line here unless we get our regulations so successful that 6 we never have to make a change ever again. And that day of 7 Nirvana is really not on my time horizon. I know Ashok's 8 working on regulatory efficiency that's going to get us so 9 efficient that we'll never have to make changes again, but .10 in the interim the transition to that state of Nirvana is 11 going to require a lot of changes I think. i 12 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: All right. .Lloyd? 13 MR. DONNELLY: I would just like to review again 14 for background purposes only here some of the key points in () 15 the. direction setting issue paper on research as it 16 pertained to core capabilities. The concern in that paper 17 was the future role and scope of the research program, and 18 trying to define key technical areas where we should be 19 assured that we do maintain core capabilities and it was 20 defined in there as a maintenance program. I don't think we 21 use that terminology that much anymore, but I think what 22 we've done is consistent with that in terms of maintaining a ) 23 knowledge base and facilities that we anticipate will be 24 needed in the future. And finally that the criteria that we 25 would propose to do this would be approved by the Commission ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. N Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

19 l 1 1 before we did anything, and of course that led us to the l 2 first SECY paper we sent to the Commission. 3 The Commission responded, reiterating the need to 4 develop criteria and that we should proceed with developing 5 those core capabilities, and then they added the thought 6 about maintaining an agency-wide database to capture the 7 skills that would be needed by the agency to support core 8 capabilities. 1 9 That is being handled by our Office of Human 10 Resources. It is not something.that we are doing 11 indepetidently, but we will feed our information into that I l 12 centralized database. 13 DR. POWERS: It is perhaps comforting to you that I 14 I don't know a major company in America that isn't doing A 15 that. I mean that is a major management fad. j 16 My experience with it in a couple of 17 organizations, one national laboratory and one private 18 institution, is it's incredibly good for tasking l 19 formulations, that a well developed database allows you to 20 go through and say, gee, I need a guy that's an expert on i 21 Shakespearean scholarship for some reason. You find him. 22 It's just amazing where guys have skills that are not being l 23 tapped now that suddenly become useful. 24 MR. DONNELLY: I think in our effort that is l 25 certainly one of the key considerations. The other one was l 'h ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. d Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 i """"Mn"aa%3 t C. _-- - - - - - _ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. - - - _ - - - - - - - _ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

1

20 1 to identify any gaps where we have identified requirements ,( ) 2 but don't have those skills on staff and to try to close 3 those gaps. 4 Our proposed methodology was included in SECY 5 97-075 that we sent to the Commission a little over a year 6 ago now. 7 We broke our approach down into three steps. I 8 have four bullets here but actually it is three steps and I L 9 have organized the rest of this presentations along those 10 three steps so that we can focus clearly on those' stages and 11 what we did in those stages, 12 The first one is to identify the areas of research 13 where we think core capabilities are needed. The second is 14 to tie those areas to support for the agency, the regulatory ( 15 functions that the agency performs. The third is to 16 determine the makeup of the core capability in terms of l 17 skills, facilities, and the numbers of in-house staff and 18 the numbers of contract support, the money that we would 19 need to sustain those core capabilities. 20 DR. POWERS: It is undoubtedly the ordering of 21 this that these first three bullets that just -- it's like a 22 fingernail on a blackboard to me, to be honest with you. 23 Somehow you dream up the capabilities that are 24 needed and then you go scramble around and see if you can't l 25 find some reason to tie those to a regulatory function. l \\ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 1________-.-__ l

21 1 Why isn't it the other way around? Why isn't it () 2 here are the regulatory functions that may need some 3 research support. Okay, what is that research support and 4 what core capabilities do I need to support those regulatory 5 functions? How does the first one get done without doing 6 the second? 7 MR. DONNELLY: Well, it could have been done using 8 your approach, in which case you would be identifying 9 specific regulatory functions and then looking, as I 10 understand it, for the core capabilities to support it. 11 We looked at specific core capabilities as 12 potential areas and then sort of generic functions to test 13 the need for those core capabilities again -- for example, 14 operational issues, dealing with operational issues as a p) (, 15 generic function. Do we need this specific core capability 16 in that particular area? If we didn't, then we would move 17 on and look at another area and by that process conclude 18 whether we had strong support for that core area or whether 19 we didn't. 20 DR. POWERS: I think I actually understand what 21 you are telling me is that if I take a large sheet of paper, 22 number it from 1 to 100 and say here are all the core 23 capabilities I could imagine that might be necessary. Now 24 let's compare them to what we actually need. 25 I didn't see that sheet of 100 -- that large sheet O' ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

l 22 i 1 of paper of 100. I only saw the sheet of 39, and when I (o) 2 think about what I would have written on the sheet of 100, 3 it's actually a sheet of 500, and I see some big gaps 4 between that sheet and the 39 sheet. l 5 That is the step that I get worried about, that 6 quite frankly I look at the sheet of 39 and I say, ah, this 7 is a product of no thought at all. I listed down everything j 1 8 I am doing now and I think I can track it one to one against 9 the research programs because I have been spending a lot of i 10 time looking at the specific research programs, and I can 11 find a one to one correspondence. I 12 You didn't leave out anything in there, but you 13 left out a lot of things that could have been. That is the 14 problem I have, f\\ y,) 15 MR. DONNELLY: Well, what we believed was, and I 16 will tell you specifically what we did to develop that list 17 of 39, and I won't tell you that we tried to write down a 18 list of 100 because we didn't. It was more of an expert 19 elicitation from a wide range of people in industry, the 20 national laboratories, Deans of Nuclear Engineering 21 Departments, the user offices that we support, the Research 22 staff itself, our senior management, in testing whether we l 23 had covered everything that ought to be there. 24 That was the process we used and if we missed 25 things then the process was flawed. If we ended up with I t (/~~) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. A/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 {. (202) 842-0034

23 1 pretty much the right set, then it is just a different () 2 approach to get to the same point. 3 One of the main points I think we made in the 4 proposal to the Commission was that we look at two different 5 types of core capabilities, and we put labels on these, one 6 being expertise-driven and one being workload-driven, and we 7 did that for a particular reason. In the expertise-driven 8 analysis we did not look at workloads that those skills 9 would have to address in terms of specific work, for 10 example, to support a user need in NRR. 11 We were looking more broadly at the types of 12 issues and work that we would anticipate in the future and 13 the kinds of skills and facilities that would likely be 14 needed to be able to address those -- not necessarily fully () 15 address them, not have all the resources that would be 16 needed if we got a new license application or something like 17 that, but t have the skilled base that we could draw upon to 18 either use to deal with that issue or to build upon to deal 19 with that issue, and not find ourselves being confronted 20 with an issue that we just would take months or even years 21 to assemble the knowledge base and the skills to deal with 22 it. 1 23 Conversely, the workload-driven, we were i 24 attempting to look at the future in terms of steady state i 25 'real work that we could anticipate, trying to eliminate i /) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. / Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

24 1 peaks from consideration. (m) 2 I think, as explained in the latest paper we sent %) 3 to the Commission, once we got into doing that, it became 4 pretty much a budget development. We found we didn't have i 5 very many peaks at all. Most of our work was pretty 6 long-term, continuing. You might have individual issues, l 7 but those individual issues would be replaced in the future 8 by some other issue, and so as we got into it and we started 1 9 making assumptions or we needed to make assumptions about 10 workload, we realized that we could either make our own 11 assumptions or we could use those that the agency endorsed 12 for ?lanning and budgeting purposes. 13 We didn't think it would be productive to develop 14 our own set of assumptions and workloads independent of what A i ) 15 the agency did and then have to answer questions about why 1C we did that, and so we concluded that we really could not 17 effectively do the workload-driven independent of the budget 18 process and because we felt that we would be so close to the 19 budget process in doing it we chose in that paper to say to 20 the Commission that we believe that the budget process will 21 define priorities and workloads that the Office of Research 22 should be addressing, and we did not identify a core 23 capability, the workload-driven, in that response. 24 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: You didn't attempt to set up a 25 series of priorities within that group so that if the budget l\\ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. '\\- Court Reporters l 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 i Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 I i c_______

25 -1 were inadequate the lower priority ones would drop out? t ( 2 MR. DONNELLY: We did not. 3 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Did not. 4 MR. DONNELLY: The agency has a prioritization 5 process that is part of the budget development cycle. 6 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: And that would be brought to bear 7-on this?. l 8 MR. DONNELLY: It could. Depending upon what l 9 happens in terms of resource availability, core capabilities I l 10 may be able to be maintained or we may find ourselves i 11 getting pushed to the point that we cannot maintain all core 12' capabilities. t 13 At the moment, we have kind of two different L .14 pictures, but when we submitted our paper to the Commission ( 15 we were contrasting the core capabilities in fiscal '98 and '16 .I will identify in here about nine different areas where we 17 were below at that time in our '98 budget where we thought L 18 we had to be. In our rebaselining of the '99 budget, we 19 have pretty much covered all the core capabilities with the 20 exception of two, and one is in severe accidents and the 21 other is in fire protection research. 22-The reason for the former is because of the severe f 23 budget cut we took last year that reduced the Severe I 24 Accident Program back to about $2.7 million. It was a 25 ' Commission decision to do that and we didn't feel that it O' ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 -Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 _ = _ _

26 1 would be' appropriate to go back and try to justify a budget l() 2 that would build that program back up to $4 -- 3 DR. POWERS: Not anxious to get your head handed 4 to you. 5 [ Laughter. ] 6~ MR. DONNELLY: That's one way to put it. 7 The other is the fire protection research where 8 again the Commission's direction on what the agencies is 9 going to do in that area is up in the air. We felt it would 10 be better to again get the sense of what the Commission 11 wanted to do before formulating a program in that area, but 12 otherwise we have in the '99 budget proposal all the other 13 core areas covered. 14 DR. POWERS: I want to ask a question about this ( ) 15 peak and valley, but I really don't want to do it in the 1 16 context of this slide, because I really don't have any 17 troubles with the decisions you have made on this expertise 18 and workload-driven, especially what you chose to do on the 19 workload-driven. 20 It seems like a fine decision to me. I don't know i 21 that I could have done.any -- would have any advice to offer 22 you in that area, but the peak business is a question that 23 came in reviewing the expertise-driven, because I saw a lot 24 of items in there justified as being of acute importance, 25 high regulatory significance, and whatever the words are t [~) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 L-----_-----_-------_---------------------

27 1 that were used in those, and when you read over onto the () 2 right-hand, what's the justification, you would see words 3 about AP600 in there. 4 I reacted to that by saying, gee, AP600 is a 5 finite task. It is very nearly over. I don't see anything 6 in the horizon saying that there is the AP600, Jr. coming 7 down the pike. I don't have all the intelligence that maybe 8 the agency has on what is coming down the pipeline, but I 9 just don't see the kind of effort there, and I say, gee, if 10 that is the only justification, and it appeared to be in the 11 writeup, this looks like A Jinosaur here. I mean this is 12 something that is not going to be used if this is the only 13 justification. 14 Now I had reason to think it wasn't, but I have to 15 believe the words that are written there. 16 MR. DONNELLY: I would have to agree w;.th you. If 17 I were going to gi.e you my best example of peak workload, 18 it would have been AP600. I believe that you are right. In 19 retrospect, we probably could do a better job in addressing 20 that than using AP600, but I don't know exactly which one -- 21 DR. POWERS: Well, I think there are about four or 22 five of them in there where ~ irly visible programs, a 23 programs that people have raised questions about, who are in 24 a position to dictate the budget that are justified -- and 25 the justification is centered about AP600 and you sit around O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

28 l 1 saying "But that job is almost over." 2 MR. DONNELLY: Yes. k-( 3 DR. POWERS: And I am talking about a research i l1 ~4 function that should be looking somewhat in the future. l 5 MR. DONNELLY: But, see, the capability that we <6 are identifying,.the expertise-driven, is a capability to 7-deal with whatever might come up in the future, a peak work -8 load or'a steady state workload. .9. DR. POWERS: But it doesn't say that in the l 10 justification. That is the problem. 11. That is a. weakness. 12 MR. DONNELLY: Well, in the first -- the first L 13' regulatory function that we said we would address I believe l l 14 is to respond to regulatory issuer, and we didn't say whether () 15 they were going to be steady state issues or whether they -16 ' were going to be peak. 17 It really doesn't matter for expertise whether one 18 is the other or not. 19 DR. POWERS: You didn't say it in your question. l I L20 It's'the response that says it. 21 MR. DONNELLY: Okay. 22 DR. POWERS: And that is where the 1alb comes, L 23 because I say that's the only reason to do this. l' 24 MR. DONNELLY: I understand. 251 DR. POWERS: I am now down to 28. l' i I O-ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. 1 Court Reporters I 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 o i Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 L=:_ - :_ _ -

29 1 MR. DONNELLY: I think it was just used as an 2 example. As you know, though, those write-ups were fairly 4 cryptic. They are not very long. 5 DR. POWERS: Boy,-that's a generous statement for 6 them -- cryptic, my God. Very difficult to understand 7 sometimes. 8 MR. KING: I can add something on the AP600. I 9 was just thumbing through. I notice we do mention thermal l 10 hydraulics. 11 The intent was not to say AP600 is going to be l 12 around for a long time. l 13 The intent was to use that as an example of where 14 we had t.o build up expertise to deal with that particular !O

V 15 design.

16 That expertise had-been dwindled away over the t 17 past for whatever reason and then AP600 came along and it i 18 took quite a bit of effort to gear up to do particularly 19 thermal hydraulics, independent analysis on that design. 20 The intent of that, using it as an example, is to 21 say we don't think it is wise for the agency to now, because 22 AP600 is done, let that expertise go away, that we see other 23 issues on the horizon that potentially are going to require 24 thermal hydraulic analysis, whether it is power operating, 25 new fuel designs, whatever. ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

\\ 30 1 DR. POWERS: Tom, you know that this committee in () 2 general and I in particular agree with you 100 percent. 3 The problem I have is that you don't come attached 4 to the document, and so when I read those statements in 5 there, I don't have Tom King Nhispering in my ear "That is 6 just an example." 7 You have a pristine example where this building up 8 an expertise and then letting it atrophy gets you into 9 trouble and that is in your high burnup fuel issue. 10 MR. KING: Exactly. 11 DR. POWERS: That was the one where you were the 12 world class expert for a long time, and you said, gee, I 13 think I know enough about this area. 14 You let it atrophy and boom! -- boy, not 10 years ) 15 later you get hit right in the face with something and you 16 look around and all the guys that were your experts are now 17 retired. The agency people are looking to retire -- a real 18 problem for you on a continuing need, and it is a lovely 1 19 example of where issues just do not die in the nuclear 20 area -- 21' MR. KING: That's right. 22 DR. POWERS: -- because the plant base is 23 relatively static, the technology base is relatively static. i 24 The issue you had on day one will sooner or later rr rface 25 in a little different guise, and so you need to main.'n an ,O) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\u/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

l l 31 1 expertise, even in the lean years when you don't have an ,m 2 AP600 coming through. () 1 3 MR. KING: That is the message we are trying to 4 get across. 5 We put our crystal ball on the table and see l 6 whether it is fuels or thermal hydraulics or digital I&C. j 7 We try to look down the road and say what do we envision is 8 going to be happening through industry initia';ives, through 9 issues that we think might come up and not get ourselves in 10 a position of because today we don't have an immediate need 11 for some particular expertise, not let that go away, and try i 12 to make a case that we need to maintain that. 13 DR. POWERS: If I step back and look -- and I get 14 to exclude a few from your list of 29 or 39 depending on /^x ( ) 15 which list I am looking at -- a few of them I think are i 16 pretty flakey but by and large you defin things very 17 broadly. 18 Instrumentation and Control -- that is something i 19 that is never going to disappear from a plant, and it is J 20 something you are always going to have issues with. It is 21 not going to be the same in 1974 as it is in 2004 but it is 22 going to be an area where you need to maintain expertise. 23 That idea, that I have broken down nuclear power 24 plants into these very broad areas, technically that is, and 25 said here is where I need expertise just doesn't come across ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. sl Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

