to start. So good morning everyone and welcome to session TH23 of the 2024 Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Regulatory Information Conference. And this session is entitled Optimizing Pathways for Safe Nuclear Development, Innovation and Policy Alignment. Again, my name is David Wright and I'm one of the commissioners here at the NRC and I'm really looking forward to today's panel. You know, just for by way of background, we've been doing a series of these. This is the last in the series that connects talking about grid related issues. So, you know, before I go any further, my panel members and I would like to know a little bit about you in the audience. And so we have a live polling question that we would like to provide that information to us with and which I'm going to ask Ms. Producer if you'd put it up now and open for live voting. For in-person participants, you'll be able to text your responses with the information appearing on the PowerPoint slide and virtual participants. You can access them by clicking on the polls link to the right of the video window. So please take a moment and vote. And to my producer back there, please leave the question up and let it populate until I ask you to take it down. In the meantime, I briefly want to thank a few people. First off, I want to thank all of you in the audience and online this morning for choosing this session. Next, I'd like to thank my panel participants for taking the time and giving their talent and expertise to help us do this panel today. I'd also like to thank the Rick organizers. This has been another great conference and you should feel very good about the week. I'd also like to thank my staff team right for their help and attention to detail on this panel as well as their help and support of my Tuesday morning plenary speech and where I gave my Rick remarks and for their cameo appearance in my video. Okay, so based on the results that we see down here, most of your nuclear regulations, reactor people and, you know, non-government has a pretty good number there. So we've got a wide range of people, which is good. That's what we like. And now we know who we're talking to, right? That might help you. So thank you, Ms. Producer. You can take the first question down now. You know, as we enter this last day of the Rick and the last sessions of the Rick, I reflect that over the past couple of days we've had the opportunity to discuss many topics associated with rapid innovation in the nuclear sector. Today's panel is an outgrowth of these discussions and featuring examples of how industry is adapting in this landscape and key focus areas for regulators and lawmakers seeking to create policies that enable the safe adoption of new technologies. Specifically, our panelists will share industry, government and international perspectives on emerging nuclear and energy infrastructure advancements and the challenges policymakers face in supporting diverse energy generation technologies on a modern grid. We've got a great group of presenters for the panel today, and I believe you will learn a great deal from each of them as we address these topics. To maximize our time on this for the topic today, I'll give a brief introduction for each panelist, but I'd like to encourage you to please visit the speaker's pages of the Rick program and the agenda to view their full bios. It's an impressive group of panelists and experts. Kicking off for us today will be Shannon Rafferty-Cincilla. She's Vice President of Fleet Support at Constellation. Among several topics, Shannon will discuss innovation and training, remote inspection and maintenance, digital monitoring and artificial intelligence. She'll also touch on challenges such as innovation integration and knowledge and qualifications. Next will be Jennifer Schaefer, and I will refer to her as Jen, and you'll find out why in a minute. She's Associate Director of Technology at the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency in Energy, or affectionately known as ARPA-E. Jen will provide an overview of several initiatives to advance the deployment and development of next-generation disruptive innovative technologies. We'll then hear from another Jennifer, and I will call her Jennifer, is Jennifer Ewell. She's from the Nuclear Energy Institute, and she's Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Services, and she will present on several industry-wide innovation efforts, challenge areas, and considerations for regulator and lawmaker focus. Last, but certainly not least, Deanne Cameron. And Deanne is head of the Division for Nuclear Technology Development and Economics at the Nuclear Energy Agency, and she'll discuss global perspectives, including insights from the recently released second edition of the NEA Small Modular Reactor Dashboard, which they were all out by the bottom of the stairs during the week, going to the lower level. And if you had the opportunity to pick one up, I hope you did. If not, talk to her. Maybe she can get you one. After the panelists present, we're going to have time for some questions and answers. For those of you in the room, please scan the QR code displayed on the screen. The code will drop you to a page specific to the session, to this session, and it'll have a tab for Q&A where you can input your question on your mobile device. For those of you joining virtually, please click on the Q&A tab, and you can submit your questions through the browser. We'll try to answer as many of your questions as we can when we get to the Q&A portion, so please submit your questions as they come to you. So before we move to our first panelist, let's bring up our second live polling question, which is, what do you think is the most challenging barrier to innovation in the nuclear sector? And Ms. Producer, please leave the slide up for a moment while the results are populating. Let's see what we've got going on here. Huh. So these results are pretty interesting in there. You know, it looks like we've got cost financing and regulatory review being the top two in the technology part. The readiness part seems to be garnering some interest. So I'm interested to hear how this response aligns with the challenges and initiatives of Shannon and our other panelists will be discussing. So thank you, Ms. Producer. You can take the question down now. And with that, Shannon, the floor is yours. All right. Good morning, everybody. And thank you, Commissioner Wright, for inviting me to be part of this session and by honoring women's history month by having an all-female panel. So really nicely done, Commissioner. You know, as part of this session, we're going to look at the evolving energy landscape and how the industry is adapting. And my session today is going to intend it to share some of the ways that we are integrating innovation into our everyday work and the nuclear power plants. And I have to remember to use my clicker. Okay. So why innovation? Innovation is crucial to the future of nuclear energy. And we must embrace new technologies to remain competitive, safe, and ensure that we continue to play a critical role in shaping the industry's future. Also, the ability to innovate is a huge, engage efficiencies, is a huge satisfactor for our current workforce. And as a mom of three future engineers, I can attest that it is absolutely going to be required for our next generation of workforce. So our ability to innovate is vital to our ability to attract and retain talent. So how are we doing this? In the area of training, these are just some of the, I won't go through every one of them, but these are just some of the areas where we're using innovation in training. And the first one I'll talk about is our equipment operator on-demand training program. It allows us to get operators integrated into the workforce and qualified faster than a traditional approach. And it doesn't, it doesn't require us waiting for 10 to 15 people to put together a formal class. So if you have a desirable candidate that you want to get moving right away, you can put them into this program and get them started quickly. The program is a combination of a two-week classroom experience, then on-shift and self-study-paced training. And on average, it reduces the time to fully qualify an equipment operator by about six weeks. Virtual reality technology also has been used in applications like forum material exclusion training as well as practicing disassembly and reassembly of plant equipment. Our digital plant viewer is a computer simulation of our plants and allows you to perform virtual walk-downs of plant equipment that are normally not accessible without picking up dose or encountering potential industrial hazards. Our learning anytime, anywhere program uses quick YouTube type videos in various applications such as performing maintenance activities in areas that are often not accessible or for infrequently performed tasks. These videos are used for knowledge transfer and retention and can be linked to pre-job briefs, to job familiarization guides and even to work packages. And over the past year we've seen an increase of over 300 percent in the use of these videos. And finally, the glass top simulator is a portable device with a screen that can be configured like a control panel. It can be used to practice crane operation or perform main control surveillance such as pump valve and flow tests. And the system will respond very similar to our main control simulator and allows operators to gain proficiency to practice before they perform the test and to run what-if scenarios. Remote inspections are becoming increasingly common. This technology reduces radiation exposure for workers and improves the accuracy of inspections and maintenance. We've used drone technology to proactively identify degradation in normally inaccessible areas prior to failure of the component. We've also utilized drones in high dose and high temperature areas to take pictures and be used for planned future repairs. At one of our plans you can see some of the statistics on the screen but we helped to save over 3,000 person hours of work, 18-person realm of dose, and mitigated industrial safety risks and it was able to take the footage from the drone flight and integrate it into the digital plant viewer that I previously talked about. The picture on the top left of the screen is an aerial shot of a reservoir that we use for makeup water and we had aggressive vegetation growth in this reservoir. We were able to do drone flights to monitor the growth and schedule removal prior to the vegetation impacting our intake structure. And on the bottom you can see how we utilize drones with thermal camera technology to do surveys of our switchards. So digital monitoring isn't new but we're developing it in different ways. We're leveraging robotic technology for monitoring in hazardous and hard-to-reach areas. We have an extensive fleet-wide infrastructure that optimizes performance monitoring, mobile worker applications, data analysis, and maintenance to reduce cost and improve plant and analytics. This allows us to deploy thousands of devices at each station with enough capacity like IP addresses in bandwidth for various sensors, cameras, carts, and mobile devices and radios. This provides us the capability to utilize the right device for the application. For instance on the top left is a mobile cart, mobile fire cart. It has been recognized that fire watches may not be the most practical or efficient way of compensating for an operable fire protection equipment. So having a cart like this that is able to detect smoke and visually identify a fire in an area can reduce the personal burden of performing the fire watch duties. On the top right is one of the robots that we have that can be deployed for inspection and