Dallas Petry – Business Systems & Process Approach to Nuclear Regulatory Compliance TEAC 7

Dallas Petry specializes in business process analysis & design and is always looking to reduce latency and cost in complex business processes. The challenge of nuclear regulatory compliance stresses the need to index the records of nuclear applicants and operators according to NRC regulations. Regulatory indexing facilitates efficient retrieval of information for NRC review and inspection activities, thereby reducing time and cost. This goal can be accomplished by both operators and applicants through tailoring their internal business systems (CAD, Engineering, Construction Management, Procurement, Materials Handling, Staff & Training, Operations, Maintenance, etc.) to index records/documents and report on them according to the NRC’s needs for regulatory evidence. It is proposed that NRC and industry work together to further formalize the NRC regulations into a project-based knowledge management framework. A published framework can be used to: – provide the comprehensive regulatory index structure to the internal, business systems of operators and applicants, – provide the definitive framework of tasks that an applicant must undertake to achieve milestones such as reactor design certification. – contain the knowledge library of technical documents and interpretations to every regulatory component. Having such a structure allows industry to fully understand the relation between regulations and the reactor design and the maintenance and operations processes, as well as NRC’s inspection procedures. This allows better delegation of compliance activities to the industry’s engineers, scientists, operations managers and maintenance managers whose responsibility it is to produce the documentary evidence required by NRC. The framework could also be used by NRC to estimate what work effort and activities are required for specific paths of reactor applications (eg. design certification versus site license). In conjunction with good records management practices on behalf of applicants, work estimates could be used by NRC to make rough estimates of costs for reactor applications. Mr. Petry’s talk was presented at TEAC7: Thorium Energy Alliance Conference #7 (June 2015), in Palo Alto, California.