32 1 in the document. It doesn't come across because you see 7mLJ 2 these, what I call the flakey ones that are so specific, you t 3 know -- steam explosions, yes, that's an issue, it's been ) 4 here forever, it's going to be here forever, and no one is 5 ever going to understand it. It also has no consequences. 6 Why do I need expertise in this area? It stands out like a 7 sore thumb compared to broader areas and it degrades badly 8 from your message that I will need a uniform expertise here 9 because I know just based on the historical record I am 10 going to have issues that need support. 11 I can never -- I don't have a crystal ball and I 12 can't prove it to you, but if I had issues in '70, '80, 13 '90 -- the smart money is going to bet on you are going to 14 have issues in 2000. ) 15 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Go on, Mr. Donnelly? 16 MR. DONNELLY: In response to the paper that we 17 sent to the Commission on methodology, the guidance that was 18 returned was to indeed identify all the areas to support, { 1 19 current and foreseeable future regulatory activities, to 20 consider areas of research suggested by industry, better 21 justify the resource levels. 22 In the paper that we sent forward there was very 23 little information about why we were recommending a 24 'particular resource level. We added extensive narrative 25 following each resource table to better identify specific O* ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

l l 33 1 needs, both in-house and with contractors. e~s ( \\ 2 Finally, they wanted the core capabilities V 3 residing in other program offices to be analyzed and 4 integrated with the core research. 5 Now the latest paper that went to the Commission 6 on the broader agency effort implied that it would be done 7 this fall. Our position is at that time we should have a j 8 basis to look across in not only Research but these other 9 organizations to see if there is a potential for some 10 efficiencies in terms of maintaining an adequate agency core j 11 capability. 12 I would expect that to occur sometime this fall. 13 As I mentioned earlier, for the sake of this 14 discussion, I think it was useful to break our process down () 15 into three steps -- the first one, identifying the areas -- 16 we have talked a little bit about that already; the second 17 one, of assessing.the value of maintaining a core capability 18 in each of those selected areas; and finally, determining 19 the types and depth of expertise and facilities needed to 20 maintain that core -- so I will speak to each of these steps 21 as we go through here. 22 I think the main point on this slide, we have 1 -23 talked about this already, is the last bullet, which is the 24 elicitation of the opinion of experts that I have listed 25 there, to try to test to see if there's-any area that people [ )~ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\~ / Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

34 1 could thin of that looks like they need it today and it will f~) 2 be needed in the future. V 3 I don't remember, quite candidly, what we started 4 out with at the very beginning. I know that things o re t 5 added, things were deleted, and things were combined through 6 these different reviews, and one of the things 2 vanted to 7 and will address here is how we got from the 39 to the 29, 8 from one paper to the other, so you will have a clear track 9 on that. 10 But to go back to one other point above here, we 11 knew that there would always be questions relative to how 12 does this core capability or these core capabilities cot.. pare 13 to your budget, and we insisted upon maintaining a clear 14 link between whatever we identified in the budget activity ( 15 or subactivity that that core capability supported. 16 If we got working across those budget activities, 17 it would be quite a nightmare in order to maintain this 18 comparison. i 19 So in many cases a core capability aligns with a 20 budget subactiv'.sy. There are other cases where there are 21 two, three or four core capabilities when combined link up 22 -with a particular budget subactivity. 23 DR. POWERS: When I look at this particular charge 24 that you got out of COMSECY 97-075, the words that come 25 crushing in on me that make the job difficult is .O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. (- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

L 35 1 " foreseeable future regulatory activities." (s_-). When I read you document, I may start looking for, 2 3 gee, that's very interesting, trying to figure out what is 4 going to happen in the future because of this clairvoyance 5 concept to it, and you are pretty good at telling what you 6 explicitly excluded -- certain kinds of activities mostly 7 connected with DOE, there's one on MOX fuel, and a couple 8 others. 9 You made it very clear that you have established 10 some ground rules for consideration, which I thought were '11 essential and helpful. 12 What I don't see is something that allows me to 13 independently come to the conclusion that your experts came 14 to. I don't see an inventory of things that I bet you know <, - ~. (,) 15 are going to come in on you sooner or later. 16 For instance, this committee recently had a 17 presentation from the EPRI that says we aro engaged in a~$50 18 million research program on trying to extend burnup of fuels 19 beyond 62 gigawatt days per ton. Pretty clear that one of 20 these days you are going to have to handle an application I 21 from somebody that says I want to go beyond 62 gigawatt days 22 per ton. 23 Now that bit of evidence, written down explicitly 24 in the document, says, ah, yes, fuels capability that they [ 25 are going to talk about here on entry Number 15 or whatever l. l[ / ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. 'w Court Reporters ~ 1250 I Street, N W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 i (202) 842-0034 a_

36 1 it is, yes, I see that that is going to be an important l 2 thing. 3 There are lots of those. This committee gets fairly regular presentations from industry on what they are 4 i 5 planning and doing and things like that. We know, for 6 instance, that they chafe under the restrictions on the 7 . heat-up and cool-down rates in PWRs because of the PTS 8 criteria, that they would like to do a more sophisticated 9 analysis than the bounding analysis that is in the Reg 10 Guides now and that they are going to try to propose that to 11 you, becausa it becomes a tougher window to live with as the l 12 plants get older and older. 13 You know that absolutely, and writing that down is 14 such powerful support for saying I am going to need a y,,j 15 capability here -- that is really missing from the document, l 16 that inventory, and what I take it from this slide is that 17 you actually have that inventory someplace. It is on a 18 scrap of paper someplace from all these experts. 19 MR. DONNELLY: Or it is constructable. 1 20 DR. POWERS: Constructable. You know, that would 21 just make the document so much easier to comprehend, to go 22 through and when I go through and when I read the entries, i 23 these little cryptic entries in response to the questions, 24 and your natural reaction is I don't buy that, to have that 25 inventory to come back to and say no, that guy is right, [~'[\\ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington,' D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 L w_

37 1 that he knows that sooner or later he is going to get () 2 something down the pike that he is going to have to confront 3 just because these guys are spending a lot of money on it -- 4 $50 million on high burnup fuel, I bet you you are going to 5 get a proposal. 6 There will be upset utilities trying if a proposal 7 doesn't emerge out of that $50 million research program. 8 And I think that's -- I think that you could come up with a 9 table not unlike the ones you have got and say here's the 10 evidence we have, just from what the industry told us about 11 these things, translated into our categorizations. 12 -MR. DONNELLY: I was looking specifically at our 13 field behavior area when you were talking there, and you're 14 right. In terms of looking at. future issues, our statement ,/7 <(_) 15 is issues stemming from licensee amendment requests will 16 continue to arise several times a year, but it doesn't have 17. anything specific behind it of the nature you are talking 18 about. 19 DR. POWERS: It makes it look like it's a ~ 20 no-never-mind, whereas, in fact, you have made a regulatory 21 decision that says you want to go beyond 62 gigawatt days 22 per ton, you had better come in here with your ducks in a 23 row and a wide range of research activities and analyses to 24' support'you because we are going to review it very 25 carefully. That means you have got to have the capability O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. .!V Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 i L__________________

38 1 to review it very carefully. () 2 DR. MORRIS: Lloyd, this is Bill Morris of the 3 Office of Research. There is a section in the document, not 4 where we answered the questions, but where we stated the 5 assumptions and tried to describe the state of technical 6 knowledge. And it may be that attention to that write-up 7 for each of the core capabilities I believe would reveal 8 some of the kinds of the issues you are talking about now. 9 It was designed expressly to try to lay out what 10 assumptions we should make in validating whether the core 11 capability should survive and at what level. And I believe 12 if you look there, you will see that that's the kind of 13 thing -- the kind of thing that you are mentioning was 14 addressed in those, I think better than it was addressed in () 15 the answers to the questions myself. So if you hadn't 16 focused on that, that might be a valuable place to look for 17 that kind of insight. We did try to address that kind of 18 question though. Maybe we didn't do it to your 19 satisfaction. 20 DR. POWERS: Well, one of -- I mean one of the 21 vulnerabilities of the document is not is Tom King not 22 attached to it, but it's not a very effective sales pitch to 23 itself. You have got to want to understand what is going on 24 in this document, as opposed to being led by the hand 25 through this thing, in a fairly logical fashion. I mean the ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD, Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

39 1 question gets posed, and you see these words in the [~')/ 2 questions, and there are lots of them. You will come down q, 3 and you will start -- you will get to the more quantified 4 ones where you expect a quantitative response and you just 5 don't get it. 6 And there's an explanation for it, and you can 7 ferret it out in the document, but, boy, you have got to 8 want to do that. 9 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Okay. Lloyd. I 10 MR. DONNELLY: I mentioned earlier, and I think 11 you noted, that we have changed significantly the number of 12 areas that we addressed from the time we made our first 13 proposal to the Commission, where we identified potential 14 areas, until we ended up with the ones we actually (3) ~ 15 evaluated. f 16 In getting from 39 to 29 there were nine 17 combinations which I will identify for you. And contrary to 18 what SECY 98-076 says, I discovered there was a small error 19 there. They said there were no deletions and, in fact, two 20 were deleted. And we said there were two additions and, in 21 fact, there was one. I'll take the blame for the poor l 22 arithmetic there. 23 It might be helpful to you, and I'll pass these 24 around, to -- I'll just start here, you can do it -- have 25 before-the list of 39 and the list of 29 as we talk about [)/ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\s-Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 w____________-_______

40 1 these. (~'i 2 This next slide shows the combinations that were .% ) 3 made. On the left are the areas, each bullet identifying 4 one of the 39 that was there, and on the right, showing how 5. these were combined into a new area. 6 I can tell you in general why we did it. I think 7. if.you have more specific questions that what I give you in 8 a general sense, the members of the staff are-here to 9 address why these were combined. In general, we found there 10 .would be a lot of duplication between the supporting .11 material that would be developed for these individual areas 12 and that many of-the skills and facilities, for examples, 13 would be the same as well. And taking the finer cut would 14 .be more work, produce more redundancy in the material, and () '15 ' really wouldn't add value to the product. 16' So we didn't discover this, of course, until we 17 started to get into doing it. And then as we started that, ~18 we said, gee, these look so similar and the justification is 19' so similar, we don't think we would lose anything by .20 combining them, and we would save some work in the process. 21 So I believe that's a fairly general explanation as to why 22 . we combined these. j L23 If you have specific questions, we will turn to l 24 Other people who are here. I 25' CRAIRMAN UHRIG: Just one question, looking at the -[~h ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. '\\-) Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 E_ __ ____ _

41 1 list there. Human performance, does that include human -r ( 2 factors in the broadest sense? You have got some of the .s 3 components but not all of then. that are part of human 4 factors. 5 MR. KING: It is intended to cover human factors 6 in the broadest sense. 7 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: The. broadest sense. 8 MR. KING: Yes. 9 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Okay. 10 DR. FONTANA: I notice in this Attachment 4 that 11 you handed:out, the starred areas are considered sunset. 12 And I was a little confused by the definition of sunset, and 13 you may get into this later. You may get into this later, I 14 was a little confused by the definition of sunset. It says l) 15' here when the level of resources are less, areas considered 16 -to be sunset, the level of resources in these areas are 17f driven by the need to maintain expertise, not the need to 18 satisfy regulatory requirements. 19 It says the resources -- the question is, sunset 20 'means to me that those areas are scheduled to be closed out. 21 When'Irlook at some of these areas, they appear to-be very. 22 important it just appears that the budget is less than the '23 value that is taken to be required to keep expertise. Am I l 24 misreading what.this sunset means here? 25 MR. DONNELLY: In the first SECY paper 97-075, ( ) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters s-1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 L___

i 42 1 that we sent forward, we specifically itddressed the issue of b 2 sunsetting programs. It was an areas where a lot of J 3 different-people had, first of all, defined programs 4 differently, and then defined what closure really meant 5 differently. .6 And so we said that, first of all, that our -7 programs really need to be pretty focused when we are I 8 talking about closure or sunsetting, not talk in terms of 9-sunsetting the severe accident program, for example, or 10 something very broad. And so we proposed to the Commission 11 that the 39 areas then, or the 29 now, really be looked at i 12 as programs or specific areas as to whether they should be 13 sunset or not, and the Commission accepted that. 14 DR. FONTANA: By sunset you mean closed out? (x 15 MR. DONNELLY: Now, I'll get to the second part 16 now. 17 DR. FONTANA: Okay. All right. 16' MR. DONNELLY: Many people had in mind that a 19-program is sunset when all the resources disappear and you 20 have no more program, and that could be a definition. We 21 ' suggested that within this concept of core capabilities, 22 that once you had reduced to the point -- or that work loads 23 had diminished to the point that you only were retaining 24 people to keep that expertise available when needed, that, i 25 in effect, that program was sunset. And the fact that you O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. V-Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

43 1 still were maintaining a minimum expertise on staff and a [ 2 minimum contractor capability in some selected facilities to 3 keep a nucleus together -- 4 DR. FONTANA: Oh, so sunset does not mean that 5 that program is scheduled for termination. 6 MR. DONNELLY: That's correct. It means that -- 7 DR. FONTANA: Okay. That's what was confusing me. 8. MR. DONNELLY: No, it means that it has reached 9 the point where the justification for keeping those 10 resources is for expertise-drive core capability. 11 DR. FONTANA: Thank you. 12 DR. POWERS: If you have not by now, let me 13 encourage you to consider that you have chosen some very bad 14 language here. That I think I would recast this document 15 immediately in that area. I would say there are things that yj 16 -- there are areas of expertise that you want to sunset in 17 the intuitive sense of the word, that is, it is an expertise 18 you have now that you just see something in the future, and .19 I think you need to list those in the document. 20 And then you need to come up with some other word 21. for these groups of core competencies that you want to 22 neintain but. you don't have this flood of necessary user 23 need requests, or I mean they are in truthful valley as far L 24 as immediate applications. I think you have chosen a set of 25 language that is inconsistent with what the Commission had [' 3U01 RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. l Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 j Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l l E_ _

44 1 in mind when they wrote their SRM to you and is () 2 counter-intuitive, and just causes more questions than it is 3 worth. 4 And I spend, in the course of putting together the 5 draft of the research report in which we talk about some of 6 these sunset issues, I spent with members of this Committee 7 more time answering their questions on why is it you want to 8 get rid of my favorite piece of research here. Because you 9 called it sunset, and I don't think you ought to do that. 10 And he says, I don't want to do that. I mean I spend a lot of time going over your definitions and I think it is just 11 12 more effort than you want to go through, because I think you 13 have just chosen language that is just not serving you well 14 here. f 15 MR. DONNELLY: As I mentioned earlier, there were, 16 in fact, two deletions and one addition that we made, and if 17 you'd like to get into the rationale of why those were 18 deleted and why we added one, I think Cheryl Trottier is 19 here to speak to that, if you have particular questions. 20 DR. POWERS: I guess I'd like to understand the 21 deletions for both of those. 22 MR. DONNELLY: Okay. 23 Cheryl? 24 MS. TROTTIER: I think the real reason was that we 25 did not, at the time, have any real need to do any research O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

45 -1 in these areas and it didn't make sense to try and keep a O' '\\ 2 core capability in an area where there wasn't any need. 3 With the addition, that was purely an oversight. 4 We do have issues frequently involved criticality, and we 5 are losing a lot of our expertise in that area, so we did 6 make sure we put that back into the program. 7 DR. POWERS: I guess the question.comes up, when I 8 see spent fuel storage, I guess in the last year, how many 9 presentations on various aspects of spent fuel storage have 10 we had? Certainly, we've had the Boraflex issues, we've had 11 some Susquehanna issues. 12 DR. KRESS: Strainer blockage issues, 13 transportation issues, dry cask issues. 14 DR. POWERS: Dry cask issues. /~T t ) 15 Your explanation that you don't have any real 16 issues associated with spent -- is counter-intuitive 17 relative to our own agenda. 18 MS. TROTTIER: I understand. I think, right now, 19 NMSS has-been handling most of the issues themselves. They 20 feel that they have sufficient expertise-to handle the 21 issues. 22 MR. DONNELLY: There are selected areas of support 23 that research is giving in dry cask storage, and I think the 24 key distinction here is do we need unique skills identified 25 in this area? (T ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. .s/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

46 1 MR. SHAO: Okay. Maybe let me clarify. In my () 2 area, we have research on spent fuel storage, including -- 3 in the structure area, we have spent fuel -- we have 4 research in spent fuel area; material area, we have spent 5 fuel storage. 6 So, it's not including this, tied to understand 7 fuel storage. It's in the structures we do spent fuel 8 research. Also, seismic area, we do spent fuel research. 9 Also in the material area we do spend fuel research. 10 So, even though there's no general type of spent 11 fuel research, but we do research in this area. 12 MR. DONNELLY: In other words, the skills needed 13 to do the support in this area are found within other core 14 capabilities. () 15 MR. SHAO: Yes. 16 CHAIRMAN UHRIG:.Well, was it not one of the 17 Commission's directives that expertise in other groups 18 within NRC be combined within this study? Do I remember 19 that? 20 DR. POWERS: You remember correctly. You will 21 also recall'that they elected not to do that. 22 MR. DONNELLY: We didn't feel we had the ability, 1 23 because the core capabilities in the other offices hadn't 24 been identified yet, and we really felt that, to do justice 25 to it, we needed to do the broader agency effort and then l l l ) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l l