monitoring in hard-to-reach locations, high-radiation locations, and locations that would require loss of generation if a person had to perform the inspection. They can also reduce costs and increase efficiency by performing inspections, eliminating the need for building scaffold or any other temporary structures. And finally at the bottom you can see some of our data tools. We leverage analytical data in real time to forecast potential issues or failures allowing for a condition-based maintenance program versus a periodic planned work. This can improve equipment reliability decreased costs by eliminating unneeded maintenance tasks. Also by addressing maintenance needs before failure occurs it minimizes system unavailability. Now I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about artificial intelligence as part of my innovation discussion. So yesterday at the AI session there was a poll and about 20 percent of the participants said that they were already using AI. They also demonstrated success in controlling actual plant conditions, so it's very clear that AI has the potential to optimize nuclear power operations and improve safety. So in this slide I'm just going to highlight a few ways of how we use AI in different functional areas. And for example in operations Microsoft Corp pilot can be used to gather field information across multiple systems to improve efficiency in operator rounds. In maintenance we're utilizing or working to utilize AI to automate our work planning process. In engineering AI driven researches can be utilized to support trouble of shooting activities. And from a corporate oversight perspective data performance data from multiple sites can be compiled over a comprehensive fleet so that you have a view of all of the data from across your fleet and you can understand what your fleet performance looks like. So what does all of this look like in the day-to-day life of a plant person? And how does it improve job satisfaction and proficiency? So let's walk through some examples. So this is like a day in the life of a plant individual. I picked a supervisor and so it's early morning the supervisor walks into work or even before that maybe they're checking it on their phone. They can utilize AI to give them an overview of their daily meeting schedule and any deliverables that they have for the day. Then they can utilize the co-pilot application to summarize the morning plant status meeting and any actions that pertain to their department.  At some point during the day they might receive a predictive alert that indicates a potential equipment issue. And AI at that moment provides some of the previous trends for that piece of equipment, previous work order history and issue reports and shares the most likely failure mechanism. AI then can be utilized to assist the planning and work order generation for the repair. So as you can see the use of AI can streamline administrative work, help leaders set priorities for the day and quickly identify and resolve equipment issues. Finally I want to touch on large scale digital modernization. This is a project that we are pursuing in partnership with the Department of Energy and Idaho National Labs. It will upgrade safety system logic from analog technology to a digital platform and modernize the main control or interface features. This will result in improved reliability, optimize human interface features and reduce plant instrumentation, labor and maintenance or material costs. Once this is completed it will eliminate 1800 safety related components, 58 preventative maintenance and corrective maintenance annually, 796 surveillance tests annually and over 1400 round points annually. It also reduces human error opportunities by eliminating things like channel operability test, installation of box installation tests for testing and tag out removals and applications. Operator interfaces and maintenance diagnostics are also going to be improved. This system will be able to continuously self-test and diagnose all trains of safety functions. It'll improve the ability and spectrum of the quality of the main control of information and it will reduce operator burden through automation. This project also demonstrates the light water safety system digital upgrades on a large scale and it benefits from recently improved industry processes such as the NRC alternative review process ISG06 and the standardized digital upgrade license application request framework. But of course we talked about it in the poll and I saw some of your answers. There's definitely challenges to implementing innovation. Innovation does not happen without all of these challenges and I would say some of the top ones that I've listed on my slide here are cyber and physical security limitations as well as regulations need to be considered as well as the integration and impact to existing design plant. Some of these ideas also require large upfront investments before you can even get your first use case on the ground which makes it difficult sometimes to demonstrate the cost benefit of what you're trying to achieve. And finally the knowledge and qualification requirements of the end users should always be considered and our quest to leverage innovation to support the evolving energy landscape we need to ensure that the user's experience is a positive one and that we are thoughtful about our change management plans. Overall or otherwise all the time and effort and costs will be wasted if the technology is never used and to that point I'd like to end with a quote by Warren Benes innovation by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts endless demonstration monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization and this requires courageous patients. Thank you. Thank you Shannon. I've been a fan of what Constellation's been doing since I came to the commission especially in the field of in the area of innovation. Your company's been leaning in leaning forward in this and thinking outside the box and you know you're one of the leaders in this space and and it's obvious why you know I've actually walked that robot dog spot. It's kind of like a video game and it's so easy to operate I believe that my grandchildren could probably make it do tricks. I'm pretty sure they can make it roll over or do something. So it's quite it's quite amazing and the uses for that you haven't even scratched the surface on what you can do with it. I know that our neighbors to the north are active in innovation space as well and it'll be interesting. I'm a little interested to learn about how is if there and how is the community of learning taking place. How is that happening and how is it being shared and you know how is that being communicated around the world so that'd be interested maybe to get too later. Before we move on to our next panelists let's bring up our third live polling question and it is what do you see as the most important area for innovation in the nuclear sector. So we'll give the it's populating now that's pretty good. Y'all are ahead of the game. That's really nice. So it looks like advanced fuels advanced materials that's big. All right so I'm going to be curious while it's populating here to hear what maybe you think about this question as you have time or maybe in the Q&A. So it looks like a majority of our audience think that the most important thing is AI and digital twins with you know advanced materials and advanced fuels not not far behind. That's interesting. I'd like to hear y'all thoughts on this too if you have a moment to address that later. So thank you Ms. Producer you can take that down and our next presenter is Jen Shaffer and let's jump right in with your presentation to learn how operas are helping address some of these things. Perfect. It's here. Good morning everyone. How are you doing? It's okay. Yeah so as Commissioner Wright said I'm ARPA-E Associate Director of Technology Jennifer Shaffer and I'm going to be talking about innovation and nuclear and I'll provide a little bit of perspective as far as how we think about things at ARPA-E and what the opportunities that exist there and I don't believe actually I have well I do have a disclaimer slide this is new from legal to make sure that it's clear that these are my opinions not necessarily broadly representing the agency but I want to take a moment to talk about ARPA-E and the broader vision team so there's myself there's program director Bob Lidoo there's program director Bill Horak and people may not know this about ARPA-E structure but it turns out that when you come to the agency as a program director you actually are in a term limited position and so we have three program directors right now but over time people will roll off people will come back on and it's actually critical to the innovation ecosystem within ARPA-E that you're willing to have people come in where maybe the previous program director didn't like that concept and so it always ended up shelved and so then somebody else comes in and it says no no no I want to look back at that again right and so as we're thinking about structurally how innovation occurs and things of that nature I just want to take a moment to point this out because actually apropos of the polling question that was up there right when it comes to thinking about things like advanced fuels like AI these are things that could very easily end up within an ARPA-E portfolio for us to consider if a program director comes along and says hey this is also really important to me so that's how we fit into this equation a little bit so when we look at the advanced nuclear fission portfolio at the agency it really started about in 2017 and some of you may have known Rachel Slebaugh who is a former ARPA-E program director and what happened when she looked at the landscape as she said hey it seems that actually there's really some things that we haven't been thinking about as much when it comes to cost in the nuclear industry and how we can actually be innovating with cost in mind and enabling deployment and it was with this that she said let's start the Mitener program and this is how can we greatly reduce advanced reactor capex and underpinning this was actually a lot of digital technologies for how we can do digital engineering with respect to dropping reactor costs of construction with respect to how we can start thinking about what academically the idea of reactor based control and AI tools and that was all underneath the Mitener program the next program that she came up with as she said okay let's live in a world where where Mitener has worked and now we can decrease the cost of advanced reactor construction which we know we still have a long way to go but where ARPA-E were supposed to be skating to the punk and she said now let's look at operation and maintenance costs and this was another place where there was significant innovation with respect to using digital tools in AI as far as how we could think about reactor security, reactor maintenance, all these sorts of pieces of this surprisingly when piece of operation and maintenance costs can be advanced reactor uptime and this is something that we haven't looked at quite as closely in the agency it didn't end up being underneath the Gemina portfolio but this is something that we'll be thinking about more and more in the future and it was actually at this point that I came over as program director and inherited the Gemina program and this is what we've been working with over the course of the past few years and actually funny enough one of the things that I'm doing after this today is I'm going to see the x-energy control room ribbon cutting ceremony because ARPA-E was integral in basically funding that early work to help get that developed so it was really nice actually as Shannon was