CNO Summit Diary: Peter Sena of First Energy Reflects on Lessons of Fukushima After Attending US-Japan CNO Summit

While the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit has ended and the American delegation has returned home, we're still seeing reports come in from their time in Japan. The latest is this video diary from Peter Sena, President and Chief Nuclear Officer of First Energy. In this video vignette, Sena reflect on the lessons he learned after visiting Fukushima Daiichi and meeting face to face with TEPCO employees who are working to clean up the site:



As always, please keep up to date with the latest content by following #CNOSummit on Twitter.

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CNO Summit Diary: Why FLEX Is The Right Response to Fukushima

Maria Korsnick

Constellation Energy Chief Nuclear Officer Maria Korsnick was in Japan last week touring the country’s nuclear facilities with a prominent group of U.S. chief nuclear officers. 

This is the second in a series of travel logs that Maria recorded. You can read an earlier diary entry from Maria, here. Additional coverage of the CNO Summit is on Twitter at #CNOSummit.

Earlier this week I toured Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini. The stations are only 7.5 miles apart but the contrast is remarkable. When approaching Daiichi, we were stopped at a village 12 miles from the station. The area was previously used as a training facility for Japan's soccer team, but today it serves as temporary housing for site workers and a plant access checkpoint. Each of us received a whole body count before boarding a bus to Daiichi.

The view from the bus window will stay with me forever. It looked like a war zone. The earthquake and the force of the tsunami were evident everywhere. The town was empty, the houses are decaying and the storefronts are damaged. You are surrounded by broken glass, twisted metal and overturned vehicles. Large storage tanks have been torn from their mounting plates and pushed aside. Pieces of the reactor building serve as constant reminders of the hydrogen explosion.

When we arrived at the site we were issued paper face masks, anti-contamination clothing and shoe covers. We dressed out and boarded another bus to tour the station grounds. The seats are covered in pink plastic herculite sheets to further protect us from contamination. As we drove the site, I could see that many buildings were still uninhabitable. Others had been converted to shift worker resting areas or additional checkpoints.

There are six reactors on this site. Units 1, 2 and 3 have damaged cores. Units 4, 5 and 6 do not, but they will never operate again. Decommissioning the entire site will take 30+ years. The biggest challenge right now is water: too much of it in the wrong place to be exact. Rows and rows of large tanks, similar to our condensate storage tanks, are being used to hold contaminated groundwater. The earthquake collapsed the underground drainage system, so the groundwater is collecting around the buildings and leaking in. The reactor building is contaminated from the accident, so the water becomes contaminated, too. They pump the water into the tanks to clean it, but keeping up with the volume of water is very challenging and they can't discharge anything. Even water clean enough to meet U.S. EPA standards cannot be discharged.

Currently they are clearing more land and installing more tanks, but a better solution is needed. Making matters worse, many of the original tanks were bolted together, not welded, and prone to leakage. Cleaning up water and fixing leaks continues 24/7 while they seek a viable long-term solution. It's a massive challenge but it’s evident that they are working very hard to get their arms around it.

The following day we toured Fukushima Daini and its four reactors. The station is only 7.5 miles from Daiichi, so it experienced the same earthquake and tsunami. They also lost power and their emergency diesels and electrical cabinets were affected by flooding. Damage is evident in a few places but, for the most part, the station has been cleaned up and repaired. They fought the same storm, but with the benefit of a few design and response differences, they won.

Unlike Daiichi, Daini retained power to some of the instrumentation in the control room, so they could assess the status of key systems. They were able to rally their site team and find creative solutions. They ran over six miles of heavy electrical cable, in about a day, to bring in offsite power to support their safety systems. Over 500 employees stayed for weeks to support the site. It's an amazing story of an engaged team, under extreme stress, with strong leadership that brought amazing results.

It's clear that the negative outcome of Daiichi overshadowed Daini's remarkable performance. As nuclear professionals, we can learn as much from what went right as we can from what didn't. They proved that our portable, diverse equipment strategy know as FLEX can be successful in protecting their plant and their people. Back home, we need to continue to prepare for and defend against beyond design events. With pre-staged, portable equipment, we can give our team options. The equipment is in place now, but additional training and procedural guidance over the next several months will make us even better prepared for the unimaginable.