47-1 look at what was done. Y -( ) 2 DR. POWERS: Well, it seems to me that you need to 3 be very careful about the explanation on that, because it 4 really is surprising when you have licensees out threatening 5 or actually suing the Department of Energy over spent fuel 6-storage and you have the staff preparing proposed 7 regulations for the Commission in the area of spent fuel 8 storage to say, gee, I don't need any expertise here. 9 I mean it's just counter-intuitive, and I think I 10 understand what you've done is that you've said, well, there 11 are no real experts in spent fuel storage, they're experts 12 in spent fuel storage structures, they're experts in 13 critical packing of fuel pins, and they're experts in 14 corrosion, but there's nobody that's a spent fuel storage p 3,_) 15 expert, they're all these other things, and those 16 disciplines we're covering. 17 Now, fuel fabrication is -- it's one that, quite 18 frankly, surprised me-on the 39 issue, but I'd be interested ~ i 19 in why it's dropped. 20 MR. SEAO: Dr. Powers, in the same way we didn't 21 put on reactor vessel as a subject, we put on reactor 22 vessel, radiation damage, and fracture mechanics. 23 DR. POWERS: I was going to skip over the section 24 on radiation damage until I realized that that was really 25 integrity and drag. l r ( ) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\~ ' Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 1 l (202) 842-0034 l

48 1 MR. SHAO: So, really, we do put on major () 2 component. We didn't put on pumps and valves or reactor 3 vessel, same way. 4 MR. MORRIS: Bill Morris, Office of Research, 5 again. 6 Since the time we drew up the paper, we have had 7 occasion to discuss the user needs in the area of spent fuel 8 storage with the user offices, and if you looked at the 9 budget, you would see that there is a family of activities 10 that are covered under that category. 11 I've continued to examine those activities to see 12 whether we are properly covered, and as Larry Shao has said, 13 we can find the expertise somewhere in the office to deal 14 with the research activities that are required. I () 15 For purposes o# al anatior. I could sympathize 16 with your view that pe 1r we shou 4d have actually defined 17 a spent fuel storage at ' 'nd put that packaging in the 18 paper, but we did not tt ime. 19 The value of is e packaging rather than 20 substance, however, because t1 ! 'jecific elements aren't 21 covered in our expertise span for the whole office. 22 On fuel fabrication, I think I would go back to i 23 _ what Cheryl said. 24 We have requirements in the regulations on fuel i l 25 fabrication facilities to guide those facilities. We have l l i I p} ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. (s-I Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 i w __ -

49 1 not seen, in the past, a need to have research programs () 2 related to those, because the regulations seem -- and I will 3 go back to the user office, NMSS -- have seemed to be 4 sufficient to guide decisions by the user office on the area 5 of fuel fabrication facility licensing in the past, and 6 we've seldom had need to have a separate program in that, 7 other than such a program's materials criticality safety 8 which would be applicable to those facilities. 9 So, we could, of course, revisit any of these 10 issues, but at this time, we have seen fit to think that 11 this list of 29 would be sufficient to cover the needs of 12 the user offices. 13 DR. POWERS: Let me make a suggestion, for what 14 it's worth. (O ,,/ 15 I often find that the counter-examples are the 16 root to understanding examples, and the explanations that 17 you have given here on why you deleted these have clarified 18 very much on why you included other things that a careful J 19 explanation to them in a page or two would add tremendously 120 to the salability of this particular document, the I 21 persuasiveness that it's been carefully considered and is 22 not, ac I characterized it and probably will continue to 23 characterize it, a list of everything we're doing now, with 24 justifications found as we could. 25 MR. DONNELLY: I don't mean this comment to be [' ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. - \\-- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 i (202) 842-0034 L k____.______________________-._- . - - - - - - =.. - - - - - - - - - - - _ - - - - - - - -

50 1 argumentative. I would just point out that, in the fracture [ 2 mechanics area and in the structural and civil engineering 3 area, when we define the research work to be performed, 4 spent fuel' support is in both of those areas. 5 DR. POWERS: Yes, I think I understand that, and I 6 think it's been a very good explanation, and like I said, if 7 that was written up in the beginning to say here's some 8 things that we killed off as expertise and here's why, 9 because later on, you're going to get into the actual pages 10 and you're going to have a question that I can't think of 11 right now on the skills that need to be maintained, and 12 everyone says, every single one of us says a whole varie*y 13 of skills are needed for this particular job, and they list -14 four or five of them in there that all focus in on whatever -A(,) 15 particular issue it is, and you sit there and you say, well, 16 yes, I mean that's true, every single job I can think of is 17 . connected to some other job, and so, there's lot of 18. expertise. 19 This helps me understand that there's a 20 distinction between what's written there and here, and it's 21-one that's covered. 22 I thought that was very clear, but there are lots 23 of issues associated with spent fuel -- it's just not spent 24 ' fuel expertise that you need -- it wouldn't do any good to I 25 have a spent fuel expert, because what you really need is a j i (O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. '\\ l Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

51 1 guy that understands structures and a guy that understands () 2 corrosion and a guy that understands criticality. I've got 3 them. 4 MR. DONNELLY: Good point. 5 The next slide highlights areas where we believe 6 no capability is needed, and in presenting this slide, I 7 have to admit to the second mistake that I made. 8 When I briefed the committee last time, I included 9 two areas of severe accident on here by mistake. One was 10 core-concrete interactions and the other core melt 11 progression and phenomenology. 12 Actually, those areas are embedded within other 13 parts of the severe accident core capability write-up, so I 14 apologize for that. (3 (,,/ 15 DR. POWERS: On the other hand, I know someone 16 that has some vague expertise in the area of core-concrete 17 interactions who agreed with you, you don't need an expert 18 in that' area. 19 MR. DONNELLY: The three areas that we identified '20 last time and still remain are naterial control and 21 accounting, physical security, and the environmental 22 sciences. 23 I would add a fourth one that is highlighted in 24 the paper we sent to the Commission, and that is that, by j 25' Commission decision, the core expertise in the area I i 'T ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters l E 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 f

52 1 1 supporting high-level waste is consolidated now in the i <~s ( ) 2 Office of NMSS. 'RJ 3 So, had that not been a decision, we would have 4 that area, undoubtedly, en our list, as well. 5 Are there any questions before we move on? I 6 [No response.] '7 MR. DONNELLY: Okay. I would now go to the second i 8 step in our process, which is assessing the value of I 9 maintaining a core capability in the areas that we l 10 identified. i 11 Again, our approach was different from the one you l 12 describe earlier, but again, we looked at six functions that i 13 any core capability might support, might need to support, 14 and then evaluate the strength of the support that might be q 15 needed. -16 The first two deal with issues either of an 17 operational nature or of a new technology or research 18 finding nature and whether we foresaw those in the future as 19 something we were going to need to be able to deal with. 20 The next one focuses on maintaining information 21 and tools that the Office of Research has historically 22 maintained and may need to maintain in the future. 23 Finally, to help improve the regulatory framework, 24. and I think -- 25 DR. POWERS: On that second one, can you explain [)/ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

53 1 that one to me? [Y 2 MR. DONNELLY: New technologies or research? 3 DR. POWERS: Yes, new technologies -- issues 4 stemming from new technologies and research. I keep 5 -thinking I understand it, and then I read the responses, and 6 I come away saying I don't think I understand this question. 7 MR. DONNELLY: Well, I don't know if I'm going to 8 dig the hole deeper by trying to explain it or clarify it, 9 but two examples come immediately to mind. 10 I think new technologies -- digital I&C is a good 11' area, where there are new issues, and we can anticipate even 12 more of them, I believe, that will at least drive part of 13 the need to maintain a core capability in that area. 14 New research -- I think a good example is the p.(,,) 15 research coming out on -- that came out in the past on high 16 burn-up fuel from France and the need to have people who 17 understand that research and are able to analyze it and 18 assess its implication for the U.S. program. 19 DR. POWERS: When I respond to this -- I'm 20 developing a response on what is core capabilities -- I 21 should be able to put my finger on either issues that have 22-come from new technology that I know about-or areas where 23 there is so much activity going on, there's a good chance 24 that issues are going to come up. I don't think the 25-responses do that. f /^) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. (. - Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

l l 54 1 By and large, the responses are of the nature of, () 2 well, new things are coming up all the time and we've got to 3 handle it. There's nothing very specific in there. l 4 I agree with you on digital technology. I'm 5 willing to be a little rounder on that and less specific 6 just simply because I know that I've got an entire Silicon 7 Valley generating things faster than I can keep track of. 8 But in some of the other areas -- in fracture 9 mechanics, I don't think there's been a new invention since 10 Von Mises or something like that. It is really a 11 slowly-evolving area. 12 DR. SHACK: Dana has his opinions. We're never 13 going to change it. 14 DR. POWERS: Wait till I get in to thermal ' Q( l j 15 hyaraulics, where I don't think anything new has been l l 16 invented since Reynolds. 17 I think that makes it very hard to understand the 18 answer to that. They're too round in their response. 19 They're not giving me anything that I can grab hold of and l 20 say, oh, yes, there are going to be new inventions coming l 21 out in that area in these responses. And it makes -- 22 everything comes in high on this. l 23 Th question becomes non-discriminatory, because 24 everybody is saying, well, you know, I'm going to have new l 25 issues in this area, things like that. ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. A Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 i Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

55 1 Even if somebody were to come back and say, well, () 2 I don't know about the future but I've had issues in this 3 area every year for the last 15, I'd accept that. But this 4 kind of nebulous kind of responses that seem to come in 5 frequently here just leaves you saying I don't know what new 6 is coming down the pike. 7 DR. SHACK: You haven't seen fracture mechanics 8 issues every year for the past 15 years? 9 DR. POWERS: I always do, and they're always 10 solved the same way. 11 MR. DONNELLY: The third bullet, improving the 12 regulatory framework, was really focused on work associated 13 with improving regulations, risk-informed, performance-based 14 regulations, areas -- PRA, particularly -- that we would () 15 want to maintain capability to support that even if we 16 didn't have operational issues or new technologies or 17 whatever that would be driving it. 18 DR. POWERS: Here again, your little terse 19 responses -- I understand there's only so much you can write 20 down on one little block, and to make the block bigger makes 21 the document difficult to deal with, but it would have 22 really helped, if somebody is developing, maintaining, and 23 applying an analytic tool in database, to tell me what that 24 analytic tool in that database is. 25 Instead of just saying, yes, I'm going to develop O. ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l

56 i 1 tools and databases, tell me exactly which ones you have, I (J'T 2 because later on, I'm going to find guys wanting to replace 3 those. l 4-MR. DONNELLY: Well, again, I would have thought i 5 that we would have done that in these formats. I just 6 happened to turn to one on digital I&C, and we talked about 7 case tools. I 8 DR. POWERS: Yes. 9 MR. DONNELLY: I don't know if you -- 1 11 0 DR. POWERS: Yes, case is discussed under digital 11 I&C, I'll admit that. 12 MR. DONNELLY: I'll just pick them at random here, j 13 I don't even know what I'm going to find, but let's go to -- 14 DR. POWERS: If you go to human factors, you're l /~% (_) 15 going to find ATHENA. Go to reactor physics. 16 MR. DONNELLY: Okay. -17 Well, I'm looking at item six where we refer to 18 the current thermal hydraulic codes as the area needing 19 improvement in specific areas. I'm not trying to refute 20 what you're saying. I'm trying to better understand your 21 -- point. 22 DR. POWERS: For instance, let's say the current l 23 thermal hydraulic codes under reactor physics. that's a l l 24 little challenging to understand, i 25 There is a reason to bring up the thermal l .(O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\-) Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034'

57 1 hydraulics. ) 2 There is a coupling between the neutronics and the -/ 3 thermal hydraulics, and in fact, if you go in and you go 4 through the reading there, you will see that they cry for 5 having 3-D coupled neutronics, as opposed to the point I l 6 kinetics that they're using now. 7 It never says that they've actually selected a 8 code and they're going to develop it, they went out and they 9 have done'a survey of available codes and they have selected 10 one to do that and they're going to maintain and develop 11 that. 12 MR. KING: Which is, in fact, happening, but 13 you're right, it's not mentioned. 14 DR. POWERS: That's right. Why couldn't it have (/~h) 15 been said? 16 MR. DONNELLY: I guess, in talking about i 17 maintaining core capability, it didn't -- that seemed to be l 18 - a secondary issue to me, whether you can actually name the I i 19 code ~or not. 20 DR. POWERS: But see, the issue here -- I mean l l 21 this is'one of the top six criteria here, is develop, 22 maintain, and apply analytic tools and databases, j 23 MR. KING: But the primary issue is that fact that 24-we're going to do that, and the words say, yes, we need to 25 go out and select that tool and make that coupling and ID ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. s/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 1 (202) 842-0034 L_________-______________-_-________-_.

l 58 1 maintain it. We could put the name of the 3-D tool in here l ' '2 that we were actually working on. 3 DR. KRESS: Well, you run the risk of that being obsolete at some future time, because those tools keep 4 5 changing. 6' MR. KING: Yes. ? 7 DR. KRESS: I can understand why you would leave 8 -it out. 9 MR. ELTAWILA: Dr.. Powers, this is Farouk Eltawila 10 from Research. 11' At the time the core capability paper was written, 12 we stated that we are going to maintain the RAMONA core 13 capability, not the RAMONA code, its capability, and since 14 then, you correctly stated that we surveyed all the codes () 15 available in the reactor physics area and we narrowed down 16 our selection to the PARCS code. 17 So, that's why it's not state here, but the RAMONA 18 capability is stated, which is the physics code. j l 19 MR. DONNELLY: The last two areas that we i 20 evaluated the need for core capabilities against was to help '21" improve our technical knowledge and technical base through 22 cooperative research programs, and finally, the response to 23 oversight groups. l 24 DR. KRESS: That's one -- that next-to-the-last 25 bullet -- that's one that sees out of character with all the i l ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. j Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

l 59 1 rest of them. j. j. 2 MR. DONNELLY: Well, it does, but I guess I go 3 back to the fuel behavior and the work done by the French. 4 If we didn't have a core capability of any kind, we would 5 not have been able to follow that, maybe even know that it's j 6 going on. 7 DR. KRESS: How do you have a core capability in l 8 cooperative research? 9 MR. DONNELLY: You have experts within a core that 10 are able to participate and involve themselves in 11 cooperative research efforts on behalf of the agency. 12 If you don't have'those experts who can do that, l i i 13 then you don't have the -- you won't derive the benefit from 14 those cooperative programs. That was our logic. 15 These six areas, then, set 0,- the foundation for 16 screening the potential. core capability areas by doing the 17 evaluations that were, i.n fact, guided by the metrics that 18 we had in the paper. 19 We said, if operational issues, for example, in a 20 given area, are expected to be a major consideration in '21 terms'of maintaining a core capability, we ought to do some l 22 analysis that says there's a high probability here or a low 23 probability and why, and so, we developed the metrics to try 24 to have a degree of consistency throughout the analyses that i 25 we did in the office, recognizing they were done by O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. D Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 ( (202) 842-0034 l-L L

60 1 different people and different groups within the office. () 2 If we did a good job, which you have indicated 3 there were some areas we could have done better, you would 4 have, for example, been able to go into tools and databases 5 in a particular area and see a high rating, see the 6' rationale for that high rating, go back into the metrics, 7 and say, if I agree with the metric, then I agree with your 8 high rating in that area. If your metric was off, then it's 9 .off. 10 So, that was the approach that we used, and then 11 it was a subjective look back. 12 After going through the 14 areas that are rated -- 13 high, medium, and low, or none -- to say is there enough 14 strength there from these ratings and this justification to O) (, 15 say we should keep a core capability? It might be a very 16 small one, it might be a robust one, but at point, does it 17 make Jense to have one? 18 And again, peopl.e could draw different 19 conclusions, and I think, from the questions that the 20 Commission posed, in, namely, looking at the last two areas, 21 where we're talking about cooperative research in response 22 to oversight groups, if that's the only reason we were going 23 to keep a core capability, it would be a weak justification. 24 I have in the briefing material the actual form 25 that we used. I don't want to spend time on it, because I'm b ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\s-Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

i 61 1 sure you looked at them in your review of the paper. ~g -f 2 DR. POWERS: Let me ask you a question about the V; 3 high, medium, low, and none. I guess I want to ask a couple 4 of questions. 5 The first one is was your intention in 6 establishing these semi-quantitative characteristics that 7 they characterize the capabilities that you identified from 8 top to bottom -- that is, the most important one to maintain 9 and the least important one to maintain -- or was your 10 intention that they be like grades in graduate school -- you 11 know, you've selected out the cream of the crop here and you 12 expected them all to be pretty high? 13 MR. DONNELLY: I don't know that I fully j 14 understand what you're saying, but I would say we did these ?3 (,) 15 to try to take an objective look and have documentation to 1 16 support a conclusion that we should retain a core capability 17 in this area. 18 If you say why, we should come back to this form 19 and be able to go down and say it's driven, in large part, 20 by a high probability of significant safety issues of an 21 operational nature that we foresee in the future. 22 Now, if you disagree, we can have a dialogue on 23 that, but if you don't disagree, then we would maintain that 24 we ought to have minimum expertise to deal with the likely 25 issues that are going to come up. l l l O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\> Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