talking about control rooms and things of this nature from what I see when I look across the advanced reactor landscape everybody is developing a digital control room and it makes sense right now but he's going to be putting an analog control room in an advanced reactor and this is where we have to start thinking about this. There are other places where innovation hits within nuclear right and of course one of the places where you could consider this is in the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle which is actually where my expertise resides and so we actually had two programs in the space one of them was program director Bob Ladoos and this is the onwards program and one of the programs or problems that Bob saw coming down the pike is we have all of these advanced reactors all of them have their own independent fuel forms and as a consequence of this many of them have their own different waste forms and it's not clear what the path to disposal looks like for many of these advanced reactors if you have a metallic fuel what is the disposal pathway for this if you have a fuel and molten salt reactor what is the disposal pathway for this and Bob said you know it's great that the advanced reactors are moving forward but we could start funding some R&D to start looking at waste forms to start looking at disposal to start looking at frankly canister design for how we might think about this and this is basically what the onwards program took on. My bread and butter in background is in nuclear fuel recycling and this was okay part of this is how can we start thinking about innovation in management of nuclear fuel recycling this was the Curie program and one of the things that I saw as I had looked through the past is that classically when we talked about recycling as a community really this was basically the classic nuclear fuel recycling technology this was purex this was solvent extraction this was generating pure plutonium streams and while that was something that we needed at a time when we were developing it right during the Manhattan Project right this is where all this technology came from if you actually started from a clean slate for what we needed today for nuclear fuel recycling it actually wasn't what we developed back you know about 70 years ago it would it would be considering things like how do we co recover plutonium with actinides right because we don't need a pure plutonium stream is there a moment to think about what costs are for recycling facilities because at the time we didn't consider this really seriously for the Manhattan Project right today if we want to think about recycling costs it would make sense if we could be much more attentive to how we could structurally decrease costs while being safe obviously across these types of facilities and that was really what Curie sought to innovate in and then of course we've been thinking about other things like transmutation of nuclear fuel as well as what perhaps you could use heat for industrial applications of nuclear so this is everything that we have basically going on with the nuclear portfolio at RPE and keep an eye on this because things may be coming down the pike further one other piece that I'll say when I think about innovation because this is kind of the core of the panel today right what are what are innovation in nuclear how do we enable it I think of it in kind of two threads one is the innovation side of the house how do we develop the technologies how do we get this r&d funded how do we do all of these pieces then there's the implementation side of the house right now there is a feedback loop between these two but there are things that you can be doing in innovation that are independent of implementation and then there are things that you mean to be thinking about when you are innovating to make sure that they are actually going to be attentive to implementation and that's one thing that we have in RPE is both basically an r&d focus as the program director as well as a commercialization focus in our tech to market team so those will be some things in the lens of what I'll be talking about here so let's talk a little bit more about reactors so many of us are familiar with the idea of a micro reactor a small modular reactor of course the classical large scale reactor and here's basically a timeline of how some of these things are moving forward this is not a completely inclusive timeline but right we know kairos and okla we're thinking about 2026 we know westinghouse atachi thinking about 2028 terapower and xenergy around the 2030 time frame and there are of course others on the landscape here right that are being considered and so as a consequence of this we need to be thinking about what innovation is relevant to us and so these include things like digitization which is something that has come up a couple of different times in the poll that I'll speak more of about recycling of spin fuel and then also of course advanced reactor fuel cycles the other piece within this that is really important to consider as you're operating in an innovation ecosystem is there can be a lot of emerging market dynamics that don't touch explicitly on your ability to innovate but basically that are kind of the market poll is how we talk about them at rpe one of the biggest ones that we're seeing right now is actually the policy framework right so at rpe we try we basically do things saying that we don't touch policy we're innovators if policy happens we need to be attentive to it and thinking about how it'll impact commercialization but we obviously have to be aware of it and we're seeing a couple of different threads of this come through right we're seeing significant congressional action with respect to funding of advanced reactor r&d funding and de-risking advanced reactors as well as on a more international stage of course we saw cop 28 with the tripling of nuclear power by 2050 right all of these things send strong market signals to investors that say hey we can start investing in nuclear more and more and hey we can also maybe start thinking about investing in early stage nuclear and early stage r&d more and more so these are this is how policy can actually impact the r&d sector and what's happening there another emerging dynamic that's really critical is artificial intelligence we're seeing this right now the implementation of large language models as Shannon was showing the ability for basically machine learning and AI to do things like sensor fusion so you're able to pull from multiple parts of a plant such that you can make more informed decisions right this is something that can be very difficult for a human operator to do and so these are the sorts of things that we're realizing what this means for us as a hub for innovation is how do we actually harness this so it deploys most rapidly one of the things I've learned a couple of different things from the Gemina program as we were running it one of them is that standards are absolutely critical it was something that when we brought up the the program immediately there are there are things at RPE that we say when we're developing a program one is here are the known knowns here are the things that I'm not even going to bother figuring out that's beyond the scope of the program and here are the things that we're going to figure out along the way one of the things that we figured out along the way is that standards are really critical if we're going to implement artificial intelligence and digital technologies and so this is something that I've been in any program development scope where people are thinking about this I'm like how are you building your standards community what are you doing to actually help impact this on a commercialization standpoint so that's one piece of it the other piece of it is actually we need to get this physical connection to the digital technology such that when you actually go talk to a regulator you aren't talking about just an abstract entity you're able to talk about things in very concrete manner and that way you're they're not having to imagine here what is actually the safety basis or considerations with respect to this one of the aspects of this that's really exciting with respect to constellation this is probably one of our first implementations where we have a technology within Gemina but we're actually implementing it at a constellation plant it's in passive mode so it's not doing you know anything actively but we're able to start getting the data we're able to start getting what we need to actually start moving forward with this and this is a project actually I'm on a quarterly review for this this afternoon and then the other piece of this is industrials and how this impacts things so one of the things that we've seen when it comes to market and market pull is that the utilities can be a very important partner but it turns out that things like data centers and industrial partners like oil and gas can actually they're willing to accept a certain level of market risk that utilities may not actually be in a position to take on and as a consequence of this this also can pull certain technologies across the finish line and so these are things that actually directly intersect with the innovation ecosystem so I basically have two more slides one of the slides that I'll talk about here is micro reactors and so this is a space where I believe actually it was about 2016 we were thinking about what we were going to do in the RPE portfolio as far as types of technologies and micro reactors were one of the things that came to the fore and we funded Westinghouse's event she reactor and now we've seen many many more come into the the ballast for this there was a lot that you can imagine for those of you in the community right it was not quite clear what the value proposition of micro reactors was sometimes you know maybe you can think as it as a one for one replacement for diesel generators but you know what would be the value for that would we need to develop an entire supply chain right all of these things were risk factors what we're seeing more and more emerge as we look more closely at micro reactors and you're seeing frankly more micro reactor technologies come to come to the fore is that there is a real opportunity here because it seems like when you get to the micro reactor size all of a sudden you're not at that large-scale construction size you're in where you can actually manufacture something and here's where you can really start hitting your economies of I don't want to say size but economies of scale basically you can actually start manufacturing and learning rapidly and so there's other knock on benefits that we didn't anticipate this what this means for innovation though is if we staff a micro reactor the same way that we've classically staffed some other things that are maybe not leveraging AI and digital technologies the way that we can the cost proposition and the value proposition is not going to be what it could be and so this is a real place where innovation could actually be critically enabling and disrupt what we thought was going to be the case for micro reactors the last bit that I'll say is digital twins and control and this is actually I completely stole this figure from the NRC and I've been inter engaging significantly with Raj Iyengar and others on this because it's actually just a great figure and they've been great partners with this but this connects some to the micro reactor conversation that if you're going to deploy many of multiples of micro reactors if you're able to do things like start to have the conversation about more displaced control of them and obviously this is something that needs to be worked out right the economics of them start to make more and more sense the other place