In November of last year, we provided an update on possible Projects for 2020 with a promise to update all of you after the Board of Directors (BOD) made their final decisions. This update is intended to share with all of you the Projects selected for 2020. The following Projects were approved by the USA BOD for 2020:
Spend & Rebate Forecasting- While not technically a Project, this effort is worth reporting out on. The USA BOD authorized USA personnel to develop an automated process to forecast spend on USA agreements containing rebates, to allow real-time tracking of spend and rebates throughout the year. Brad Vickery will be leading this initiative and the USA BOD has assigned ownership of the process at the stations. This activity is intended to drive more use of USA agreements and allow adjustments during the year, instead of just seeing results at the end of the year when it’s too late to correct.
Training- John Tripoli has rotated from Plant Status Control to Training full-time for 2020. The USA fleet has Seven Accreditation Team Visits (ATVs) planned from December 2019 to December 2020. Ensuring each station’s success will be John’s major duty for the year. This will require John to attend Accreditation Renewal activities at several non-USA stations to ensure the changes made by INPO last year are correctly implemented at the USA stations.
Advanced Remote Monitoring – will continue as a project through 2022.
Cyber-Security – The USA BOD approved funding for this project only through the completion of USA member NRC inspections which conclude in July of 2020. At that time the team will stay active as a networking team with no full-time PM.
- The NRC is performing “Full Implementation” Cyber Security Inspections at the plants through 2020. They will inspect 3 USA Plants in 2020. Cook in April, Columbia in July, and Comanche Peak in February.
- 18 Utilities are scheduled for inspections in 2020. (6 utilities will have MS-8 Inspections after our final inspection in July)
- Continue to provide USA MS-8 Peer Assessment Support to any site requesting this.
- The sites that have already had NRC Inspections are focusing their assessments on issues identified by the regulator. We want to be sure these are resolved before the regulator returns for PI&R Inspections.
- Determine what assessment procedure changes are necessary to meet the NRC post Milestone 8 Inspection requirements. (The NRC is determining what the new inspection process will be)
- Team Benchmarking of each other.
- Weekly Conference Calls.
- Sharing of documents/procedures.
Artificial Intelligence CAP Screening – The USA BOD has decided to wait until a pilot of this initiative is completed at Columbia Station before making a final decision. Columbia’s pilot of this program is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2020 and at that time the USA BOD will review the results and determine if a fleetwide effort is worth pursuing. We will update everyone after that decision has been made.
- The proposed system will:
- Use algorithms to screen CAPs to generate recommendations for severity, Condition Adverse to Quality determination, proposed actions, evaluations, owner (by position), and trend codes
- Analyze data to detect trends in performance
- Identify and report most significant issues and detected trends
Fuel Purchasing/Coordination – The USA BOD authorized this effort and it is already complete. AEP, NPPD, Talen, and Xcel are participating members and worked with ConverDyn and Cameco to develop long-term agreements/contracts for UF6 supply and conversion that will save our members approximately $8M.
At the recent USA Winter Conference, the Site Rep team decided that going forward we will meet in the fall of each year to discuss in more detail potential projects for the following year, along with discussions on project value, and engagement. This meeting is a result of a review of lessons learned from changes implemented as a part of the new USA Business model.