62 1 DR. POWERS: So, you really were trying to ) 2 . understand something about these 29 areas that you had, you 3 know, why it is that people judged that this ought to be a 4 core capability. 5 MR. DONNELLY: No, because we hadn't judged that, 6 really, yet. 7 We had said we believe, based on just general 8 knowledge and this expert elicitation, that we should have a 9 core capability in this area. Let's see if we can support 10 it, the different areas that it might support the regulatory 11 process, so we can have a meeting of the minds. 12 If you -- you might disagree with the rating, you 13 might disagree with the metric, you might disagree with the 14 rationale, but at least we-would be able to have that T 15 dialogue and, hopefully, through adjustment, reach a common 16 conclusion. I 17 DR. POWERS: I guess my second question and third, l 18 then, was there an attempt, in formulating these 14 i 19 criteria, to assure that they were distinct? 20 That is, if I got a high value in -- say, under '21 the first one, provide technical bases for agency decisions 22 -- that that did not, ipso facto, mean I would get a high 23 value under provide the technical bases of agency decisions. 24 MR. DONNELLY: They are not distinct. 25 DR. POWERS: They are not distinct. ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 1 L_________________________.

l 63 1 MR. DONNELLY: There are lots of cases where there () 2 could be overlap. Responding to an oversight group on an 3 operational issue, for example, is the same thing as dealing 4 with that operational issue. L 5 DR. POWERS: No attempt to make them orthogonal 6 questions. 7 MR. DONNELLY: Right. 8 We've spent a lot of time, an awful lot of time, 9 in the office to arrive at this set that the whole 10 organization could pretty well understand and see as being 11 realistic, and it is not perfect. It's a way to try to 12 explain what we did in a rational, consistent way. 13 DR. POWERS: The next question really deals with 14 quantification and consistency. What is done to give me ) 15 some idea, for instance, under frequency of occurrence, what l 16 a high-frequency occurrence is and what a medium-frequency 17 of occurrence? 18 MR. DONNELLY: If we did a good job on the 19 metrics, you should be able to turn there and find out what 20 the person should have in mind when they make those ratings. 21 DR. POWERS: Okay. They always say they rise all 22 the time, and some of them are really fairly interesting. 23 You get the distinct impression that when -- and 24' I'm not pointing to anybody in particular, really, but I'm 25 going to say some names -- when Larry Shao writes down high l l l 1 l ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. l N-- Court Reporters l 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 .___-__________________________________-_________________a

64 1 frequency of occurrence, he's operating with a different () 2 calendar than when Joe Murphy writes down frequency of 3 occurrence, okay? 4 I mean they live in different technical worlds, 5 and it takes different amounts of time to resolve a given i 6 issue, and when Larry gets a radiation damage issue, he 1 l 7 rolls his eyes and says it's five years in the reactor just 8 to get the data and then I can do some analyses on it, and 9 he didn't want too many issues coming at him. High ] 10' frequency is one a year to him, whereas a guy working on 11 PRA, a high frequency is one a week. 12 MR. DONNELLY: Well, once again, if I go back, for 13 example, to the metrics in attachment five in 97-075, for l 14 the high-frequency of occurrence on an operational issue, we () 15 said are expected to arise one or more times a year, and the 16 median is to -- they are expected to arise with a frequency j l 17 of less than that and a low is they are not expected to j i 18 arise. 19 DR. POWERS: Okay. That's what I was looking for. 20 MR. DONNELLY: Yes. 21 You might say you could construct better metrics 22 than that, but that's what we did, and we tried to test, 23 again, on a logical basis and a discussion basis, once we i 24 got a rating or someone rated something high, to go back and 25 say'is it consistent with this, and if so, you rated it O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\m / Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 L (202) 842-0034

65 .1 high, explain to me why you think that's realistic for the ( 2 future. -. x.- 3 So, we tried to run those tests against these '4 metrics as a way to achieve it. 5 DR. POWERS: Understand where I come from. Yes, I 6 believe that, if I tried to do this myself, I would come up 7 with a different thing. I cannot attest to you it would be 8 better. I just don't think this thing lends itself to an 9 optimal set. 10 MR. DONNELLY: No, it doesn't. It clearly 11 doesn't. 12 DR. POWERS: I think you come up with an approach,. 13 and.the real questions are can you persuade people with that 14 approach, and did you carry it out well? I mean kind of the () 15 first step in persuading somebody is to carry it out well. 16 To argue over the approach -- it's too late for that, to be 17 honest with you, and I'm sure that anyone at this table, i 18 anyone in this audience, if they had to do it over again, 19 even you would probably come up with something that was 20 different. I don't know that it would be better. 21 DR. FONTANA: Two questions. 22 Were these things weighted equally when you i 23 compared them against each other? 24 The reason I ask is that some issues could arise, i 25, .like, say, once a year and have a high rating for l\\ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\~s Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 L_______.__

66 1 occurrence, and other issues could arise a lot less than I1 2 that but be really, really important, and that would show up %) 3 in another list, but the question is, if they're weighted 4 equally, then one would not override the other as much as 5 they should. 6 MR. DONNELLY: That's correct. You're right. 7 It would appear, for example, in your example, the 8 safety significance might outweigh the frequency, might be a 9 low frequency but it might be a high safety significance, 10 and we did not do any weighting. 11 It was purely let's document it, let's step back 12 from it, take a look at it, and say -- 13~ DR. FONTANA: Use some judgement. 14 MR. DONNELLY: Yes. J,j; 15 DR. FONTANA: Were these criteria devised before 16 you asked the outside experts -- was this one of their sets 17 of guidance that they had or the other way around? 18 MR. DONNELLY: We spent most of the time with the 19 outside experts on the list. 20 DR. FONTANA: Okay. 21-MR. DONNELLY: And I think, in our interactions, 22 we explained to them the process we were going to use, but I .23 don't recall that we got a lot of input from them on the 24 criteria. I'd have to go back. It was quite a while ago. 25 DR. FONTANA: Just whether they had this in front O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\ s# Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

67 1 of them when the experts were doing their thinking or 1 (-T/ whether you asked them first to get sort of an overall l 2 i 3 integrated input before you set up these criteria. Either '4 one is okay. 5 MR. DONNELLY: Yes. I don't recall. I don't 6 recall. The interaction with the outside people occurred 7 over months. We started with one group and we worked our 8 way across, and we probably were refining our process as we 9 went. 1 I 10 DR. POWERS: Are we going to continue on 11 discussing the questions here, or were you going to a i 12 different subject? 13 MR. DONNELLY: I was going to move off the high, 14 medium, and low area, but I'm willing to say with it as long G k_,) 15 as you have questions. 16 DR. POWERS: Let me ask you a few more questions 17 on this. I'm beginning to learn that I want both you and 18 Tom King attached to the document. 19 You have under nearly all of -- or the first two 20 or three questions, you have safety and regulatory 21 significance. 22 Now, the first thing that strikes you is there's 23 nothing that says the words " risk" in here. 24 Now, maybe that's embedded in safety and whatnot. 25. You know, when I vote on safety significance, maybe I'm l ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. L Court Reporters l 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

i 68 1 voting, in part, on risk significance. () 2 So, I guess my question is how do I select a value 3' for whether it's a high safety significance, medium safety 4 significance, or low safety significance? 5 MR. DONNELLY: Well, I will go back again to j 6 attachment five in SECY 97-075, which has the metrics, and { 7 in this case, we have tried to distinguish between high, 8 medium, and low ratings in terms of -- in the first case, it 9 said it would raise -- I'm trying to find it here -- it 10 would raise significant doubt regarding the ability of the i 11 licensee safety measures to maintain acceptable safety l 12 margins. So, the key word there is "significant doubt." l 13 The next one, we said a moderate doubt, and in the last one, 14 we said little doubt. { () 15 DR. POWERS: All you've done is punted the 16 question. 17 MR. DONNELLY: Well, I understand, and again, we 18 worked very hard to come up with some distinguishing 19 features that would allow someone to give it a high, medium, 20 and low rating, and that's what we selected. 21 DR. POWERS: I'm still a little puzzled.

Now, 22 what's significant doubt, which is a moderate doubt?

I mean 23 I haven't gotten anywhere here. 24 MR. DONNELLY: I think, if you were in a l 25 particular area and you saw a high rating -- let's say in ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 i l (202) 842-0034 w__-____

l-69 1 fuel behavior, you saw a high rating -- I don't know if it's {} 2 high,or not then you could have a dialogue on that 3 specific thing with the individual giving the rating and say 4 why do you think that raises a significant doubt, and then 5 you hear the answer. 6 Now, there should be, in the rationale provided on 7 these forms, as cryptic as it may be, a reasonable 8 explanation Qf that. It may not have all the meat on it 9 that you want, but it ought to get us in the right L 10 direction. 11 DR. POWERS: When I read those rationales for 12 safety and regulatory significance -- and values are nearly 13 always high -- I read an explanation that, when I try to l-14 think about how I would vote it, these fellows have rated it Oi) 15 high if there's a total breakdown in the system. s 16-Now, if I flat-load this core in a prompt critical 17 configuration, yes, it's going to be real safety 18 'significant. L 19 The fact is that doesn't even occur. We typically 20 could get one fuel element out of place or something like 21 that or one fuel assembly just doesn't behave well. 1 l 22 The evaluations have taken extreme positions, it 23 seems to me, rather than be rooted in, say, historical 24 evidence. Say, issues come up in these areas, what's the 25' ASP program dictat6 about them? - g] ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. ?s_/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

l 70 1 In fire protection, we know that we fire lots, 2 roughly a half-a-fire per plant per year, and quite frenkly, 3 there are fires -- not fires in trash cans, because those 4 don't get reported, but they're pretty moderate fires, and 5 so, you'd have to say there that -- fires can be very 6 important. I mean, if I have a Brown's Ferry, there's no 7 question about it, that's a serious thing. I l 8 But the fact is it's difficult to rate fire 9 protection events that occur typically as a high-risk i l 10 significance or high safety significance. They just aren't. 11 They could be, but they just aren't, and that's what makes 12 the question non-discriminatory to me. 13 There's not a single core competence in here that 14 I can pick that, if I go to the extreme, it's not -- it's a 1 () 15 really bad thing. 16 On the other hand, the things that we're 17 encountering day to day do have a range. I have a Wolf 18 Creek drain-down even, boy that scores real high, and that 19 occurs. We have those fairly regularly. 20 Fires in trash cans, we have those fairly 21 regularly and they're not safety significant. 22 But that difference, that distinction just does 23 not come through when people answer this. They're taking it 24 too much to the extreme. l l 25-MR. DONNELLY: Would anyone else like to respond L- .h ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

71 1 to that? I don't think I can defend that we may have taken [] 2 the extreme versus the norm, but -- w 3 Go ahead, Mike. 4 MR. MAYFIELD: Mike Mayfield from Research. 5 Could I get you to look at the piping as an 6 example, if it's not too painful? 7 DR. POWERS: I struggle finding -- I 8 MR. MAYFIELD: Well, so have I. I've had the 9 luxury of sitting back there looking for it till I finally i 10 found it. 11 This is an example one where, when we got into it, 12 we thought it was going to fall off the table, and it was 13 one of-the early list, I think, even before we pared dcwn to i 14 39, and we honestly thought it was going to fall off the l O( j: 15 . table. 16 Since it's been sort of a pet project of mine for i 17 more years than I care to discuss with you, I took it sort { 18 of near and dear to my heart. 19 However, when we went-waltzing through the tables 20 21 DR. POWERS: Let me just interrupt, Mike, and say 22 I did look at this one, because I said now this one's surely 23 got to fall off the table, and you persuaded me. 24 MR. MAYFIELD: But the question about risk isn't 25 'in there. Well, we talked about it in terms of core damage O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD, k/ Court Reporters 1250 1 Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 l -(202) 842-0034 l l E--_---_

1 72 1 frequency. Did.we quantify it with specific numbers? No, 1 j 2 we didn't go do calculations. 3 The sense of it was, based on previous work that 4 had been done, some of it in support of the changes made to 5 General Design Criterion 4 back in the mid '80s and some 6 more recent stuff that's been kicked around; that by and 7 large it's low, the significance is low in terms of core 8 damage frequency. 9 But as we kept working through this and you 10 finally get to the end of the day and what would it really 11 cost us to maintain some level of expertise in this, it's 12 not very costly. Does it have impact? Yes, it has some 13-impact. i l 14 But where we could, we tried to roll in some level .,Q ' .Q 15 of quantification in terms of core damage frequency, those 16 kinds of things, but we didn't run off doing calculations to 17 support them, and in many of the areas, there just isn't a 18 persuasive risk analysis you can put your hands on. It gets 19 hard to do that. 20 DR. POWERS: You want to know what persuaded me on 21 this? You did persuade me, but you didn't do it in this 22 document. 23 MR'. MAYFIELD: Okay. 24 DR. POWERS: You persuaded me in another 25 discussion we had, where you pointed out to me that the way ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

73 1 licensees are responding in their power upgrades is to () 2 increase the flow velocity to the pipes, changes everything 3 we've done before, and that's what led me to say, yes, 4 piping's going to be important. I 1 5 MR. MAYFIELD: But you get into these things and i 6 .what we've found -- if Lloyd hasn't made the point yet, this { i 7 was not done in five minutes. There were months and months 8 of agony, going round and round and round over these things. I I 9 It wasn't a quick read or a quick fix. I 10 So, as we went through some of the loops on these, l 11 some of the ratings changed as we got input from some of the l 12 other staff members, but very often it started boiling down 13 to more of a quality -- how do you make the distinction 14 between significant and moderate? ("(,]j 15 Well, it's sort of -- when I read through this and 16 I think about the area, does my gut take a real big wrench, 17 or does it just kind of waffle, and you end up significant 18 versus moderate. Many of them were down at that level. 19 MR. KING: You used fire protection as an example, 20 Dana. If you go read the fire protection section, it does 21 talk about the IPEdEs and the fact that fire is a dominant 22 contributor to risk in a number of plants. 23 We've been lucky. We had Brown's Ferry. We've 24 had other fires that haven't been nearly as serious, but we l 25 did try to factor risk insights into selecting these things, l [~ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l-L________-__-_-______-________-__

- - ~ ~ ~ ' - 74 1 even though the word " risk" doesn't show up in the metrics () 2 that we wrote. 3 DR. POWERS: I have to admit, I eventually l l 4 concluded that safety significant must have risk in it when 5 you had a risk measure. Some areas, they're just not 6 included in the PRA. If I'd ask you for a risk estimate on 7 it, said you must have one, I don't have one. 8 MR. KING: I mean organizational performance -- we 9 don't have a risk number, but we think it's a pervasive kind 10 of thing that deserves some research and continuing 11 attention. 12 You know, if we had it to do all over again, we 13 could probably do a better job at bringing risk in and 14 supporting some of these things, but Mike is right, we spend () 15 a lot of time on these, back and forth on what the right 16 questions were and what the right metrics were and how much 17 level of detail do you put in here, and I'm sure we could do 18 a better job if we sat down and started clean today, but 19 there was a lot of thought put into this stuff. 20 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: At this point, I would like to 21 interrupt. We have a 15-minute recess scheduled here. Am i 22 breaking this at a logical point? 22 MR. DONNELLY: It's fine. I think this is a good 24 place to break. 25 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Okay. O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