where you can get with digital twins and control is operations and maintenance right you can start getting in a predictive maintenance regime all these things have significant cost benefit and we need to get down this cost curve rapidly as we're deploying these new reactor technologies so some of my concluding thoughts here the other thing that I didn't hit through this is when it comes to digital technology sometimes it feels like we just are going to flip the switch on this and they're all of a sudden going to be a part of our ecosystem the reality of how I see this rolling out is it's going to be gradual and it's going to be kind of piece by piece and we're going to see aspects of it be taken on and eventually we're going to get more and more comfortable with technology on all fronts and this is how we'll build this and that's as part of what we're building right now you know when it comes to smaller reactor designs we do recognize that they create an opportunity for decreased hazard right the hazard basis for a microreactor is not the same as it is for a bigger reactor and as a consequence of that the regulatory interface while obviously you want to have something very safe perhaps doesn't look quite the same because intrinsically it is a safer design right and so we're going to have to have this balance of how we think about what our safety needs are for these types of technologies as we consider digital implementation and then also we need to be dedicating resources significantly for increasing familiarity with digital technologies basically across the board and I believe that that was my last slide so if it works will it matter thank you thank you very much Jen RPE's got a lot going on and I was fortunate enough you invited me over to meet with your team a while back and to experience and learn what you had going on and I really appreciate the partnership and the relationship that's been established between your agency and your area and DNRC because it's really important for us to understand what's coming and how we need to be prepared to move forward because we've got to think differently you know about a lot of that so we really thank you for that so before we go to the next panelists let's bring up our next and final polling question which is do you think current national policy supports innovation in the nuclear sector and it looks like it's populating and we'll see what what happens here so I'd like to remind you to use the app to begin asking your questions of the panelists that we'll get to in just a little bit so remember the code will drop you to a page specific to this session and you'll have a tab for the Q&A where you can input your question on your mobile device and again for those virtually click the Q&A tab and you can submit your question through the browser so it looks like well we're almost split down the middle what else is new so thank you Ms. Producer you may pull the live polling question down so next up is Jennifer Yule from NEI and I'm excited to hear your perspectives informed by the industry at large and you've been a friend a long time and welcome okay thank you Commissioner Wright and for everybody who organized this session for inviting me to speak today so I am actually going to rearrange because I can't see over the podium all right so I just want to start my presentation with another question for you all I'm using low tech here because I'm just going to ask you to raise your hand or not okay how many of you think that nuclear power is critical to the nation's energy future all right great so hopefully I'm looking at Jim Slider who works for me at the NEI and Jim I did not see you participate is there a reason for that ah it's a given thank you Jim anyway Jim helped me with these slides so want to knowledge his effort here so my talk is going to be a little different what I'm going to be talking about is one the nation's need for nuclear energy that innovation is in fact an imperative how the NRC can enable innovation and a little bit of a pivot does the drive for transparency inhibit innovation and that is NRC's drive for having a lot of guidance so that applicants understand what they're looking for does it inhibit innovation and then can we find the right balance so first up for those of you who may not think that nuclear is critical to the nation's energy future let me just say last year 2023 18 percent of the nation's power was nuclear we look at it from a carbon free perspective and we are almost getting to half all right nuclear is the backbone of our stable electricity grid as we get more and more renewables onto the grid we need more and more base load power but we need carbon free base load power and nuclear is doing a great job in fact we have the highest capacity factor of any other form of electricity production we're at 93 percent in 2023 and over the last 20 years we've been over 90 percent on average the nearest electricity generation source that is anywhere close is geothermal at 69 percent and natural gas at 66 percent so absolutely nuclear is the backbone of our stable electric grid now do we need nuclear well let me just say the recognition that nuclear power is critical to the world's energy future we have a number of data points I selected a few first it's it's a global need at the COP 28 there was a pledge by numerous countries to triple nuclear power by by 2050 DOE did its own analysis of how much nuclear power is needed by 2050 and they see the U.S. tripling nuclear by 2050 and subsequent license renewal is a necessary part of our energy future so we look at the need for nuclear it is recognized in the by the nation it's probably the only position that has bipartisan support in our Congress at this point and guess what the road to getting to that future runs right through the NRC so we also need to enhance our role in the global market we are being out competed by other nations in our export and that has energy security implications it also has national security implications and our influence overseas depends on establishing these hundred year plus relationships with other countries we're also seeing new organizations asking for carbon-free power and reliable carbon-free power we have tech companies oil and gas companies chemical companies everybody is interested in carbon-free nuclear power because it is the most reliable form of power and when we look at what the utilities are projecting we're seeing more and more utilities in their integrated resource plans which is are their plans for the future including nuclear power so in to enable this we absolutely positively must maintain high standards that's not not debated that is an absolute fact and we will do so so look at our federal support last question asked about federal support for innovation the federal government has invested over 10 billion dollars into nuclear power and as those production tax credit and in investment tax credits accrue over time it's going to be much more than 10 billion so yes innovation is part of this mix we asked our members what is your future look like and we got the response license renewal 90% over the 90% percent of the fleet is going to subsequent license renewal there are some plans that don't have license renewal yet but they have submitted to the NRC and we're seeing the ramp up of those subsequent license renewal applications and you've heard this throughout the conference so I don't want to belabor the point we're also expecting over 20 power upgrades by 2030 why because we need more carbon free reliable power we're looking to to extend fuel cycle for at the plants that involves higher enriched fuel that involves accident tolerant fuel advanced fuel types and there's over over six billion dollars of investment waiting to happen in the nuclear industry and some has already started happening we're seeing other uses beyond electricity and you see them listed there and when we asked our our members how many utilities are interested in building new nuclear you can see the results for yourself nuclear power is critical to the nation's energy future and to the global energy future so just to give you a snapshot at this time you've got a list of advanced nuclear deployment plants if I had another slide to put on top of it it would be pretty much all of the existing nuclear power plants going into subsequent license renewal so is innovation necessary to meet this skyrocketing demand so how many think it is all right some of you are very stubborn and you're going to stick with 50-50 here I was trying to you know break the tie but anyway I'll continue so at this stage with all of the advanced reactor vendors in the United States let alone globally there's a wide range of advanced reactor options there's different sizes there's you know different thermohydraulic fluids there's different outlet temperatures there's all sorts of designs out there so we can go from a micro reactor support a micro grid to you know the very large plants that are passive that are passive safety plants that are already are licensed so you know we've got a number of options innovation is necessary wide array of options innovation is necessary to enhance safety Shannon did a great job going over all of the different innovation activities at one utility across the industry Jim Slider runs an innovation task force and we do every year a top innovative practice award at the at NEI and the innovations are phenomenal really creative thinking and right now for the most part those innovations don't require NRC approval so but we are getting into the need for NRC approval and so I want to take that on in my next slide we also want to enhance our efficiency we want to be absolutely want to be safe but we also want to keep our prices as low as they can be for the customers but safety is the primary concern we want to address obsolescence digital instrumentation and control is an example of that we have others we also want to attract the new gen or the younger generation of engineers we want to train them quickly but sufficiently we want to qualify them at a faster pace because they don't see a future of 30 years working for the same company so we need them attracted we need to train them with you know high quality qualification requirements and we need to retain them and they don't want to go into a control room and see 1960s technology so this is important to attracting that workforce that is so necessary for this expansion of nuclear power and we also as I mentioned before want to compete internationally which then supports our own national security there are other reasons for innovation but I thought this was a pretty good list to start from so how do we enable innovation well our regulator needs to be flexible and let me just take a step back I was at the NRC for over 20 years I've done the reviewer job it is a hard job for one thing the industry needs a strong independent regulator absolutely that is critical for social license so that the public can say you know what I think these plants are safe and I have confidence that they will remain safe so that's necessary so we want a strong independent regulator and if you were to put yourself in a reviewer's shoes for those of you who are not NRC employees the reviewer has a hard job they have an application and they make the decision about whether a reasonable assurance of adequate protection is met and they feel a great deal of responsibility and so we need to recognize that so over the time over time NRC developed numerous guidance documents to help that reviewer feel like to have more confidence that yes they're making the right decision and that worked when there were say 40 years of a pretty static industry large light water reactors okay now think about it with the pace of change that we're seeing with