Columbia Generating Station’s Operations Vice President Grover Hettel has served on the Utilities Service Alliance’s senior leadership core peer team for about two years. Hettel recently sat down to talk about being a part of the USA team.

What is the USA site leadership team?

The site leadership team (SLT) is made up of vice president representatives from each USA member station. One VP from each station is on the team. Our team reports to the board of directors, which are the chief nuclear officers from each of the USA member stations.

In general, we help ensure that each of our stations are receiving the benefit of being a USA member. We also set and drive the initiatives in the USA business plans.

Each SLT member is also a sponsor for one of the core peer teams. I am the Training Core Peer Team sponsor.

What is new with the Training Core Peer Team?

One of the areas the team is looking at is Training performance indicators. We are taking some of our processes and common health metrics for Training and aligning on the metrics. This way, we are familiar with the metrics well enough to help each other more and provide better feedback.

The Training CPT is there to help each station out and strengthen their programs. They are also a support system for each other when it comes to preparing for Training accreditation renewals. The team has been very successful over the last two and a half years. None of our member stations have been placed on probation, and that’s a big credit to the core peer team and their involvements.

What does being a part of USA mean to you?

For me, it gives me a group of plants in the industry and peers that I can go to for benchmarking, or use as a sounding board, and that alone is very helpful.

I also see it as an opportunity to drive improvement. It is good to be a part of something that you can use to improve, and it creates some healthy competition between one another. We’re able to learn from each other’s mistakes and also learn from what others have accomplished and done well.

USA Senior Leadership Team member Grover Hettel is the vice president of Operations at Columbia Generating Station near Richland, Wash.