75 -1 MR. DONNELLY: It's fine. () 2 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: We will recess. We will 3 reconvene at 20 till 11. 4 (Recess.] 5 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: We will reconvene, and Lloyd, 6 we'll let you continue here. 7 MR. DONNELLY: I included this slide to just make 8 the point that, in addition to the table that we talked 9 about that had the 14 criteria with the high, medium, and 10 low ratings, there was obviously other narrative that we 11 felt was important to document the results of our 12 assessment. I've just outlined them here. 13 I would go to the bottom of the chart, though, 14 because I understand, in talking'with Medhat, that one of () 15-the areas that Dr. Powers had some concern and interest in 16 was the area where we addressed are there any sources other 17 than NRC-funded sources where we might find the core -- some i 18 of the core capability or the entire core capability outside 19 the NRC, and I guess I would like to.ask you, Dr. Powers, is .20 that an area that you had particular concern with? 21 DR. POWERS: Well, what I think I will say my 22 concern was is when they come through and they say can we 23 get expertise in thf7 area, and I tried to understand what 24 they were talking about, and I'm not sure I really did, I 25 was thinking in terms of, okay, an issue comes up, an event ANN.RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 i

76 1 that deals with this particular area tangentially or [) 2 directly, and I-look around and I don't have anybody that's v 3 really what I'd call on top of this issue within the agency 4 itself and I need some help, so can I get that help, and I 5 understand that that help has to have an independence of the 6 licensees. 7 So, if I'm going to go look for help in the area 8 of fuels, I'm probably not going to find that expertise, 9 because it's thin, to begin with, in the country, and where 10 it exists, it's going to be subscribed by the nuclear 11 industry so badly that I'm not going to get independence. 12 Okay. So, for fuels, I say, yes, you better i 13 develop your own in-house capabilities, you ain't going to 14 find it. I 15 I come to civil engineering and I say drag a $100 16 bill through the civil engineering department of any 17 engineering school in America and I'll have more help than I 18 can possibly stand. 19 I didn't see that kind of discrimination that 20 frequently, what I saw, in reading on that issue, is people 21 saying, well, I need expertise that knows the nuclear ) business inside and out as well as this issue, and boy, I 23. just don't find that, and that's true. I can't argue with 24 that rationale. 25 But I also think that some of these issues are ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

i 77 l 1 pretty nuclear-ended. It doesn't take long to get the () 2 nuclear part of it, civil engineering being one of them, l 3 that, boy, you know, half-a-day of explanation from the 4 staff and a good civil engineer understands all the nuclear 5 part of it he needs and he can say, okay, is there a seismic 6 issue here or not. 7 That's the kind of discrimination I did not see 8 being made, and I guess that's what raised the concern that 9 there are a lot of areas -- civil engineering, thermal 10 hydraulics, electrical engineering -- where I say the { 11 technical capabilities of the country as'a whole is so rich 12 that it's not -- and the issue comes up in so many i 13 industries that it's not going to be fully subscribed, I can l 14 find. guys that can independently give me advice. l '~ j( .15 I am not going to find guys that are -- that have 16 that nuclear spin to their things. I mean, if that's the i 17 criterion, that they understand the nuclear part very well, 18 then there's no trouble at all. 19 If it's I need experts in an area to help me with, 20 say, operational events or any of the other categories you 21 have, then, boy, I did not see a high level of l 22 discrimination on the -- what's available within the 23 community. That was my big problem. 24 MR. DONNELLY: I just looked at two here, the one 25: that you mentioned, structural and civil, and I looked at y l. ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 I (_______-__________

78 1 digital I&C, and I think, in digital I&C, we did [. w,) 2 discriminate. We said the core capability could be supplied 3 from outside experts. 4 DR. POWERS: I think you did that. 5 MR. DONNELLY: We did that. 6-In civil engineering, we said the outside .7 expertise in civil would be limited, the majority with 8 experience on nuclear structures are components are 9 primarily industry consultants, and the conflict of interest 10 -could pose a problem. 11 I think the issue you're raising, though, is more ) 12 of the timeliness one. Could somebody, given enough time, 13 get up to speed on the nuclear structures? 14 DR. POWERS: How critical is it? I mean how p). -t, 15 different are these things than the structures these guys j 16 ordinarily deal with? And my assessment is they're the 17 same. It takes a guy maybe a half-a-day to understand, and 18 maybe it's a week, but -- and it's not the specific one. 19 It is -- again, it is the salability of the ideas,

20 that there has been -- somebody has looked with some care 21 and saying, okay, if I have no expertise today, how long 22 does it take me to get adequate expertise, and I went 23 through for my own edification and said, just for yourself, 24 what are the areas within NRC's span of control where I l

25 think that there is a poor likelihood of finding expertise [ } ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\d Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 w_

l 79 1 promptly that also has the requisite independence, and I ( ) 2 think I came up with about six where I thought, boy, there's 3 just no question, no only cannot the NRC rely on a nebulous 4 industry but, in fact, they can't even rely on the national 5 laboratories providing this, they're going to have to have 6 their own in-house. guy, not desirable, they're going to have 7 to have their own in-house guy, and the others, I did my 8 $100 bill test, and not everyone came through and survived 9 the $100 bill test, but boy, sure a lot of areas do, and so, 10 it may be a matter of sales, and it may be one of time 11 perspective. 12 If you want an answer this afternoon, you've got 13 to have the in-house expertise. 14 I found almost no issues at NRC come up where l f'\\ () 15 you've got to have an answer this afternoon, or if they do, 16 they're handled by the line organizations and Research 17 doesn't get involved. 18 MR. DONNELLY: Were there other areas of the 19 narrative that you'd like to discuss?- l 20 DR. POWERS: I'd like to go into some more of the 21 evaluations, and examples, specific ones are the best way, I 22 think, to go through it. .23' Maybe just start with the thermal hydraulics area i 24 and I can ask some questions here about the evaluations, and 25 mostly just my understanding, and some of these questions [ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 200 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l l

l 80 l 1 got prompted by looking at specific ones, but they're l em . gen'eric in nature. 1 /

2

. 3' For instance, you have a question that I have L 4 labeled 3 (a) dealing with breadth and frequency of 5. applications. What happens when I have a low frequency but 6 a wide breadth? How do I vote -- high, low, or medium? l 7 MR. DONNELLY: I remember some discussions on that i 8 subject. I think what -- we basically concluded there can 9 be a problem there, but we weren't willing to try to cut it 10-any finer, and so, it was -- hopefully, the rationale would 11 speak to either the breadth or the frequency. l 12 DR. POWERS: Okay. So, it8s an either/or. l 13 It just has to be high, for instance, in one. If 14-it's high.in one but low -- say it's a high frequency but a >f) (< '15 ,very narrow focus, as a couple of them are, by admission, in l 16.. the write up, it's okay, it's still high. 17 MR. DONNELLY: Right. 18 DR. POWERS: And presumably, though I don't think 19 I ran into any examples where the breadth was wide but the j 20. frequency was low, if it.a very wide, low frequency -- I 21 guess there is one example of that in the write-up -- it 22.- still comes in high. Everything comes in high, so I'm sure 23 i it comes in high. 24! MR. DONNELLY: Right. We probably should have l. 25-l l written it breadth and/or frequency. l l l i ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. i' Court Reporters x I 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 j Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

81 i 1 DR. POWERS: Well, I hate that particular type of l (9 2 language.

\\m) 3 Continuing down in that question, it says degree 4

of improvement needed, and I guess my first question was, 5 does high mean that what we have is useless? If I come in 6 and say I need a high degree of improvement, does that mean 1 L 7 what I have right now is just completely useless? 8 MR. DONNELLY: I think the answer has to be no l 9 there. 10 DR. POWERS: Yes, sure. 11 MR. DONNELLY: But I would like to go back -- 12 DR. POWERS: I was almost positive that the answer L 13 was no. 14 MR. DONNELLY: I'd like to go back to the metrics (A) 15 again. For a high, it says major deficiencies exist that 16 will prevent their use in addressing expected safety cr 17 regulatory issues -- 18 DR. POWERS: So, the answer is useless. 19 MR. DONNELLY: -- or the tools are highly 20 inefficient. 21 DR. POWERS: So, the answer is, indeed, if it's 22 high, then.they're useless. 23 MR. DONNELLY: For particular safety or regulatory 24~ issues. l 25 MR. KING: No, I think they're not useless. l j ) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. 5/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 1 L-____-_x_____

l l 82 1 They've been used in the past. They're being used ( 2 currently. 3 I think the question is, as you look down the 4 road, are there tools that you can just_take off the shelf 5 .and use, or do we think we're going to have to improve them 6 to keep our expertise.in the agency needs up to date? 7 You know, thermal hydraulics is a good example. 8 Those tools are fine for large-break LOCAs and medium-break 9 LOCAs, but you start to get into other issues, whether it's 10 steam-generator tube rupture or PTS or things that they 11 really weren't designed and assess for, you've got to do l 12 work, make sure they ccver the right range and have been 1 13 properly assessed and so forth. l L 14 I think that's -- at least, in my division, where 15 we've answered that question, that's the way we've thought 16 about it. 17 DR. POWERS: Okay. 18 When we come now to the next question that I've i 19 labeled 4 (a), which is just a #ollow-on question under the l 20 area of thermal hydraulics, it says need to improve 21 requirements and guidance, and this response says we need to 22 improve our analyses. It's a non-sequitur. l l-23 The question is need to improve requirements and 24 guidance, and the response is we need to improve our 25 analyses. ^ ('v) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 E

83 1 MR. DONNELLY: I think we tried to make the link () 2 between those analyses and the support that they lend to 3 improvements in the regulatory framework, and the example 4 cited, the one I'm looking at, is steam generator tube 5 integrity analysis, main steam-line break, and high burn-up 6 fuel behavior. 7 So, the criteria itself was more designed to focus 8 on a requirement and say there's a problem there. This ties 9 the improvement in the analytical capability to making 10 improvements. 11 So, it's a bit more of a stretch than the direct. 12 DR. POWERS: After I walked around the room a 13 little bit trying to understand this, I said I think I know 14 what they mean, but it doesn't say it very clearly, that, in (D (_j 15 fact, they do independent analyses in the thermal hydraulics 16 area, and they are falling behind the level of technology 17 that the licensees want to apply to comply with the 18 requirements and guidance, and I think it's true, in the 19 area of thermal hydraulics, they have given an option to the 20 licensees to use best estimate in Appendix K, and they 21 really can't evaluate a submission. 22 The tools are behind the times there or so 23 inefficient to use that they can't -- that it's 24 cost-effective to improve the tools over trying to use the 25 ones you've got right now. I think that's the sense that /m / ) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. 5/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 J

84 1 this question is trying to answer here, but it doesn't say () 2 it very clearly. 3 MR. DONNELLY: Well, actually, the previous 4 section dealing with the degree of improvement is what I 5 think you're talking about here. 6 DR. POWERS: But it is in response to this need to i 7 improve requirements and guidance. It goes on to bring up 8 high burn-up fuel, which I have no idea what it has to do 9 with thermal hydraulics. 10 MR. DONNELLY: I'll let Farouk address that. 11 MR. ELTAWILA: This is Farouk Eltawila from 12. Research. 13 As you mentioned in one of our meetings, the issue 14-of ATWS and performance under high burn-up fuel and whether () 15 the oscillation that occurred during ATHS can cause the 16 ' damage -- fuel damage, and that's what we need a couple 17 thermal hydraulic and neutronic code to address that issue. 18 The issues are activity insertion accident, which 19 for the case of PWR, that the drop -- the rod withdrawal 20 accident, that will have a longer time, so you need -- there 21 is an effect of the thermal hydraulic here. 22 No, I'm sorry. It is, in the case of rod drop 23 accident, in case, in PWR, it taPas longer time for the rod '24 to drop, so there might be a room here for a couple of .25 thermal hydraulic and neutronics. The feedback between the j ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 i

85 1 thermal hydraulics and the neutronics can affect the () 2 magnitude of the pulse that you will be getting for ATWS in 3 particular. 4 DR. POWERS: You're going to get yourself into a 5 logical trap here. You've dropoed the BWR rod drop accident 6 out of your considerations in your fuel program because of 7 the low risk. 8 MR. ELTAWILA: That's correct. But it's still the 9 issue of ATWS. 10 DR. POWERS: ATWS is there. 11 ME. ELTAWILA: Yes. 12 DR. POWERS: And in fact, the mechanical loads are 13 there, just doesn't show up in your fuels program. I mean 14 you've got a weakness in the program outside of this that () 15 we'll get to discuss later on. 16 MR. ELTAWILA: All right. 17 DR. POWERS: We go c, to the next question, 5, and 18 this particular one -- and this is just a question on how 19 you respond. The questions are clear. 12 0 The two questions -- one question is the level of 21 NRC commitment and the value they get from participation in 22 these exchange programs or international programs, and what i 23 you have here under thermal hydraulics is that you have a l 24' high level of commitment and a medium value of contribution, 25 and so, they're distinct, they're disjoined. [ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. 'N Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l i m_________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.. -. _. _

1 86 1 What do you do? I mean what does that mean? Do () 2 you drop the level of commitment, or do you demand more 3 contribution here? 4 MR.'DONNELLY: I think it just 5 DR. POWERS: I mean you can take it as just a l 6 statement of fact. 7 MR. DONNELLY: It allows you to look at the whole 8 area of cooperative work in a particular core capability and i 9 say what value or what importance do we attach to it. l 10 If we had no commitment and we had low value, we'd 11 get out of that, you know? 12 DR. POWERS: Yes. 13 MR. DONNELLY: But if we have a high commitment 14 for some reason and the value is moderate, it just adds a (k 15 little different flavor to thinking about the importance of 16 staying in that program. 17 Clearly, number 11,.the value is the most 18 important. Probably, the leverage -- in other words, the 19 value we're getting for the dollar -- is next important, and 1 20 the commitment's probably the last important but something l i 21 to consider, and that's why we put it in. l 22 DR. POWERS: I think it has to be considered. 23 Come down to 6, and here's one of my favorite 24 ones. Are there any of the issues here that are not 25 complex?' ( Jum RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

87 1 MR. DONNELLY: You're numbering doesn't match up. () 2 DR. POWERS: Yes, it doesn't. It's just my notes 3 here as I go through. It's -- you have a question on 4 complexity and significance of subject matter. 5 MR. DONNELLY: Oh,.I'm sorry. Yes. 6 DR. POWERS: Okay. It's rated as high, which I l 7 said, in this particular one, it's just running a code. I'm 8 not sure how complex that can be, but it says it's complex. 9 And then I started looking at the others. Are there any of 10 them that are not complex? 11 MR. DONNELLY: Well, I'm going to, at the risk of 12 being wrong, suggest we look at piping again -- 13 DR. POWERS: Oh, okay. 14 MR. DONNELLY: -- as an example and see what we ) 15 find there. You have a copy still in front of you there? 16 Of course, I don't have it, so you can tell me what it says, 17 and I'll have to believe it, j 18 DR. SHACK: Well, fuel behavior is a medium, for 19 example. 20 DR. POWERS: Yes. One-that I thought was complex i 21 is not. 22 MR. DONNELLY: What did we say on piping? '23 DR. POWERS: Hey, there is one. 24 MR. DONNELLY: I'm not saying that's the only one. 25 It's just one that I happen to remember. O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\ss Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 __.-_.______._m..___._-_-__ .._____.-m-_:.___.__.u_ _____.__._m _m.