this huge expansion of nuclear power lots of different techniques that are available for even the simplest of activities technology is being brought to bear we need to be innovative in our review approach as well so does this drive for transparency inhibit innovation and I think the answer is yes it in the past with all of that investment in guidance the industry knew what the NRC wanted and so we liked that you know we wanted to have you know a very reliable result from the review process but if you're NRC reviewer doing that hard job the first thing you do is you open up the standard review plan it's about 2,000 pages all right how long is it take you to read those portions of the plan that apply to you oh geez but then there's 400 over 400 regulatory guides all right how many how much effort does it take to go through those guides just to look at subsequent license renewal we've already done license renewal there's only a subset of aging management programs that need to change and oh geez the most recent version of the generic aging lessons learn documents over 1300 pages there's over 400 new regs there are numerous office instructions there are branch technical positions so is that reviewer really taking a look at that submittal and asking himself or herself whether or not reasonable assurance of adequate protection is provided using their own engineering judgment well I think that reviewer feels pretty locked in to only accepting if it's meeting this voluminous amount of guidance documents and so at one point this approach did work but now with the pace of change and the need for a lot of licensing for these you know for the expansion of nuclear power we need to be faster we can't have this voluminous amount of guidance for every single different design every single different technology to be submitted so my premise is for the future the nrc needs to train its reviewers to make sound engineering decisions based on their own technical understanding their assessment of defense in depth their assessment of the of the risk as one factor in the decision the assessment of whether safety margins are maintained and I also think that holistic reviews will be more helpful so that it's not one reviewer looking at like a nanometer of of the of the depth of this submittal it's a lot of people different technical backgrounds saying you know what because of this system over here you know that system over there that you're reviewing it's not as important maybe as you think it is so can that help us and nrc has already started doing that but we have to get back to what is necessary for reasonable assurance and try to break away from this rigid adherence to all of this guidance now it's going to introduce differences across the reviewers and then that's leadership's job that is absolutely positively the leadership's job that's the branch chief knowing what reviewers are doing what if there are differences in opinion it goes to the division director that division director needs to understand what I should say his or her staff is doing and needs to be the arbitrator making the decision and it needs to be timely because we have so much to do and the nation and the globe is depending on the nrc to get this right as well as the industries got to submit really strong justification for whatever it's asking for so this is a shared responsibility here so bottom line here is I think we've got to change the way reviews are being done can can we do this is this something that nrc maintains its independence but you know collaborates with the industry and the members of the public so we can maybe start thinking a little bit different going back to basic engineering principles I think the regulations must be flexible however they need to be repeatable and that's where leadership comes into play so key takeaways just from my perspective these are again my thoughts nuclear's role in decarbonization is accepted as absolutely essential new plants and subsequent license renewal playing key roles in the nation's energy mix in in the in the world's energy mix innovation is imperative to meet the moment and nrc's got to embrace sufficient decision making with little guidance go back to engineering judgment and engineering principles but have leadership there knowledgeable leadership there to make sure that the reviews are being done consistently by other reviewers and nrc's got to ensure repeatability through that oversight by leadership where to start well first of all performance based regulation I think is a great concept and and in fact nrc strives to do performance based approaches in in rulemaking but we can't do rulemaking on every regulation out there so we also need to consider holistic reviews so every reviewer understands the importance of their section in the overall scheme of ensuring safety so with that I will stop here and again thank you for your attention and in the invitation thank you thank you Jennifer and I know from personal experience that the regulatory and legal side of things can get complex and can be frustratingly slow so I appreciate your approach and also appreciate your constant and frequent communication on these things with the nrc so our first three panelists have addressed several key examples, challenges and initiatives from a U.S. perspective but now I'm interested to hear more from you Deanne on the global new technology deployments inside including enabling conditions so Deanne the floor is yours thank you Commissioner Wright and thank you to everybody for being here today we'll go to the next slide please it is hard to see the slides from behind this person isn't it that's a little trick you have to go on your tip toes I'm not you that's a little tricky okay so this is a graph from the 2022 NEA publication on climate change targets and the role of nuclear energy so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a step back to the global perspective we had a lot of great discussions already from previous panelists on very specific aspects of innovation, technical and also domestic now let's take a step back and look at the global picture in this publication in 2022 the NEA called for a tripling of global installed nuclear capacity and we modeled how that could be achieved through a combination of long-term operation large-scale new builds and small modular reactors for a combination of electricity production but also heat applications key takeaway from this graph is that based on existing policies as they stood in 2022 global installed nuclear capacity was actually on a trajectory to decrease between 2020 and 2050 but we found in our modeling and scenarios that a tripling is technically possible but it would require a change to policies now this was published in 2022 next slide please in 2023 we saw a great deal of momentum around the world for the role of nuclear energy to grow and expand in energy trajectories and energy planning this is a photo from the NEA ministerial level conference on road maps to new nuclear that we held in September of 2023 in Paris where ministers from 21 countries and about 40 CEOs met together to discuss their commitments to build significant new nuclear energy in their own domestic energy systems and to identify their shared challenges what are the biggest risks in the areas of finance supply chain workforce development and fuel availability they committed to continue working together to address these issues the next meeting of this group will take place in September of 2024 we'll be reporting back to ministers on progress and there will have been significant progress in the 12 months between the two consecutive conferences but the priorities that they identified for us just again finance supply chain workforce and fuel so we can compare that to one of the poll questions that was asked the live poll questions earlier next slide please momentum continued to build at the end of 2023 COP28 was a significant milestone for nuclear in a couple of different ways one of the the significant announcements of course was the declaration signed by leaders from 25 countries that committed to triple global installed nuclear capacity by 2050 and we were delighted that they referenced NEA's analysis and support of this declaration this is tremendous policy support it represents a lot of momentum but success is not a foregone conclusion in reaching this target so let's turn to the next slide please and now I'm going to focus a little bit more just on the SMR piece of this but understanding that SMR is just one of the four pillars alongside large-scale nuclear long-term operations and applications for heat we see a variety of reactor concepts under development around the world for a variety of applications and markets and this is both a good thing because it creates opportunities to decarbonize even the toughest to evade sectors of the economy industrial applications even transportation sectors but it's also a considerable challenge to achieve a tripling of the nuclear sector will require a number of enabling conditions to be very robust that includes the policy frameworks regulatory pathways fuel cycle front-end end-back-end readiness supply chain robust talent pipeline which I'm going to debate a little with you all in your live poll you write that as one of the lowest priorities we see it potentially as one of the highest risks and highest rate limiting factors for progress in nuclear new build another enabling condition obviously is public trust and financing next slide please in 2023 NEA defined six new indicators to assess progress of SMRs around the world essentially we took on the mission of trying to well review the status of SMR development and deployment around the world to contribute to an evidence-based situational awareness there's a lot of media announcements how do we cut through the noise and understand what is really happening not only here in North America but around the world we understood that for a complete picture we need to look beyond technical feasibility we need to understand progress of SMRs in licensing citing financing supply chain fuel supply and public engagement next slide in early 2024 we completed our review of every SMR on the planet very proud I don't know if Lucas if you're in the room if you are he's not in the room oh he's right there stand up please Lucas Lucas meal was a project manager for this I think it's about four thousand person hours of work that he oversaw for this publication so hats off to Lucas we identified 98 design concepts around the world again that is both an asset and a challenge one third of them however are just paper reactors at this time they either have they have no human or financial resources assigned to them in some cases they never made it off of the paper into reality in other cases people started to work on it and the project ran into problems is now unfunded and is paused or cancelled but it means that about two-thirds of the projects are in fact under development or concepts are under development next slide please these are the SMRs that are in the publication that we just launched a couple weeks ago in March 2024 next slide and they represent a variety of concepts some of them are water cooled so they're an evolution of current technology is deployed around the world but in fact most of them are not water cooled there are many Gen 4 reactor concepts here so this is quite a quite an interesting evolution in the makeup of or potentially the makeup of the future global fleet next slide please also they propose to use a variety of fuel cycles and when we collected this information to be honest I was quite surprised I had not anticipated this level of diversity and different fuel cycles being proposed of course not all of these SMRs are going to make it to market but those that do will