Standing here at Fukushima Daini, I'm confident that our FLEX strategy is the right approach for our stations and the industry as a whole. I'm comforted to know that it worked here, and very thankful to our Japanese colleagues for their dedication, hard work and many successes.

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CNO Summit Diary: PG&E's Ed Halpin on the Lessons From Fukushima

Ed Halpin, SVP & CNO of PG&E

Ed Halpin, Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer at PG&E, was in Japan this week with virtually all of his American colleagues as part of the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit. He shared this diary entry with us after reflecting on what he saw at Fukushima Daiichi earlier this week. Be sure to follow all the updates from Japan on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag.

As nuclear operators, we have earned a special trust from the communities we serve. My time here reaffirms my belief that the U.S. nuclear industry must always maintain its strong focus on safe operations, intensive training programs, effective peer-review processes, and the continued sharing of lessons-learned across the nation and throughout the world. The U.S. industry has always relied on redundant layers of safety in operating its facilities and is making exceptional gains in implementing a program known as "FLEX" to further enhance safety in the face of extreme natural events.

"FLEX" addresses the major challenges encountered at the Fukushima Daiichi power station following the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami: the loss of power to maintain effective reactor fuel cooling. The strategy focuses on providing an uninterrupted supply of electricity and cooling water to protect critical plant safety systems at all times and ensuring that every U.S. nuclear energy facility can respond safely to extreme events, no matter what the cause.

My belief is that mandating more modifications or changing our design requirements based on the worst potential natural disasters and assuming conditions that are highly improbable will only complicate our response to such an event. Certainly we need to close out the more important issues that are currently on the table and in keeping with our industry "Path to Excellence." Even more importantly, we need to continue to emphasize a strong operational focus with rigorous, realistic training. We must be able to implement our FLEX strategies blindfolded across every operating crew and our emergency response teams and training have got to be exemplary. These actions honor the trust we have earned from our communities and customers and keep us focused on our primary goal - safety.

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CNO Summit Diary: Entergy Nuclear CNO Calls Visiting Fukushima Daiichi 'Life-Altering'

The past two days in Japan, U.S. chief nuclear officers have toured Fukushima Daini and Daiichi, and with respect to the latter, left the experience appreciably changed. We've made a point each day of inviting the CNOs to the very back of our tour bus and asking them to share their experiences on camera with us.

It's true that every CNO we spoke with identified the Daiichi visit as life-altering, but no reaction seemed better representative of the CNOs than that of Jeff Forbes, Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer for Entergy Nuclear. Just watch.

Please remember to follow our updates on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag.

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CNO Summit Diary: Maria Korsnick's Reflections from Japan

Maria Korsnick

Maria Korsnick is Chief Nuclear Offiicer (CNO) of Constellation Energy. In the aftermath of Fukushima, Maria appeared in a series of videos for NEI explaining exactly what changes the industry was effecting in the wake of Fukushima. 

She's in Japan this week as part of a delegation of American CNOs touring the country’s nuclear facilities as part of the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit. This is the first in a series of travel logs that Maria recorded to share her experiences. Please remember to follow our updates on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag.

As I boarded the plane for Japan, I wondered what it was going to be like to experience our business in a completely different culture. Once I arrived, it didn’t take long to generate some first impressions. My hosts were welcoming and polite, surroundings were neat and orderly and properties were well-cared for. It’s abundantly clear that the Japanese people take pride in their surroundings.

Japan has only one-third the population of the United States; however the entire country is roughly the size of California and only 27% of their land is habitable. That means lots of people in a small space. For perspective, greater Tokyo is home to a staggering 30 million people. Despite its population density, Japan doesn't exude the chaos of a crowd. Trains arrive and depart precisely on schedule, the cars are clean and you better be in line to board or it will leave without you. Thousands of people move around quietly and in orderly fashion. There’s no trace of graffiti, trash or cigarette butts anywhere.  It’s quite unlike anything you would see in any large American city.