4% 88 1 DR. POWERS: Okay. I ! [~'/ V 2 Complexity, it seems to me, is the eye of the ! s-l 3-beholder, and when I thought about things, I said, you know, 4 everything I work on I think is very complex, and the fact 5 is everything I work on is really simple stuff. 6 Second quantitization is complex stuff. I've t l 7 never understood that. 8 So, it came down, why is this a useful question? l 9 Everybody thinks what they work on is complex, except for 10 piping people, apparently, and I happen to thiak what'they 11 work on is very complex. 12 MR. DONNELLY: I think it spoke to probably 13 getting back to the other question that we answer in here 14 about the state of the technology and knowledge. If the ! (~,) (, 15 issues are very complex, I think it speaks to the stronger 16 need to maintain expertise than if they're simple, 17 straightforward issues. 18 Now, you make a good point about it being in the i 19 eye of the beholder, and it's sort of back to the same point 20 we made earlier on safety significance, is it raises 21 significant' doubt or moderate doubt or little doubt. I'd 22 like to just go back to the metrics again, refresh my memory 23 on what they say in this area. 24 DR. KRESS: Here's ar interesting one, Dana, 25 hydrogen distribution. For complexity and significance, Os ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 l (202) 842-0034 L_______

_._2-----________

f 89 rL 1 it's low. (m) 2 DR. POWERS: And it's one that you want CFD codes / ( '3 to be able to analyze because it's so complicated. l l 4 DR. KRESS: Yes. .5 MR. DONNELLY: Go ahead, Farouk. 6 MR. ELTAWILA: I think the reason that was rated 7 low is because if you have -- for all operating plants right 8 now, Mark'I and Mark II are inerted, Mark II] have igniter. l 4 1 9 So, from the risk perspective, you have back-fit 10 or at least have a regulatory requirement to deal with 11 hydrogen issue in the containment that you are in the 12 preventive, so you really don't need that capability to try l 13 to calculate where the' hydrogen is going to end up, because i 14 you distribute it in your combiner or you inerted the plant /"~T (,/ 15 to deal-with hydrogen issue. l 16 DR. POWERS: Maybe we could take a second. My i 17 questions are primarily of a generic nature, but I'm going 18 to attach them to some of the specifics, just because it's 19 easier. i 20 We turn to the digital electronics under safety 21 . significance. It's ranked a medium, but then I look over in i 22 the text and it says issues raised that have been of major -23 safety significance. 24 MR. DONNELLY: I think -- I'd like to have L 25 somebody in the technical area speak to it, but we probably O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. s/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 t

90 1 should have said moderate, to have been more consistent with j } 2 the metric. 3 MR. KING: Or high priority. 4 DR. POWERS: One of them's got to change, it seems l 5 to me, or there has to be an asterisk that explains to me -- i 6 I mean it may be that there are one or two major issues out j 7 there that come up, but by and large, it's of a medium or, l 8 relative to other things, it's a medium. 9 It's just one that I would have -- you know, it l 10 catches your eye, because I've got my colleague Don Miller 11 telling me that the security of the free world hinges on 12 digital electronics, and here these guys say, well, maybe l 13 not so much. 14 And I bring it up not just to say got you but to O 15 y,f say.got to make sure that somebody reading this can go 16 through and say, yes, if I tried to do this, I would have l 17 come to the same conclusions, and the one thing that will 18 deter him from doing that is to see things that are not I 19 intuitive and not explained or that are just contradictory 20 in the document. l 21 I mean it just makes people want to reject the 22 whole thing and say, now, let me go see if I can really pick ( 23 this to death, and I'll have to admit, I launched into a 1 24 . picking exercise, which I'm going to try to avoid bringing l 25 up. [~' ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 o

91 l 1 MR DONNELLY: Well, we tried to do to ourselves i l (~ ) 2 through several iterations working through this document, V t 3 and I won't say we were 100-percent successful. 4 DR. POWERS: There are a couple of other areas 5 that you might want to give some attention to in this 6 regard. 7 For instance, if you go under fire protection and j l 8 safety, it says we don't have data on occurrence rates of 9 severe fires, and then sitting right next to it on the 1 10 bookshelf in my office is an AEOD study on the occurrence i 11 rate of fires, and I say these two are inconsistent with 12 each other. 13 Now, I happen to understand what they're talking 14 about there, that what the AEOD study says explicitly is A(,) 15 that we have occurrence rate on fires, a lot of them, 16 they're just not severe ones. The severe ones happen too 17 infrequently to have any data on it. 18 What that says is that you'll never have 19 occurrence data on severe fires. The severe ones have 20 probabilities of 10 to the minus 3rd, 10 to the minus 4. 21 You know, you can wait 100 years before you have occurrence 22 data on that. 23 Why is that a motivation for getting involved in 24 this? You'll never get the data that you need here. But to 25 the casual reader, it's going to -- you know, what good was l [ j) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\~ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

92 1 this AEOD study that collected together all this data on the [J' 2 occurrence of fires? 3 You know, there are two problems. One is the 4 reality. You'll never have the data that you're looking for 5 here. The other one is the perception. You have a database 6 .cx1 the occurrence of fires. 7 Where you really don't have data is what happens 8 when you have a fire to the equipment? That's where your 9 real vulnerability in fire protection is, is how do things 10 fail.and how do things degrade in fires? You've got almost 11 no data on that. 12 Whereas occurrence of fires -- I happen to be 13 aware of seven, now, databases in the United States and 14 internationally on occurrence rates of fires, just don't () 15 happen to be. severe fires, because we just don't have them 16 very often.

L'7 MR. KING:

And the write-up goes on and talks 18 about the deficiencies in the computational tools and so 19 forth. But I understand your point. i 20 DR. POWERS: Since we've got Larry here, I'd like 21 to ask a question, mostly for my own information, about the 22 RPV integrity issues. 23 It says that RPV integrity issues arise regularly, .4 and I'm perfectly willing to admit that that's been true in 2 25 the past, but I think-these guys are successful, I think !() ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

93 1 they've done heroic things. () 2 It strikes me that most of these issues are l 3 solved, that we have screening criteria, that we have the l 4 tools to analyze these things. 5 Are we done? 6 MR. SHAO: Okay. A lot of things have been done, 7 but a lot of things have not been done. 8 For instance, you mention the cool-down rates, you 9 just mentioned an hour ago. That's based on reactor vessel 10 integrity. If they want to reduce the conservatism in 11 reactor vessel integrity so that they have a better chance 12 to meet the heat-up and cool-down, that's one example. 13 The other example, if they want to use this mass 14 curve for fracture mechanics, the industry is doing some () 15 work, and the staff have to review whether the mass curve 16 they're counting is right or wrong. 17 And on the license renewal, they have data for -- 18 so far we have data up to maybe 16, 17 years. 19 So, there are quite a lot of issues still out 20 there. 21 DR. POWERS: And that's just a terrific answer. I 22 mean I just can't think of a better answer. It happens to 23 parallel the answer that I wrote up for the research report, 24 by the way, and I think it's all true. 25 But then come across in the document that our ANN RILEY & ASSOCIA'.ES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

94 1 problem now is that the industry chafes under the -- we've f\\L,] got rules that work, but the industry is going to chafe 2 3 under them, and we know it. 4 We know that they want to do things about this, 5 and they've got actions underway that we can anticipate, the 6 foreseeable future, that they're going to come down and ask 7 us. 1 8 We know that -- we've had what -- I think I've had 9 three or four presentations on this master curve thing that 10 I still don't understand, by the way. It seems like a good 11 idea. 12 MR. SHAO: The message is company. i 13 DR. POWERS: It's coming. i l 14 MR. SHAO: They want to use the method to reduce rs { !,) 15 uncertainty. ) 1 16 DR. POWERS: We know that that window on the ] 17 heat-up and the cool-down is getting narrower and narrower. 18 MR. SHAO: Getting narrower and narrower, 1 19 especially for BWRs. l l 20 DR. POWERS: That's right. And we know that 21 they're not going to live with that and that the narrowness 22 of that window is born of the conservatism and the 23 screening criteria. l 24 MR. SHAO: Right. They need some relaxation. 25 DR. POWERS: They need some relaxation. l I-~) \\ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters s-1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 L_._.._

95 1 MR. SHAO: Otherwise, they can't operate the ( ') 2 plants. %./ 3 DR. POWERS: And that kind of perspective -- not 4 that these issues arise regularly, that we know they're 5 going to arise in the future, we know the industry has got 6 something coming down the pike -- just makes -- he makes 7 such a persuasive case. 8 You know, we've got to attach Larry nos to the 9 report, because he makes such a persuasive case for research 10 here -- I mean there's just no question that somebody is 11 going to have to look at these issues in a great deal of 12 detail, because the guys on the line can't use the 13 regulatory guidance that we have. 14 MR. SHAO: Right. They have to deviate from the 15 regulatory guidance. 16 DR. POWERS: That's right. And we're going to 17 have to do something. I mean that's a beautiful and 18 persuasive case there. You just gave me a big star and say, 19 boy, I better get something in the row here, because it 20 takes a long time to do these. l 21 MR. SHAO: Right. 22 DR. POWERS: I mean your time scale is -- your 23 stop watch is a calendar. 24 MR. SHAO: Right. 25 DR. POWERS: -Just because materials -- to get the [~ )T ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

96 1 samples and things like takes so long. b) 2 MR. SHAO: Thank you. q 3 DR. SHACK: It does back, though, to this 4 independence question. You know, we have the same sort of .5 issue with the high burn-up fuel where we say, okay, if 6 industry wants to use high burn-up fuel, they provide the 7 data, you know. 8 When do we decide that they provide the data to do '9 that, and you know, you say, okay, you want relaxation in 10 your pressure temperature operating limits? Bring me the J 11 case. ) 12 And you know, there is this question of, you know, 13 how do we assess the value of having an -- now, I personally 14 believe there's a great deal of value in having an (O,) 15 independent capability, but do we do it basically because we 16 can afford to do it in the one case and we can't afford to 17 do it in the other? 18 I mean I suspect that's one of the arguments, is 19 that you'd like to have it whenever you can, and sometimes 20 you can afford it, and sometimes, if it takes in-reactor 21 tests, you can't' afford it, but I'm not sure that -- you ) 22 know, that -- that argument or that independence question 23-doesn't seem to have been addressed anywhere. I 24 DR. POWERS: I mean it's a particular seminal l

25 issue, because historically we've developed the database, I

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97 1 and so, you really want to do it now. I mean I think it's j [~) 2 outside this core capability issue, but what it comes front %/ 3 and center with is on the overall research issue. 4 MR. ELTAWILA: Can I add some things about the 5 high burn-up fuel issue? 6 I think you're correct about -- we are asking the 7 industry to' provide the data for extending burn-up beyond 8 the limit that exists right now, and what we are telling 9 them, that we don't have the money to generate these data, 10 you have to generate these and you have to put it in the 11 public domain, but that does not mean that NRC will not have 12 its independent capability. 13 We will have still our own code. We can run our 14 still additional confirmatory program to have our b) q,. independent capability. But the cost of generating the data 15 16 for new criteria is beyond any amount of money that we have 17 in the budget righe now. 18 DR. POWERS: And I think what Bill's asking, the 19 question of -- you have a finite pot of money, and you've 20 made very rational elections on how you want to spend that 21 money, which doesn't include maintaining the experimental 22 database. 23 Presumably, the agency as a whole has a bigger pot 24 of money, and are they making a rational election on how 25 much they give you? I mean that's the debate that he's ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 __=____-__

l 98 1 asking about. (~'\\ 2 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Farouk, do I understand that C/ 3 you're asking the industry to provide the data from reactor 4 -- in-reactor tests? 5 MR. ELTAWILA: It will be, in part, tests, yes, 6. some-kind of testing in getting the -- whether it is for-7 reactivity insertion accident, will be in-reactor test, or 8 some other test like we have at Oregon, if you're looking at 9 the clad integrity itself. We're getting it from -- get 10 high burn-up fuel and subject it to a lot of mechanical 11 testing and observation testing. 12 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Is this part of a DOE program or 13 EPRI program? 14 MR. ELTAWILA: That will be the responsibility of f~). 1,,;,j 15 the industry as a whole. We don't know if they will be able 16 to do that or not. 17 It's becoming a very sensitive issue, because the 18 vendor -- they like to keep their own data for themselves. 19 They don't like to share it with other vendors. So, we 20 don't know how the industry is going to respond to that 21 request from NRC right now. I 22 DR. SHACK: As Dana points out, this is sidetrack, } l 23 but it's kind of a hobby horse, since we're writing a letter l .24 on the fuel research and it sort of comes up, but you know, I 25 even when you say that they are supposed to provide the j . (' ) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\/ Court Reporters j 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

I 99 1 data, it's not at all clear to me how you set the criteria 1 /~T l lG 2 for what data you want, you know. 3 Do you need data to support the high burn-up fuel, i l 4 you know? Is it in-reactor data? Is it some other kind of 5 data, you know? l 6 And these things where the lead time are years, ) i 7 you know, it's certainly one thing to say, oh, that's not i i 8 the data I-real.ly need to make this case, and it's not at 9~ all clear to me that, when the NRC gives up its 10 independence, how you go through this interaction-with the 11 industry to make sure that the case they put together is the 12 case that, in fact, you need. '13 DR. POWERS: It's not at all clear that, when the 14 NRC gives up its data-gathering effort, it's made a () 15 cost-effective decision for exactly the reasons you're 16 talking about. 17 It's damn difficult to sit here today to say here 18 are the data that I'm going to need about fuel I've never 19 seen. 20 Now, if I did it with a 25,000-megawatt database l 21 at my disposal and say what do I need to know about 45,000, 22 I'd be dead wrong, because I can't extrapolate and reveal ~~23 the' REM effect. 24 I mean there's no hint of the REM effect in the 25 earlier data, and they would be wrong if they had set the h ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. A/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C.-20005 (202) 842-0034

100 1 criteria for the industry -- you know, 10 years ago done ( ) 2 this, and so, you~1ay out for yourself a big chore, which 3' comes back to the core competency. 4 You really need experts when -- your need for 5 experts, I'think,-goes up when you give up your experimental 6 ~ capabilities, which you're doing like crazy around here, and 7 it makes it harder-to retain experts, too, much harder to 8 retain experts when they are not going.to be hands-on -9 associated with experimental programs in 1d experimentally-dominated fields. 11 PRA guys don't really need experiments. -12 MR. KING: We may want.to talk about that some. 13 Lloyd has a slide, number 21, that talks to that issue, that 14 I think is an important point. It gets to how do you set i 15 the levels of. resources you need and facilities you need in 16 any of these programs to maintain expertise? You don't 17-maintain expertise by having people answer the phone. You 18 know, you've got to have them engaged in some interesting, 19 useful act of' work that includes experimental component as 20~ well as analytical component. 21-DR.. POWERS: Yes. It seems to me that we have a 22 couple of examples developed now. 23 I'm particularly enthused about some aspects of '24. Farouk's program, where he has people going out to the 25-laboratories from the staff and participating and then L['d Court Reporters Y ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

101 j 1 coming back and still working within the organization. I ( ) 2 think he's done a really good job in trying to address how 3 do you maintain experts. 4 MR. KING: He's keeping a couple of facilities 5 alive. 6 MR. DONNELLY: Did you have any other -- 7 DR. POWERS: I have a vast number of picky 8 questions on -- 9 MR. DONNELLY: I'm sorry I asked. i 10 DR. POWERS: I mean they are all kind of the same. 11' I don't understand, from the write-up, how they came up with 12 high, medium, and low here. I don't understand, when 13 there's this or this in the question, how to vote when it's 14 one but not the other. () 15 You know, I'm not sure that it's productive for us 16 to go through each one of those, because -- I mean it's j 17 virtually every one of them. 18 I cannot, at the end of the day, come back and say 19 -- I accept the structure, I even like the structure of the 20 questions. I just don't know it got the answers. I can't 21 get those answers independently. I 22 And that's what I would say is the vulnerability 23 this document has as a persuasive document in that-a 24 sympathetic -- and I considered myself a sympathetic reader 25 of the document -- doesn't come away persuaded that -- in ( ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 l (202)- 842-0034 w

t 102 l 1 two areas. l,m ( ) 2 One, he is not persuaded that you have stepped 3 back and said what do I really need, and then he's not 4 persuaded, if he accepts your lists of candidates, how the 5 votes were gotten. I mean he just can't do it himself. He .6 needs, let's see, Tom, Larry, and you to explain each one of 7 the answers to him. That's a defect. 8 MR. DONNELLY: Okay. 9 I will proceed now to talk briefly about step 10 three, or as long as you'd like to about step three. 11 Once we have gone through the process of 12 convincing ourselves that a core capability was needed in a L 13 particular area, the question, of course, then, is how much, 14-what type, how much in-house, how much contractor- ,f~~)'(, ' 15 organizations, how much experimental capability would be 16 needed. 17 Basically, each person who was either working in 18 that area or responsible for that area analyzed what would 19. likely be needed to respond in the future to the range of 20 issues and problems that one might anticipate and then .21 looked at the skills -- the skill set, I guess I should say, 22 both in-house and with contractors, that would be needed, at 23 a minimum, to respond to that capability, did the same for 24 facilities, and then, as Tom mentioned, there are some L 25 instances where that skeleton set of skills and so forth was -ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters '1250'I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 l (202) 842-0034 l

103 1 not deemed to be sufficient robust to keep people, and n() 2 additional resources were added in the hopes of having a 3 program that would allow us to not only attain people but 4 retain people because they found the work challenging and 5 interesting. 6 That is a simple explanation of what we did. The 7 complicated answer is found in the narrative that supports 8 each resource table, where we tried, down to the individual 9 FTE level, to explain why we picked one or more of a 10 particular discipline. 11 And that was in a particular response to the 12 Commission in our review of our earlier paper.that said they 13 were having difficulty figuring out how we arrived at the 14 resource level, and understandably so. /^) \\, 15 This next slide highlights the resource table 16 that's in SECY 98-076 in comparing the expertise-driven 17 resources to the budget. 18 I would point out that, in terms of-FTE, our 19 budget is pretty much at the core level in terms of -- in 20 the aggregate, 96 FTE versus 102 -- and I'm only talking 21 about direct FTE there, I want to emphasize that -- and 22 about $8 million difference between the budget for the core 23 areas and what we identified as the amount needed to support 24 core capabilities. 25 The non-core activities are essentially the office i. i I ON ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 E_____________