require not only availability of fuel which is a common topic of conversation right now in particular with respect to HALO but they're going to require waste management readiness they're going to require R&D infrastructure to collect data and qualify their fuels validate their codes and there's going to have to be infrastructure including transportation amongst other requirements for these novel fuel cycles next slide please some propose to use LEU many are proposing HALEU but there are in fact also a few concepts that propose to use a fuel cycle that does not depend on enrichment at all which we found very interesting next slide so let me now share with you sort of a snapshot of global progress this is what we're calling the SMR pipeline so you can see on the left hand side concepts that are not under active development there are concepts they are articulated concepts and then the pipeline as you go across to the right moves through different stages of progress towards construction and commercial deployment five of them at the right side of the graph are already under construction or operating now there's an enormous amount of data underlying this one simple bar chart and in fact in the publication there are 53 or 52 graphs that sort of present data underlying this in a lot of different ways I don't have time to share all of them with you so you'll have to read the publication but I have selected three to share with you today next slide please here's a snapshot of licensing progress around the world so you can see a lot of reactor concepts engaged with USNRC a lot with the Canadian CNSC and so on but interesting to note the darkest greens are where SMRs are already licensed to operate and the lightest greens are where we see pre-licensing engagement taking place so there's a volume of activity in North America but there's also a depth of activity happening in China and Russia for example this is all based on public verifiable information from the regulators themselves so this is not vendor self-assessment next slide please the snapshot of progress on sighting activities around the world here the color scheme is that the lightest green dots are the ones that are already operating or they're under construction the darkest greens there's sighting activity but in the earlier stages might be feasibility studies might be negotiations might be a non-binding MOU so you see a lot of sighting activity in North America and in Europe but in the earlier stages and we clearly see Russia and China leading in the deployment of first-of-a-kind small modular reactors and that includes reactors on land and on water and it includes generation four concepts next slide please through the collection of all this data we started to see some interesting or learn about some really interesting new applications these are these on this graph are not conceptual these are actual examples of projects that are moving forward with SMRs to replace coal SMRs to replace fossil cogeneration for the production of hydrogen and synthetic fuels small micro reactors to replace diesel at mining sites and SMRs to power data centers next slide please now there's going to be an animation I'm not expecting you to absorb all of it it's just indicative of what you'll see in the publication but while this is playing I'll recap some of our key findings some of the things that we learned while compiling this report first of all the variety of concepts different sizes different temperatures different fuel cycles different burn-up rates different configurations for a variety of applications and markets that is an asset because decarbonizing electricity is only the first step and frankly it's the easiest step and then we have to be able to reach into other parts of the economy that have very different requirements so that diversity of concepts is an asset but is also a significant challenge including from the perspective of regulators and national labs and other key enablers knowing where to grow their competencies and focus their efforts and resources we see Russia and China leading on deployment at this time but we see North America and Europe we see a lot of activity in North America and Europe that is accelerating and moving quickly timelines are near term and they are accelerating there are many different business models represented across all these so we see not only innovation in the technologies but also innovation in the deployment models the financing schemes and the business models public and private financing a lot of it has been sitting on the sidelines waiting for maybe the field to thin out a little bit but we do see some of that financing unlocking and accelerating which is absolutely critical field qualification and availability is going to be critical path especially for those proposing to use novel fuel cycles the readiness of regulators the supply chain and the workforce we see those as potentially rate limiting factors and lastly there's a lot of reason for optimism there is a great deal of momentum great deal of progress but we would say that through the collection of all this information we noted that almost all of the developers are laser focused on their first deployment project and to the extent that we need to unlock economies of multiples and shift to fleet and manufacturing and modularization in order to unlock the true potential of SMRs unlock the economies of multiples that paradigm shift has not yet started in earnest that doesn't mean it's not going to happen it just means that it hasn't started at this time so a lot of reason for optimism but also a lot of challenges that we have to overcome collectively in order to make this happen and as one of my other fellow panelists said the planet needs it humanity needs it so I'm delighted to be here today thank you for the invitation to share these thoughts with you and thank you Thank you Dianne thank you very much I really appreciate your participation this second year in a row and you've come a long way to do so so thank you I'm also looking forward to taking a deeper dive into the second edition of the dashboard it looks like it's well put together and easy to understand and comprehend and I think with the diverse group that we have at the RIC I think it's important that we step back and really take a look at what's happening globally so the presentations thank you so much for your remarks they were very interesting and I really thank you for your willingness to come and share with us today and participate in the panel so Mr. Producer if you'd put the QR code back up I guess it's up now right okay good and if you want to submit your questions if you haven't already please do so we're going to jump right into it CJ I'm going to come to you first do you have anything online or from the room I do Commissioner we've got some great questions already queued up first one here is for Shannon Shannon we heard at the plenary that retention of new employees is challenged by the relatively slow rate of innovation in nuclear and we talked a little bit about walking in the control room and it's like going back to 1960 right and so has that been your experience in the utility environment that you're having trouble staffing or retaining employees because of the slow rate of innovation yeah that's a great question and I think that that question is not even particular to nuclear power I think just in the world today right now there is that desire for innovation for change and the ability to do that in your everyday workforce you know as I mentioned in my results it is going to be crucial as we have the workforce is retiring and we have new generations that come in we want to first attract those people we want to show them the really neat things that I talked about that we talked about on a global scale as well and you know bring those people into our plants and into our companies and then it's really important to be able to give them the space to be creative to be innovative that support system and that time so that you can keep them into the company and providing value you know what I found is you know one of the benefits of you know being able to work with such a large organization like Constellation is people are innovating every single day we just have to give them the space and the resources to be able to move forward with that and I think when you see new people coming in and they see that and you're trying to recruit them that makes them interested if you can tell them that they have a space and that you're supportive of that type of development and innovation and then you know from a job satisfaction perspective like I said everybody wants to be more efficient and they want to learn quicker with their proficiency so being able to provide those opportunities to your current staff is super important as well thank you very much I'm going to come back over here I'm going to ask one from up here if it's all right Dianne I'm going to come to you real quick you know as countries seek to triple the global installed nuclear capacity by 2050 what are the pinch points that you see and you mentioned a lot of things that had to happen but are there are there real concerns about certain areas and what would be the biggest risk to success just press there there we go perfect okay so I'm going to focus the answer specifically on OECD countries and there's something very unique in OECD countries where including the United States and Canada and European countries over the last 20 years to different extents and different ways we've all really kind of divested what used to be vertically integrated state owned nuclear sectors we've divested and privatized which has many advantages to harness the competitive spirit of the private sector harness private sector innovation but it results in in some very specific challenges when you want to move quickly and you want to move a nation forward based on shared strategic vision and you no longer have sort of you have all these different actors who have to you know be convinced to move in the same direction with a shared vision and without falling under direct authority of a single of a single decision maker so that's a very unique challenge and I think that also there's a unique opportunity to help with that in terms of collaboration amongst OECD countries to renew and create strategic alliances to help compete globally with with state owned enterprises from other parts of the world those are really important and in support of that because that's kind of really big policy thinking in support of that there needs to be very very deliberate investment in things that can be rate limiting it takes time to bring a new workforce into the pipeline to bring people not only through the university system but to bring people mid-career from other sectors it takes time to ramp up your supply chain it's one thing to have a great supply chain based on current trusted partners but to triple there's going to have to be a lot of new players coming onto the field and we need to be thinking about how do you on board new players into the nuclear family and all that needs to be done with a shared vision of where we're trying to get to thank you very much CJ I'm going to come back to you thank you sir next questions for Jennifer Yule Jennifer regulation has been presented as one of the restraints to innovation could you provide some specific examples within the current landscape of that happening based on your experience digital I&C that was fast yeah look again industry needs a strong independent regulator absolutely positively it's necessary for social license and so nobody's talking about the NRC not doing its job nope it's critical however I do think that over time there has been a drive to get to absolute assurance rather than reasonable and if you were