Tokyo at night.

On our first day, we took a train and a bus to a plant known as “KK”, three hours outside Tokyo. There are seven reactors on the site but none are currently operating. They are in the process of updating their tsunami counter measures. We were warmly welcomed by our hosts. American and Japanese flags were displayed side by side. We had a good discussion on their learnings from the 2007 NCO earthquake. They have since built upon their already strong design and made enhancements to add margin.

The plant tour was quite impressive. Inside the Unit 7 control room (it’s an advanced BWR design) operators use digital controls and operate plant equipment from computer screens. A member of the Japanese regulatory body was present in the control room, much like NRC residents tour our plants and ask us follow up questions. A banner in the room read, “World Class Nuclear Plant: Resilient to Natural Disasters.” I wish them well on their journey to re-start the units. 

At the end of day one, I remember thinking that the world of nuclear translates well. Regardless of what language was being spoken, attentive operators worked in pristine conditions and focused intently on effective communications and procedure adherence to ensure safety. Sounds like us!

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CNO Summit Diary: Chasing lessons in safety at Fukushima by chasing the sun

The following post was sent to us via email by John Keeley, who is travelling with a delegation of American chief nuclear officers in Japan this week. You can follow John's observations on Twitter by following @nei_media and the #CNOSummit hash tag.

In summer, in morning or early afternoon, when a traveler moves by air many thousands of miles from east to west, he never quite escapes the bright sun of day. My communicator colleagues here in Japan all noted the difficulty we had securing substantive rest on our flights over the Pacific during this novel journey. We were ever chasing the sun, they said.

The American chief nuclear officers we're following with our cameras and electronica this week have been, ever since their arrival here, in perpetual motion in pursuit of safety lessons. In making the unprecedented and extraordinary commitment to "put eyes on the problem" created by the 3/11 Fukushima tragedy, our CNOs, it occurs to me, are following a global commitment to safety much as we communicators were following the sun.

Remember: this is a trip undertaken *after* U.S. CNOs had unanimously adopted significant safety enhancements at all 63 operating stations in response to the Fukushima accident.

The CNOs I ran into late on Sunday night were every bit as bleary-eyed and time-zone tortured as we communicators, but about 15 of them awoke at the crack of dawn Monday morning in order to board buses and trains to Kashiwazaki Kariwa, the largest nuclear generating station in the world with a capacity of 8200 MWs and 5400 employees.  Since 2007 the station has invested almost $2 billion dollars fixing earthquake damage and installing post-Fukushima modifications. There were significant safety lessons to be learned in seismic and flooding space at Kashiwazaki, and so our CNOs bused hours across this island to learn them.

They returned from that site about an hour before meeting their Japanese CNO counterparts at Monday night's welcoming reception. There's no rest for the safety-lesson-craving weary on this trip, and well before a new workday had started in Tokyo on Tuesday every American CNO was back on a tour bus, this time headed for site visits at both Fukushima Daini and Daiichi. We'll have a lot more to say and illustrate about those two extraordinary site visits in the days ahead, but at the end of a hot Tuesday of touring the CNOs were still very much in motion, still very much  in learning mode.

Darkness was fast setting upon our tour, but instead of heading to our new hotel and a badly needed hot meal our buses trudged slowly through a town called Tomioka. It's a seaside town quite near both Fukushima plant sites, and on March 11, 2011, it knew 16,000 residents. It was a community known in summer for festivals and parades.

Tomioka. Photo used under Create Commons License through Wikipedia

Today it's devoid of human existence, devastated by the tsunami and uninhabitable by radiological fallout. Unchecked nature is overgrowing much of what had been developed and thriving little more than two years ago.

Fallout from the Daiichi accident delivers 1-3 millisieverts microsieverts an hour in Tomioka. The Japanese government has begun decontamination efforts for the town, and there is a plan to have is habitable by 2017, but today it is a sobering wreck of abandonment. Our CNOs wanted to see with their very own eyes the ultimate consequences of a day gone very wrong at a plant.

I wish them all some early and deep shuteye tonight. They're off to freshly pursue safety lessons through the total  sun again of tomorrow.

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