104 'l overhead, IPE, IPEEE work, generic safety issues, our /~ ' i D) information technology budget, our travel budget, things of 2 3 that nature. 4 DR. FONTANA: Does this include contractors or is 5 that l 6 MR. DONNELLY: Yes. 7 DR. FONTANA: -- just in-house? 8 MR. DONNELLY: The dollar amounts on the right are 9 for contractors. 10 DR. FONTANA: If you divide one number into the 11 other, you come up with different numbers. 12 DR. POWERS: The Government gets to budget 13 differently than you and I do. FTE is an FTE. Dollars are 14 ' contract dollars. () 15' DR. FONTANA: But the FTE are headquarter FTEs? 16 MR. DONNELLY: Yes. The left column is 17 headquarters. 18 DR. FONTANA: Okay. 19 MR. DONNELLY: And we could convert that right 20 column to contractor FTE. 21 DR. FONTANA: I got you. 22 MR. DONNELLY: The problem is that different 23 contractors charge different amounts for an FTE of effort. 24 DR. POWERS: Well, there's different amounts of f 25 experimental work associated with these things. ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, ITD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 1 i

105 1 MR. DONNELLY: That's right. (~ 2 DR. POWERS: Experiments tend to be expensive 3 nowadays. I guess they've always been expensive. They just 4 haven't gotten cheaper. Though I understand Argonne will 5 give you a real deal. If you want high-quality work, you 6 come to one laboratory. If you want slip-shod stuff, you go 7 to another. 8 MR. DONNELLY: Again, to highlight some 9 information that was in the paper, there were nine areas 10 where we were below by more than $100,000 in contractor 11 money to sustain the core capability. 12 DR. FONTANA: The question is what are you going 1 13 to do about it? 14 MR. DONNELLY: We have corrected most of the / \\ (v/ 15 problem in our '99 budget. 16 The budget that we have submitted for upper 17 management review will covat all of the core capabilities 18. except for fire protection and safety, which we did not 19 budget for at all, and for the four severe accident areas 20 that are below budget. 21 And mainly because we didn't feel it was 22 appropriate to try to build up these areas in severe 23 accident that were just cut previously, and fire protection 24 is still up in the air. 25 The next slide, I think we've discussed. We might (T ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\s l Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

106 1 want to talk about it a little more, but it was the point () 2 that Tom made earlier regarding the subject of sustaining or 3 maintaining the availability of people once you've ~ 4 identified the requirement. 5 And we believe that the resources that we put 6 together in each of these areas will be adequate, but as our 7 paper pointed out, if you're one deep and that person is a 8 unique, world-class expert, and that person retires, whether 9 it's on staff or in a contractor organization, it's very 10 difficult to replace that person and be up to speed within a 11 short period of time. It may be impossible. 12 So, you will have a period of time where there 13 will be a growth process to try to get back to where you are 14 today. 15- _DR. FONTANA: In other words, there's no 16 succession planning. 17 MR. DONNELI That's correct. Well, I don't 18 know. I guess we could talk ~about examples where there 19 would be. Maybe within a contractor organization, there 20 might some' succession planning. '21 But if we just.have one person on the NRC staff 22 that has that skill and that person leaves, there wouldn't 23 be any. 24 DR. FONTANA: So, there's no formal plan. 25 'MR. DONNELLY: Right.

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l I 107 1 DR. POWERS: I think, in truth, that's just one of i / 1 2 the many challenges that managers face. No matter what you V 3 did, you would always have a top guy that you'd hate to 4 lose. l ) 5 MR. DONNELLY: That's true. But in a robust 6. resource environment, part of that management effort would 7 be to try to plan for succession. 8-DR. POWERS: You can try, but it never works, and 9 it's jus *' one of those challenges that you always face. ~10 I mean it strikes me as a statement of reality 11 that there are always key individuals -- I don't care how 12 strong the bench is, you know, you still have Michael 13 Jordan, and it's just a natural thing, and you hate it when t 14 he gets injured. () 15 MR. DONNELLY: I think a point we're trying to 16 make is, in a lot of cases, there's no bench, and that makes 17 the problem much more difficult. I l 18 DR. POWERS: Yes, your problem is more severe, but 19 I think it's more a statement of fact than it is a statement l 20 of a problem that deserves solving. 21 MR. DONNELLY: That's correct. I think it's more, 22 from our point of view, a be aware -- if you haven't thought 23 about it, when you get this thin, it's going to present a 24 greater problem than perhaps you have today. l 25 DR. POWERS: You're going to have occasion when T [O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 l (202) 842-0034 L.

108 1 issues are going to arise that are going to be slower to 7 'l 2 solve than perhaps you would like, but it's a fact of life Q f 3 and there's nothing you can really do about it. 4 MR. DONNELLY: My last slide here just covers the 5 next. steps. 6 As you know, I mentioned earlier there's going to 7 be a' broader' agency-assessment, and then this database, 8 skills database, will be developed this summer, and of 9 course, we had a plan to obtain'ACRS, ACNW, and external 10 stakeholder review after Commission approval, but the 11 Commission said that they wanted your review prior to that, 12 which I can understand, and after we have our Commission 13 meeting and we get an SRM, we'll then know how the 14 Commission wants us.to proceed. 15 CHAIRMAN'UHRIG: Does the Commission want an 16 answer before or.after the results are integrated'into the 17 broader agency effort?- 18 MR. DONNELLY: Before. 19 DR.-POWERS: I think the Commission wants an 20 . answer this week. 21 MR. DONNELLY: The issue of -- in my opinion, the 22 issue of whether or not another office could support what I ' 23 - call a research core capability is kind of an interesting 24 one. l ~25 Certainly, another office could possess the same l' ' ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\ Court Reporters .1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 l (202) 842-0034

109 1 type of skill, on the surface. The question then is 2 twofold. 3 Does the particular experience, expertise, and 4 background of that skill match up at all with the kind of 5 work that our researchers do, and secondly, will that 6 person, by virtue of the day-to-day functions that they 7 perform, allow them -- or will they, just as a natural 8 byproduct of their daily effort -- do the kinds of things 9 that a person in Research would do in terms of following 10 foreign research, staying up to speed with the latest 11 technology and latest developments. 12 I don't know the answer to that. but I think it 13 has to go deeper than just looking at do we have a health 14 physicist over here and a health physicist over here, and h 15 so, when we do get into this look across organizational 16 lines, we're going to have to go deeper than that and 17 perhaps convince the -- convince ourselves and then the 18 Commission that, even though we have similar capabilities, 19 similar-looking capabilities, they both may need to be 20 retained to have the true capability the agency wants. 21 We haven't done that yet, and I don't what we will 22 find when we do. 23 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: The problem may be here that, as 24 a research organization, you can keep focused in a given 25 area. O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

110 1 In one of the operating organizations, the person ]) 2 may be told fight this crisis that came up today. It 3 shouldn't take too many of these kinds of incidents where l 4 the person is really no longer working in the field that he i 5 has the expertise and where he had been counted on. 6 MR. DONNELLY: Not only that, the awareness of 7 past research is maintained by the Research staff, because 8 it's part of their history and part of their daily work, 9 whereas past research is maybe not even on the wavelength of 10 a new person doing licensing work, even though they are 11 working in that area. I 12 In fact, I think there was an instance in the 13 piping area where NRR was dealing with a piping issue that 14 Mike and his staff were aware that had been worked on and f' !( 15 resolved several years, but it wasn't -- you know, it just 16 wasn't on their radar. j l 17 They don't maintain that data, they don't think j i l 18 about the historical data, and so that's another value that l l 19 having a research core capability brings to the process, and 20 you don't appreciate it until you get there, 21 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Well, the problem here is that, 22 if the person working on it isn't aware and doesn't consult l 23 with Research, he's going to redo it. t 24 MR. DONNELLY: That's right. Exactly. 25 That concludes my presentation. We're obviously ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\-- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 '(202) 842-0034 L________________.___

111 1 ready to try to answer any other questions you might have. 2 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Do committee members have 3 questions? 4 DR. FONTANA: Well, more like a comment. I 5 wouldn't be so rough on this thing as Dana was. I think a 6 lot of the answers are in there, but I think it probably 7 could stand some rearranging, like providing what the needs 8 are first and identifying what it takes to build on these, 9 regardless of whether you've got the budget or not, then get 10 into some of this. 11 I think it's a matter of presentation. I think 12 most of the argument are in here, but they are kind of hard l 13 to find. 14 Maybe a simpler step-wise presentation, going from () 15 -- you know, from needs, what I got, what I need, what 16 happens if I don't have it, what kind of cost, and so on -- 17 might be a little easier to follow, but I think there's a 18 lot of good stuff in here. 19 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Other questions? 20 DR. FONTANA: Oh. Another statement -- it seems 21 that you're totally constrained by the budget, which I 22 . understand, but is there not an effort needed of this is 23 what I really need and this is what it's going to cost, l 24 regardless whether the funds are available at this point? 25 MR. DONNELLY: That occurs through the budget h ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. A/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 I u___

i 112 1 process. ()- 2 What we are asked to do is -- we're given a fiscal s-3 constraint to develop a budget within, and then we're 4 ' allowed to identify over-budget requests, so that, in 5 totality, if we could get the whole thing, that would allow 6 us to do everything that we thought ought to be done. That 7 over-budget request, though, has to be of lower priority, 8~ obviously, than anything within our request, and this is an 9 internal budget process I'm talking about. 10 So, the Program Review Committee, the Executive 11 Council, and the Commission get an opportunity to look at 12 what's within our budget, which we see as the highest 13 priority, as well as these other things, and each office 14 does the same, and then they can look across and try to make f3 (,)- 15 decisions on what they feel they can fund, what they should 16 fund, relative to what they feel is realistic to ask the 17 Congress for. I 18 The process allows for it. Whether it provides 19 for it is another thing. 20 DR. FONTANA: One of the outcomes that's not too 21 good, it seems that, when the whole agency is faced with a 22 budget reduction, it seems that it came out of Research. 23 MR. DONNELLY: Research has taken, historically, 24 more than its fair share of budget cuts, largely because it 25-had the predominant amount of contract funds, where the cuts i l [/) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. l N-Court Reporters j 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 l (202) 842-0034 l

113 1 normally were taken. ([ 2 DR. FONTANA: But you know, the analogy is eating 3 the seeds rather than planting them. 4 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Let me raise an issue here that 5 we haven't talked about in any significant issue, has to do 6-with the NRC relying on other agencies or other 7 organizations for their expertise. 8 Now, we've talked about DOE laboratories. There 9 is expertise there. There's expertise in the contractors. 10 But how reliable is this? 11 You have an area that you determine it's 12 critically important that you retain this expertise 13 somewhere. Is it possible to rely on others when you're not 14 funding them directly? ( 15 MR. DONNELLY: I think the answer is, in some 16 cases, we could. 17 I mean if another agency had a large long-term i 18 program that had been going on and we have every reason to 19 think it would continue, then I think it would be fairly to 20 say that. i 21 If it was a very thin program, on shaky footing, I 22 then you'd have to, you know, watch it closely. 1 23 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: 'Let's take an example here. 24 There's an awful lot of work in advanced instrumentation and 25 control going on in other fields -- Department of Defense, h ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. L\\/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 L (202) 842-0034 I L

114 1 particularly, critical weapons, safety systems have their () 2 analog with nuclear power plants. 3 Sometimes that information is accessible, 4 sometimes it's not, but is this an alternative to some of l 5 the -- to the answer to some of the problems that you're 6 having with budgeting, to perhaps jointly work with other 7 organizations? 8 I'm aware of a major effort made about two years 9 ago to look at the joint DOE research, NRC research 10 activities that -- I don't know that anything has 11 particularly come out of that. 12 Tom, maybe you can bring us up to date. I'm not 13 aware of anything that's happening here. 14 MR. KING: The report is still held up. Of 15 course, with Mr. Lash being assigned a new position, maybe 16 that will free that one up. 17 We did look at that issue, particularly in digital 18 I&C, knowing that FAA and NASA and others are very 19 interested in this subject, just like we are, and that was 20 consideration in terms of, if we had to cut somewhere, one 21 of the considerations is, if you can get this expertise, 22 it's available outside, it may take you a little time to -- 23 not be as timely as if you had your own staff in the area, 24 but if you did have access to state-of-the-art experts in 25 digital I&C from elsewhere, that is something you factor O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

115 i 1 into your judgements on priorities for -- if you have to cut [) 2 something, that might be an area where you'd cut. I %s 3 In the core capabilities report, you know, we 4 think the agency should have some capability in that area, 5 but one of the questions that was asked somewhere in this 6 report is, is it available from outside, and I think the answer is yes, in this area, it probably is. 7 l 8 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Particularly as you go to l l 9 off-the-shelf-type equipment. 10 MR. KING: Off-the-shelf software and equipment -- l l 11 a lot of the applications are similar in the sense that 12 there are safety considerations, certainly in FAA and NASA. 13 The technology is changing very rapidly, so people have to 14 keep up with it. Software quality is an issue for !n!Q 15 everybody, not just us. 16 So, there are a lot of similar things. It is a 17 real consideration. 18 You know, there are other areas where they're 19 unique to the nuclear field -- severe accidents, reactor 20 physics, and so forth. Those are the kinds of things, if 21 you're really getting squeezed, they'd be the last to go, at l 22 least in my view. '23 MR. DONNELLY: Tom, I'd like to make-one point. 24 When we were looking at the availability of l l-25 outside expertise from what we call non-NRC-funded sources ( ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\_s - Court Reporters i 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 c__________-______________

l 116 1. -- we use that terminology advisedly, because if you've got () 2 ongoing issues to resolve, you could turn to NASA or l 3 somebody else, but'you're going to pay for it through i 4 reimbursable funds. 5-What we were really thinking about here is, once l 6 you've pretty much resolved the issues and you're debating 7 the question, even though we've got the issues resolved, i l 8 should we keep a capability in case a future one comes up, 9 that's when you look at these non-NRC-funded sources and 10 say, yes, if an issue comes up, we can turn to them. l 'll We're going to have to pay for it when the times j 12 comes, but in a reasonably timely and a reasonably 13 independent manner, we can get to them. 14 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: What about access to foreign ) 15 technology, foreign research? It's a well-known fact that -16 NRC supports a number of foreign research activities, Halden l 17 being a classical example here. 18 Do you. consider this as part of the big picture 19 here as far as this type of thing is concerned, as far as I 20 the -- you look at the adequacy here. Is the availability 21 of the foreign research a factor in here? 22 MR. DONNELLY: Absolutely. 23 The Halden project is a good example, where it's 24 supporting the fuels program, the human factors program, the 25 digital.I&C program, and if you were to look in the core (~') ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. ~i/ Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washingt.on, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 o_ _ _ _ _ _. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ = _ _

I 117 j 1 capability areas, the Halden work, in the aggregate, is all i I \\ 2 covered and considered essential to provide the information \\~s/ i i 3 that we get from a relatively unique facility or a unique f l 4 facility. l 5 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: The question here is always can 6 you get the answer to your specific problem, because you l 7 don't control the program. The program is controlled by l 8 many people, not just one participant, even though it may be \\ 9 a significant participant. 10 As I recall, there's -- I don't remember what t l 11 percentage, but it's probably the order of 10 percent of the 12 total bill in this area is paid by NRC, I suspect. l 13 MR. DONNELLY: I think what our staff does is make i 14 a judgement about what -- how much it takes to have adequate ) 15 influence. l 16-The same is true not only for foreign but it's 17 also true for organizations like USGS. In order to have 18 them do the kind of work that we would like to have -- or l 19 orient their work to the way we would like to have it, you 20 have to have a sufficient influence, and that normally comes 21 through money. 22 MR. KING: We have a lot of influence, even if we 1 23 don't bring a lot of money to the table. I've found we've i 24 had a lot of influence in deciding what tests to be run, i 25 what the conditions are, what the priorities are. i i [ ANN RILEY & %3SOCIATES, LTD. \\- Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