to say what does reasonable assurance look like the answer from the NRC will be it's whatever the commission says it looks like and then individually it has to be what the reviewer thinks is necessary and I understand that that I understand that it's it's essentially the ultimate performance based requirement however I do think that the example of digital I&C with all the safety benefits that it offers and and it's been articulated by my fellow panelists it's it's a shame the the world is digital and we are we're really happy the commissions last year issued the the risk informed approach to common cause failure which was the sticking point and we are now trying to get guidance developed now I know I just said guidance may not be the best thing on this case I'm going to say guidance would would be needed because the industry and the staff have been so far apart about what provides reasonable assurance that I think this is a case where where guidance it would would be helpful again we don't want it to be 2,000 pages long we want it to be pretty concise and we're working with the with the industry and the NRC about providing you know a succinct description of what the new policy would allow but that one that one is is a black eye on the industry absolutely positively we need to do better and I think we we really do need the industry and the reviewers and the in the commission we need to get away from this absolute assurance thank you I'm going to come back over here Miss producer if you could pull the live question three the live polling question three which was about what do you see as the most important area for innovation in the nuclear sector and and so I'm going to come to you Jen Schaefer all right surprise so there was you notice there's a spread of answers that on that question that that you can see can you maybe if you is this in line with what you're seeing and what y'all are working on at ARPA E are there maybe put a little bit more detail or more context on what's being shown here yeah absolutely and the one thing that I'll say only just to piggyback on what Jennifer said what she said beautifully is it seems to me that this is probably the choice of being the the perfect or the absolute regulator versus leveraging the broader safety benefits that come along with some of these technologies right it seems like the most the single most existential thing that in a NRC on some level needs to solve right now and so that's at least where I'm sitting when I see this now to the question that was actually directly asked to me AI and digital twins this is a critically enabling technology across the board whether that you're thinking about control whether you were thinking about maintenance whether you're thinking about all of these different pieces this is something that we've seen at the agency this is something that we're keeping in the eye as far as far as even thinking about supply chain innovation sometimes when I think about what we need to prop up in a very limited amount of time to meet our climate goals is we actually need to start thinking about how we can leverage this across the board and supply chain and deployment et cetera so I definitely echo the AI and digital twin observation when it comes to advanced materials and manufacturing and I'll also kind of put advanced fuels in there because I see them as two sides of a very similar coin as far as the absolute are indeed that needs to be executed there. I would say that this if there's a list of things that I'd like to take on at ARPA-E as far as one of them would be okay we need to start actually asking the control question and how we can actually we're supposed to be ARPA-E and not afraid of risk that's one piece of it when it comes to digital line see the next thing is advanced fuels and advanced materials how we get through this more rapidly how we demonstrate this how we assess this how we manufacture the fuels how we do this in a repeatable way sometimes when I hear people who who do fuel work for the current fleet it's almost like witchcraft as far as the actual manufacturing of the fuel pellet and things of that nature right there's a lot of just inferential science if you want to call it that that goes into it whereas you're not actually using some of the advanced manufacturing technologies that could exist there and I think that we'd want to leverage for many things especially if you're thinking about using transuranic fuels and you want to think about remote handling and being able to do that in a cost-effective and reasonable way the non-electrical applications trying to develop a program in nuclear heat for industrial applications I see it as a really important opportunity one of the things that we struggled most with program development that we're still working through is what is the actual innovation that gets us there more rapidly is it large-scale construction engineering digital tools is it how you're able to harmonize on a design more rapidly I think that that's one of the more critical things the other thing is we're still spanning the space for what would actually be the most impactful place to put our money down if you were to start investing in this as far as when you think about who the market players are and what their specific non-nuclear needs are right so there's still a little bit of community building frankly I think that needs to be done with respect to that and then when you think about grid integration I'd agree that this is something that we need to be thinking about when we think about how you interface with the grid but it's probably not the sort of thing like if I had to rack and stack the top list of things it's probably the one that I'd be like okay I think we can figure this one out the most on the fly so yeah thank you so much CJ I'm gonna come back to you okay this next question is for my friend and former colleague Deanne in your projection you had a slide that showed projections for future needs for nuclear what percentage of that was for electricity versus other applications and I'm gonna expand the question a little bit since we're talking about innovation could you also talk about are there and others could chime into are there some regulatory innovations that are necessary to enable the non-electrical applications of nuclear and thinking about like emergency preparedness security how do we handle that so if others want to chime in on that too that would be great so the graph that I showed had our scenarios that graph was color-coded based on long-term operation large-scale nuclear new build and SMR we have exactly the same shape in the report color-coded by electrical versus non-electrical applications and I don't have the split right at my fingertips but it's in the report on climate change targets so please check out check out the report if you'd like to see that it does include a significant amount of heat applications and I would say one of the key differences at least as of 2022 between the NEA scenarios that we published versus at that time the IEA net zero scenarios is that the IEA was focused they were calling for a doubling of nuclear capacity by 2050 but they were focused basically on electric electricity production and so it might end up but this is a couple years ago already right so one more thing to say which is we are going to update our analysis this year and publish a refresh to those scenarios because we know more today than we did three years ago obviously what was the second question I was wondering if you could talk about are there regulatory innovations that are necessary to enable I mean we understand the sort of technical challenge for example with coupling say a high-temperature gas reactor with the chemical plant but are there regulatory changes or innovations that are necessary to enable that use of the technology yeah I think so and the regulatory innovations go hand in hand with with some of the design innovations I think the extent to which the design can reduce the scope of the industrial project that falls under the purview of the nuclear safety regulator that has certain advantages so thinking about how you technically couple your nuclear reactor with an industrial site while meeting their requirements which sometimes requires deep integration of the two technologies but at the same time thinking about what the tradeoff is because if I can separate as much of the as much of the physical project as possible from from the scope of the nuclear safety regulator then I might be able to give the NRC a bit of a break right with a smaller smaller body of design that they they have to review and then I think there's another piece of this which is synchronicity of timelines so for all of these different industrial applications you know people talk about regulatory certainty great and really often they're also implying or explicitly calling for faster regulatory timelines right really everybody wants their license just faster but in actuality faster is not necessarily what is needed what is needed is synchronicity so if you have a mine site and you're planning horizon for a mine site is five years you need to be able to have your SMR in five years and that means you need to get through the regulatory process in five years you don't actually need it in two you you just need it in five seven forget it it's not going to have you know seven means you're not an option for that mine site and so really understanding the the synchronicity and the timeline requirements of these different industrial sectors and helping that guide the prioritization within the regulatory process I think that's something that needs to happen and be thought about thank you so much so there were there as it always happens you generate a ton of questions because the information they shared was a lot we can't get to all the questions we're we're out of time now and for the panel so I'd like to thank each of you again for taking the time to to be with us and share with us today Shannon and Jen Jennifer Dianne thank you so much and and for all of you in the audience for your participation and for the time you took to be with us here today thank you so much your your questions added a lot of value to the session and hopefully you enjoyed it and I'm sure on the way out if you have questions for them they'll be glad to answer them so thank you so much yeah nice job everybody great job it's like a girl


Okay, thank you very much. I would like to begin our second session now to introduce our distinguished political keynote speaker Senator Brett Mason. We are delighted to welcome Professor Ian Young, Vice Chancellor of the ANU. We thank him sincerely for his time and support for the Japan update. Please join me in welcoming Professor Ian Young. Well thank you Simon. Ladies and gentlemen could I begin by acknowledging the first Australians on whose traditional land we meet and paying my respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. Ambassador Aki Motou, Ambassador Murray McLean my great privilege here this morning at this second Japan update is to introduce Senator the Honourable Brett Mason. This year is an important year for Australia-Japan relations Prime Minister Tony Abbott visited Japan in April and Prime Minister Abe visited Australia in July. During his visit Prime Minister Abe delivered an important speech to the joint sitting of parliament in English and at which we were also delighted that after that we were able to host him here at ANU. While in Australia Prime Minister Abe endorsed the ANU's Australia-Japan Research Centre as the nation's national centre on thinking on Japan and the centre was highlighted in the joint statements by both Prime Ministers. ANU has long played a role in research on Japan and Japanese studies and in influencing policy. Let me just indulge for a moment and just mention a couple of significant elements around that. Just looking across ANU today we have established the Japan Institute which is the umbrella institution that brings together all of the Japan related researches and activities from right across this institution. We're fortunate at present time to in fact have two Japan specialists in executive roles within the university. Professor Jenny Corbett is the Vice-Chancellor of Research and Research Training and Professor Veronica Taylor is the Dean of the ANU College of Asia and Pacific. I think it's quite unusual to be in a situation where we have two Japan specialists in those particular roles. And indeed just earlier this week Emeritus Professor Peter Drysdale and Peter's here, his longstanding contributions were recognised in being awarded the Japan Foundation award. He's only the third Australian to win and I have to say with some pride that both of the others were also from ANU. You use every opportunity you get, don't you? But look, enough boasting, enough boasting, that's the Vice-Chancellor of South Wasting. I'm very happy here to see in fact another great product of ANU in Senator Mason, of course an alum of this university we're always delighted when Senator Mason returns to ANU. He was in fact here back in November to launch a program around the G20 at the Crawford School which was hosted also with the Brookings Institution so we're delighted to see him back again. Senator Mason is the Parliamentary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Senator for Queensland. On this occasion he is officially representing the honourable Tony Abbott MP Prime Minister of Australia. In the past he has held the various positions in the shadow education portfolio in particular with a particular responsibility for universities and I know we've interacted with him quite a lot at that particular time. And before entering Parliament of course he also has a relationship with universities having previously served in criminology at QUT and also served as a Commonwealth prosecutor. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming the honourable Senator Brett Mason. Ian thank you so much ladies and gentlemen a good morning. I don't mind admitting ladies and gentlemen that when I have the opportunity to come to the Australian National University this wonderful set of learning, my heart does skip a beat at times. It reminds me when I was very young and you're right here. I am a proud graduate of this university but I'm also a very grateful one. I think I've had a fortunate life and there is no question that without the impulse for me and you I would not have had the fortunate life I've had so I want to thank you Ian on behalf of the university for what this great institution has done for me and the ANU also should thank E-Twice Chancellor. You have a creative, a very energetic and one of the most respected educationalists in Australia has to administer this wonderful university and he does a terrific job so thank you everyone for having me here this morning. I'm Dr. Armstrong co-director of the Australia-Japan Research Center Vice-Peter Drysdale, the head of the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research and East Asia Forum, distinguished guests from Australia and Japan including my friend Ambassador Akamoto good morning sir and Ambassador Murray McLean ladies and gentlemen there's an old saying, an old Japanese proverb that says when the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends. On that basis Japan and Australia are two very fine and upstanding countries for all the differences and of course there are differences in our culture and our history. There are many factors that have been drawing our two countries ever closer together both Japan and Australia to sit off the Asian mainland. We're happily part of the region but we're also capable of a somewhat detached or outsider's perspective even though Australia is really a small continent we like to think of ourselves as just a big island so our two countries share an island mentality and a very strong maritime outlook. We face outwards into the world trade and commerce are our lifeblood and indeed our lifeline. Furthermore we're both large developed capitalist economies. One could say we are the pioneers of the market economy in a region which really has only started catching up over the past quarter of the century to the idea that socialism doesn't really work. Last but not least we're both strong, vibrant people and democracies committed to freedom and liberty at home and peace and stability abroad. Again this has sometimes been a lonely and unpopular place for us for both of us to be. I won't revisit and re-examine our mutual history today our Prime Ministers, Mr Rabbit and Mr Ravey have done so extensively and frankly and in a spirit of great mutual respect during Prime Minister Ravey's historic visit to Australia just a few months ago. Let me just observe that the ties between Australia and Japan are growing ladies and gentlemen even stronger. Once more they've also become more diverse becoming more diverse, a testament to the quality and the breadth of our bilateral relationship. The strong rapport between our two leaders I've heard some Australians describe it as a romance. I don't know how that's translated into Japanese in that sense. It was a personal reflection of that. I had the great pleasure of meeting Prime Minister Ravey in Tokyo last year and of course I've known Tony Abbott for many years and I watched them with great interest when they were in camera in July. Leaders tend to be infallibly polite with each other, well usually during these sorts of top meetings but it was very clear that there was more than just that formality of protocol present. There was a lot more than that present. I know there was a genuine liking and connection. I think our Prime Ministers got each other and they understood each other. I'm very pleased that our leaders reaffirmed, dear I borrow from the Anglo-Australian history, the special relationship between Australia and Japan and confirmed that they would meet annually. This is a bonus this is icing on the cake because the strength and the closeness of the relationship between Australia and Japan does not really rely on the interpersonal relationship at the top of government. It's more solid and it's more comprehensive than that. I'd like just to briefly touch on some contemporary aspects of that relationship. Economy or trade investment clearly is the bedrock of our relationship and has been so right from the very beginning. Although Australians and Australian businesses have at times developed heightened interests in other countries and in other markets, this has never been accompanied by a corresponding decline in interest in Japan not at all. There's no better evidence for that than the recently concluded Japan-Australian Economic Partnership Agreement. It's the highest quality free trade agreement Japan has ever signed and it is one of the most important free trade agreements Australia has ever signed. I suspect ever will sign. I remember growing up in the 1970s Japan was certainly Australia's number one trading partner in Asia then but if someone had said to me, if someone had said that Australia and Japan would one day have a free trade agreement in the 1970s they would have been laughed out of town. A lot has changed in our two countries since then and for the better thanks to many reforming and forward-looking leaders of whom Prime Minister Arbe and Prime Minister Abba are the most recent exemplars. On the strategic and political level Japan is a key regional player in the Indo-Pacific and so is Australia. We've been working closely during the past 70 years now, it's a long time, 70 years to overcome historical legacies and create a regional environment where both our countries can flourish together as can all others. I won't bore you ladies and gentlemen with the alphabet suit of acronyms but whether it's the East Asia Summit, APEC, Trans-Pacific Partnership or the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership we have been working together for greater cooperation and for free trade throughout our region and I note with satisfaction that our Prime Ministers have also agreed to commence work on a coordinated Pacific Strategy of Development, Defence and Diplomatic Activities as well. Outside of our immediate region I can't think of any significant international issue of concern where Japan and Australia have not been on the same wavelength and working side by side that's whether it's the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 or dealing with the aftermath of the other Malaysian air tragedy in Ukraine, the Syrian crisis in the Middle East or indeed the Ebola crisis in Africa. We also continue to be engaged with members of the G20 and we work closely together in the UN World Trade Organization and in other fora where our shared interests in a rules based international order meet and join. Speaking of the G20 it'll be great to post Prime Minister Abe once again this time in my hometown of Brisbane. I know that the great state of Queensland with its magnificent beaches and lifestyle and Gold Coast in particular has always been a great favourite of the Japanese people. So all in all the special relationship between Japan and Australia is increasingly not just a regional partnership but of course a global partnership. It's also increasingly multifaceted. The Defence Science and Technology Agreement finalised recently will facilitate deeper defence science technology and material cooperation. This is another example of cooperation between Japan and Australia that not many people would have foreseen just a few years ago. Last but not least is a whole gamut of interpersonal links including in the area of education and as you know the Australian Government has commenced its new Colombo Plan to give Australian undergraduates, many have come from this great university an opportunity to study and gain work experience right throughout the Asia Pacific region. We want our young people to become Asia Literate and embrace their future here in our region. Japan of course is one of the first four pilot countries for the program and when I was lucky enough to visit Japan late last year everyone I spoke to, everyone I spoke to, whether they were business people, academics, officials, people from Government they're all excited about welcoming Australian students. I know that the Japanese Government is working on a similar scheme to send Japanese students overseas and we're equally excited about that here in Australia. Ladies and gentlemen the Abbott Government has afforded the Japan Relationship a new emphasis since its election about a year ago. The Japan Relationship is one that has struggled treasures and it gives comfort to us that we have such a friend when we are faced with troubling and let's face it, at very uncertain times at present. It might be unsophisticated and perhaps I am even though I'm an ANU graduate, it might be unsophisticated but I can't have to claim that there's a special bond that liberal free market democracy share with each other. If it is unsophisticated well, it will all so be it. But I don't think there's a better example of that bond in our region than the friendship between our two countries. On our finish, mindful of another, a very old Japanese proverb that says the inarticulate speak the longest. It gives me great pleasure to officially launch the current issue of the East Asia Forum quarterly. The issue about a Japan that can say yes. A Japan that can say yes to the future. A Japan that can say yes to the world. And when Japan says yes to Australia, Australia will always be there to say yes to Japan. Thank you.