118 1 j On the CABRI program, we had the final word in I 2-setting the conditions on some of those tests. The French < k.)\\ t 3 came to us and said, you know, what do you want? 4 DR. POWERS: A lot of that influence you need to l 5 -- you need to put a codicil when you say that, because I 6 think it's true, but a lot of the influence comes from the 7 fact -- used to be a big player in this research game and l 8 you have a lot of expertise on how to do it, and now you're 9 a small player. 10 Ten years from now, that aura of authority you 11 come in with and experience in this area is going to 12 disappear on you. 13 MR. KING: That's a problem. 14 DR. POWERS: And you're going to lose -- ) 15~ especially the French -- very respectful of NRC and their 16 researchers, both in-house and contractors, simply because 17 they've done a lot of work in areas and have -- know 18 experimental techniques and methods and things like that. i 19 Once that goes away, the French are going to thumb their ) 20 nose at you a little bit. 21 MR. KING: I agree. That's why it's important to 22 maintain expertise. Otherwise, you lose that influence. 23 Halden's been very responsive. 24 Even though they do a lot of things for a lot of 25 people, we've had them -- we've gone to them and said could l i l i O. ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l w___--______-____-._

i I 119 1 you put together some lessons learned reports in software [~' 2 development, in man-machine interface, and they've been very !C} 3 responsive in trying to meet our needs based upon work 4 they've done for others. 5 DR. POWERS: As an aside, Tom, have you ever tried l 6 to go through your foreign involvement program as a lessons 7 learned on what works and what doesn't work? 8-I'm thinking of -- you know, there are some that I 9 think that have just been disasters, like Mardekin. I can't l 10 think of a single data point that gets used out of Mardekin 11 for anything. It just didn't work. 12 Juxi there are others that are just incredibly 13 successful and we use the stuff all the time, and it's your 14 database, and there's a difference in how you've interacted L/'T Li ) 15 on it. 16 My characterization of the involvement on Mardekin i 17 was you sent them a check and said send us the results, and 18 the others, you have had guys in there dictating the test 19 matrix, just really involved. So, I think there's a 20 difference in character. ~21 Have you ever thought about having somebody put 22 that together, see if there's a lessons learned on how to 23 engage in these collaborative programs? 24 DR. KRESS: Make a standard review plan. 25 DR. POWERS: Yes, like a standard review plan or a i .O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 l Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l ___Q

120 1 standard strategy plan for involvement in these foreign (O 2 programs. U/ 3 MR. KING: I think, informally, we've had those 4 kinds of thoughts. Nobody's ever sat down and tried to put 5 together a structured document and formalize it in any 6 fashion. 7 DR. POWERS: It's a thing I think I would be 8 reluctant to formalize. I mean it's one of those things 9 that would be in my file but nobody else's. 10 MR. KING: But I think, informally, as we enter 11 into new projects, we talk about what are we going to get 12 out of this and how do we make sure it develops what is 13 going to be useful to us. 14 DR. POWERS: One of the things about involvement (n) 15 in foreign programs that I think needs to be borne in mind 16 when you think about core capabilities -- it's been my 17 observation that, for a lot of foreign institutions, 18 continuity of the personnel is crucial, that it takes 19 forever to integrate yourself into the decision-making team, 20 and once they do, they don't want see a new face in there, 21 because it's starting all over. It just seems like a 22 cultural thing. 23 MR. SHAO: Especially the Japanese. 24 DR. POWERS: Yes, especially with the Japanese. 25 On the other hand, I think, with the Russians -- I don't [} ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\- Court Reporters 3 1250 1 Street, N.W., Suite 300 i Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 i

121 1 think it's so critical with the Russians. I think they just ) 2 want to see the dollars, they don't really care who brings 3 the money. 4 But the Japanese -- I mean you know -- you and l 5 Walk must have spent 10 years just trying to build a 6 relationship there, and every time you change a face in that 7 organization, it takes the guy years to -- literally years 8 before he's given any credence in the discussions. I think 9 you've got some real good lessons learned. i 10 MR. KING: Let me mention one other thing. 11 Clearly, NEA is starting to play a more active 12 role in the expertise and cooperative research area than 13 they used to, because they recognize -- everybody's budget's 14 gone down, it's not just ours, and facilities are being shut - (') T y_ down in Europe just like they're being shut down here, 15 j 16 They had put together a report a year or so ago 17 which they called capabilities in facilities, trying to take 18 a look at what the current research needs are and do we have 19 facilities and programs out there to meet them. 20 They now have embarked on an effort to recommend 21 cooperative research projects to make sure that happens and 22 to make sure thac some of these key facilities stay alive. l

23 I happen to be the chairman in a group that's trying to put 24 that-report together.

25-But the idea is to actually, instead of talking ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

122 1 about it, come to CSNI with concrete proposals for i[ 2 cooperative research projects that will keep these centers l L 3 of excellence or some of these key programs and expertise 4 alive. 5 We'll see whether there's money to back this up or 6 not,-but they're worried about it, as well, and we're 7 participating in that activity. 8 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Is this primarily in thermal 9 hydraulics, severe. accidents? 10; MR. KING: It's across the board. It covers eight E 11' areas -- thermal hydraulics, fuels, severe accidents, 12 digital I&C, human factors, fire protection, PRA, some 13 materials kinds of things, seismic. 14 So, there is work going on overseas, and they have ) 15 the same concerns, the same stuff we're talking about. 16 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Do you have a timeframe for this 17 evolving into some sort of joint program? ,18 MR. KING: The initial report is due to CSNI at 19 their December meeting, where we'll come in with some 20 preliminary proposals,.particularly focusing on near-term 21 needs, things that we're worried about losing in the near i 22 term, and then it will be -- the plan is it will be updated 23 annually. 24 At the annual CSNI meeting in December of each 25 year, there will be proposals put forward, updated to A C ) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\d' Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

1 123 1 reflect current status of research needs and programs and so lO 2 forth. v 3 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Is this primarily government 4 organizations? i 5 MR. KING: Yes. 6 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: There are no industrial 7 organizations involved? j 8 MR. KING: The idea is the members of the group 9 and CSNI are all from government organizations but to { 10 recognize that, to really be effective, we need to bring l 11 industry in. j 12 So, although the initial meetings will be with 13 government people, the plan is to invite industry to l 14 participate where we see that they have an interest and have ) 15 something to bring to the table, as well. 16 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Or unique facilities. 17 MR. KING: Or unique facilities, unique expertise, 18 they have an interest because it's going to benefit them. 19 So, the proposals we would expect would be joint .20 industry-government proposals. R21 DR. KRESS: You had a slide that spoke to the 22 difficulties in sustaining core capabilities. 23 I wonder if you've given any thought to i 24 identifying core capabilities as a distinctive 25 organizational assignment and making it more visible and l l I k) ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. / / Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l

1 actually maybe even having an increment of salary associated 2 with that, you know, identifying a particular FTE as this 3 guy, this job is a core capability job, therefore it has a 4 particular job description associated with it and extra 5 money associated with it, in order to overcome some of these 6 difficulties in sustaining it. 7 MR. DONNELLY: We hadn't given any thought to 8 that. It might present some difficulties in doing it. I 9 think we were thinking more about retirements that would 10 occur or people would be drawn away just because they want 11 to work on the latest and greatest, independent of income, 12 but it's certainly something we could look at. 13 DR. POWERS: I think you'll find that it's failed 14 universally, and it fails for an interesting reason. You 15 quickly make everything a core capability. I can get a 16 raise by just convincing everybody that this is a core 17 capability. 18 DR. KRESS: Unless you have a process for 19 identifying core capabilities. 20 DR. POWERS: Even when you do that, what you 21 quickly do is improve your political and persuasive talents, 22 which may be of value to you, rather than your core 23 capability talents. 24 In the other, the management-fed core capability, 25 a lot of companies ?-- tried this. Some of them have found O ANN RiaEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 j Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

125l 1 it very successful. () 2 Most have found it a dismal failure, and when you 3 go through and you try to understand which ones it failed at 4 and which ones it succeeded at -- now, I haven't done this 5 myself, I've just simply read about other people trying to 6 go through and understand this -- what they find is that it 7 fails for those organizations that don't have 8 discrimination. 9 If everything becomes a core capability, then you 10 don't have any core capabilities. 11 Now, they're defining core capability a little 12 differently than you, but I don't think it's so radically 13 different. 14 It's what does it take to do the job we do well, () 15 and we want to protect that capability so that we can 16 continue to do our job well, that if they define everything 17 as a core capability, then nothing is a core capability and 18 it just falls quickly apart, and what you find is -- and I 19 found this when we tried it in our laboratories -- is people 20 really chafe when they discover they're not part of the core 21 capability. 22 Boy, you get some serious lobbying, and if you 23 don't have a very discriminating set of questions that don't 24 get all answered high or you have too many questions, so 25 that people are always high in some category, everything ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. s Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

l l 126 becomes a core capability, just nothing disappears. 1 () -2 You know, the fact is, there are things that are 3 done in this agency, right now, a lot, but when you look 4 down the road five years, you really say we really don't 5 need to do that a lot, and that's what you really have to be 6 able to do to make this core capabilities in the L 7 management-fed sense work of you, and I suspect you'll find l 8' the same problem in this more interesting sense. 9 DR. FONTANA: I guess the way General Electric 10 handled it, our friend Neutron Jack, is if they're not 11 number one or number two in the market, he just gets rid of l 12 the business. l 13 DR. POWERS: The critical decision, I think, that t 14 you really need to think carefully about is this one of when ) 15 are we going to do independent analyses and when are we 16 going to review what the licensee submits. 17 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: One of the major problems in 18 trying to retain core capability, particularly expertise, is 19 the auxiliary loads that get dumped onto people, things like 20 -- well, monitoring contracts isn't so bad, because you're 21 monitoring technical activities, but just the whole business l 22 of going through and trying to get a program underway, the l 23 bureaucratic procedures, what have you, I have had people 24 say that as much as 90 percent of their time is spent in 25 that type of thing, as opposed to technical work, whereas [~ ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. \\w-Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 i Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

127 1 they'd anticipated when they took the job that it might be \\s-)/ I 2 75 technical, 25 other. -i 3 DR. POWERS: Scenario budget planning that I think l 4 kills it. 5 MR. DONNELLY: Well, we just did a survey of our 6 staff, _and just barely did it, and it needs to be looked at, 7 so I don't want to draw too many hasty conclusions from it, j 8 but I would say the 25 percent is more the norm, or numbers 9 on that order, in terms of administrative requirements. 10 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: What I was hearing was the 11. exceptions in somebody who had an unusual situation? i 12 MR. DONNELLY: I would hope so. I really would. 13 I'd like to talk to anybody on our staff or in the NRC staff 14-who says-that 75 percent of their time is spent on j 15 administrative functions associated with their technical '16 job, I really would, give you an independent assessment, j 17 I'd find it highly unusual. 18 DR. POWERS: Historically, people are very poor 19 judges of the splits of their' money unless they do something 20 very - - { H21 MR..DONNELLY: Or it's a particular point in time 22. where they are getting hit with it, and you know,'the i L 12 3 research organization, about five years ago, had a number of 24. IGA reports identifying what I would call administrative and 25 financial' problems, and we did a lot of corrective measures l I s .[\\ J-ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 I Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 E

~ -'- 128 1 to take care of that, and I think it was probably () 2 front-end-loaded, and if you're thinking back in that 3 timeframe, maybe people were a lot more -- were loaded more l 4 in that area and more sensitive to it. But I don't think, 5 today, that we would find that. 6 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: You have a document here. Do you 7 have a even remote estimate of what it might cost to produce 8 a document like this in terms of manpower? 9 MR. DONNELLY: I don't, but it would be quite a 10 bit. 11 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: As I went through it, I marveled 12 at the amount of information that was here. It had to come 13 from a major effort and a lot of people, 14 MR. DONNELLY: Largely the managers in Research, ( 15 branch chiefs, most predominantly, I would say, and you 16 know, it's a weighty document as it is, and part of the -- 17 our effort was to keep it short as possible and keep it 18 readable, and of course, when you do, you leave out 19 information that help its understanding and so forth. 20 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Dr. Powers wants to add in. 21 MR. DONNELLY: Yes, he would like to have us add 22 quite a bit, I think. 23 DR. POWERS: I think you've got a serious 24 salability problem. 25 MR. DONNELLY: Well, I won't take issue with that. O ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034

129 1 One of our concerns ?.s we worked on it was readability, ['l 2 salability, consumeability, whatever you want to call it, Q 3-and whenever you -- think if we had 40 areas, we'd have 4 another 60 pages on top of what's there. So, it is a 5

problem, 6

We've got to think about a way to make it a little 7 more user-friendly for the Commission, I think, in terms of ) 8 -- if we do nothing else, at least get the document indexed 9 and tabbed so 'that people can find it. 10 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: What about the possibility of 11 putting out two documents -- one, a summary document that's 12 20 pages, and then the other, volume two, as the major i 13' backup? Has that been looked at? 14 MR. DONNELLY: We did not look at that, but that O (j 15 is a pretty good idea. The question is, would you have 16 enough in these 20 pages to -- 17' CHAIRMAN UHRIG: -- be meaningful. 18 MR. DONNELLY: Yes. It might. 19 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: That's about the limit that 20 people at the Commission level can digest in a short period 21 of time. The amount of time that they have to allocate to 22 something coming before them is very limited, whereas their 23 staff would be the ones who would go through the details. 24 MR. DONNELLY: Right. We'll give that some 25 thought. That might be a way to deal with the problem. ! [\\_s' 3 ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 L 1 -- --.---

i 130 1 CHAIRMAN UHRIG: Other comments, concerns, last ! [~h 2 minute thoughts, advice? G) i 3 DR. POWERS: Let me ask one additional question 4 that I should have asked earlier. You created this 5 structure of questions to answer your six areas. What made 6 you think that it would work? l l 7 MR. DONNELLY: That it would work? j 8 DR. POWERS: Yes. 9 MR. DONNELLY: I can't remember all the iterations i 1 10 we went through trying to arrive at something that the 11 organization as a whole thought would work, but I remember a 12 number of sessions with research managers and trying l 13 numerous alternatives, and of course, they'd all get holes I 14. shot in them and so forth, and we finally arrived at this, l \\ rh / 15 and we believed that, with the -- if we could get reasonably 13 good metrics and we were addressing the things that a core 17 capability should do for this agency in terms of helping 18 resolve issues or provide an interface to cooperative 19 efforts that were important to us or whatever else, that it 20 would work and that we would have documented it in a way 21 that you and I could sit down and discuss a particular area 22 and have a basis for that discussion and a common frame of 23 reference. 24 Now, you've pointed out we had some weaknesses, 25 and admittedly so, in there, but if they were shored up to g ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 L

131 1 your satisfaction, I think we could then understand what we () 2 did and the importance of it. 3 DR. POWERS: In my generous moments, whi ch I don' t 4 .have very often, it's like a Westinghouse document, you find 5 that and suspect, when you read it, there's a lot more 6 supporting the answer than what's written down. You really 7 do need the King-Donnelly-Shao triumverant in front of you 8 to explain the answers carefully. 9 MR. DONNELLY: One test of the credibility, 10-though, is the coordination with the licensing 11 organizations. As we were rating things high, medium, low, 12 and putting down rationale, in that review process, we got a 13 lot of feedback and that rationale got adjusted based on 14 that.

rr

(,,) 15 .So, it wasn't just Research in a vacuum coming up 16 with some rationale that we hoped people would buy. It has 17 been scrutinized. i 18. DR. POWERS: Maybe that's the answer to the 19 question, then, an answer to a question there. 20-When I read your discussion on -- responding 21 'specifically to.some of the questions that the Commission 22 had asked you -- and they asked for the input from the line 23 organization, and you said, yes, we got it it persuaded 24 me not at all, and maybe what you need to think about as a 25 tool for. persuasion is elicit from the line organizations a / 'b ANN RILEY & ASSOCIATES, LTD. kl Court Reporters 1250 I. Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 842-0034 l l

132 1-formal peer review of your document and include it, just ~~^"" ^"' ' ^ss c'^'"s o-Court Reporters 1250 I Street, N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20005 ) (202) 842-0034 -- i~~

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ = _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _. i REPORTER'S CERTIFICATE This is,to certify that the attached proceedings before the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission in l the matter of: NAME OF PROCEEDING: SUBCOMMITTEE ON SAFETY RESEARCH PROGRAM (ACRS) l-i l CASE NUMBER: l PLACE OF PROCEEDING: Rockville, MD l l 'were held as herein appears, and that this is the original l-l transcript thereof for the file of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission taken by me and thereafter reduced to typewriting by me or under the direction of the court reporting company, and that the transcript is a true and accurate record of the foregoing proceedings. e t(d l () O Jon Hundley L L Official Reporter Ann Riley & Associates, Ltd. i I I -}}

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