The Nuclear Power Plant Exporters' Principles of Conduct are an industry code of conduct resulting from a three-year initiative to develop norms of corporate self-management in the exportation of nuclear power plants. In developing and adopting the Principles of Conduct, the world's leading nuclear power plant vendors have articulated and consolidated a set of principles that reaffirm and enhance national and international governance and oversight, and incorporate recommended best practices in the areas of safety, security, environmental protection and spent fuel management, nonproliferation, business ethics and internationally recognized systems for compensation in the unlikely event of nuclear related damage.

Speaker Biography:

Ariel (Eli) Levite is a nonresident senior associate in the Nonproliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment. He is a member of the Israeli Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee on Arms Control and Regional Security and a member of the board of directors of the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies.

Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Levite was the Principal Deputy Director General for Policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Levite also served as the deputy national security advisor for defense policy and was head of the Bureau of International Security and Arms Control in the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

In September 2000, Levite took a two year sabbatical from the Israeli civil service to work as a visiting fellow and project co-leader of the "Discriminate Force" Project as the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.

Before his government service, Levite worked for five years as a senior research associate and head of the project on Israeli security at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Levite has taught courses on security studies and political science at Tel Aviv University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Davis.

The events of this year alone have highlighted the impact that natural phenomena (so called external events) can have on critical infrastructure and commercial nuclear power plants in particular. The design of commercial nuclear power plant structures, systems and components has taken into account the effect of loads due to external events such as earthquakes, floods, high winds and tornados. However, the original approach for establishing design levels was based on deterministic methods that today would be viewed as short-sighted and scientifically inadequate. This talk will offer perspectives and insights on NPP design and performance, evaluation of so-called extreme events, and how evaluations of potential core damage accidents are performed. The approach and process of evaluating plant integrity and safety continues to evolve; in part this is attributable to a degree to the vigilance that is maintained by the industry, but is also due to ‘current events’ that demand attention (new science, Fukashima experience, Fort Calhoun flood experience, Virginia earthquake, etc.).

About the speaker: Dr. McCann is currently the President of Jack R. Benjamin & Associates, Inc., a Consulting professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and Director of the National Performance of Dams Program (NPDP). He received his B.S. in civil engineering from Villanova University in 1975, an M.S. in civil engineering in 1976 from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in 1980, also from Stanford University.

His areas of expertise and professional experience includes probabilistic risk analysis for civil infrastructure facilities and, probabilistic hazards analysis, including seismic and hydrologic events, reliability assessment, risk-based decision analysis, systems analysis, and seismic engineering. He currently teaches a class on critical infrastructure management in the civil and environmental engineering department.

He has been involved in probabilistic risk studies for nuclear power plants since the early 1980’s and is now participating in a new round of risk studies for plants in the U.S. Recently, Dr. McCann led the Delta Risk Management Strategy project that is conducting a risk analysis for over 1100 miles of levee in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Delta. He was also a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ IPETRisk and Reliability team evaluating the risk associated with the New Orleans levee protection system following Hurricane Katrina.

He is currently serving on 2 National Academy of Sciences panels addressing issues associated with levees and community resilience and the National Flood Insurance Program.

Much study has been put into the concept of a multinational or international “nuclear fuel bank,” and in 2010 two such banks became a reality according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. However, all of the conceptual studies along with the two IAEA-approved banks are not really “fuel” banks; rather they are low-enriched uranium (LEU) reserves. While uranium is a commodity, fuel for a nuclear reactor is a highly-engineered product of which uranium is a component.

It has been argued that because there are more fuel fabricators than enrichers, the enrichment step is the crux of a supply assurance mechanism. This is a gross oversimplification. If one cannot get from LEU to a fabricated fuel assembly, then the fuel supply assurance is not available. There are issues of fuel design, core physics, regulation, intellectual property, and liabilities that could preclude fuel fabrication and delivery in a timely manner. These issues and obstacles will be discussed along with some suggestions about how they might be overcome to provide real fuel assurances.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Alan Hanson was appointed as Executive Vice President, Technologies and Used Fuel Management of AREVA NC Inc. in 2005. In this position he was responsible for all of AREVA’s activities in the backend of the nuclear fuel cycle in the U.S. Prior to that he served as President and CEO of Transnuclear, Inc., also an AREVA company, which he joined in 1985. Transnuclear designs, licenses and supplies dry storage casks; more than half of the casks in the U.S. have been supplied by Transnuclear.

In January of 2011, Dr. Hanson started a year-long assignment as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University on loan from AREVA. At CISAC he conducts research on the worldwide nuclear supply chain and international fuel assurance mechanisms. 

Dr. Hanson began his career in 1975 with the Nuclear Services Division of Yankee Atomic Electric Company. In 1979, he joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria. At the IAEA, he served first as Coordinator of the International Spent Fuel Management Program and later as Policy Analyst with responsibilities in the areas of safeguards and non-proliferation policies.

Alan Hanson received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1969 and earned his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977. He also is a recipient of a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) degree from Georgetown University in 2009.  He is a member of the American Nuclear Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Nuclear energy is politically sensitive. For its proponents, nuclear energy is clean and highly efficient and indeed is the only alternative to fossil fuels in providing a base supply of electricity. For its opponents, nuclear energy is nothing but trouble, a symbol of war and weaponry par excellence, and one that creates environmental problems for mankind today and in the future. What is remarkable in this highly emotional debate is the general division between developed and developing countries. Asian and Gulf states are more active than many in other continents in expanding or developing their nuclear energy capacities. China is leading this expansion with 27 reactors under construction now.

Nuclear development in China highlights a series of objectives many developing countries try to balance – energy and economy, energy and development, energy and environment, energy and security, and the need for both clean energy and adequate and reliable energy supplies. It tells a counterintuitive story about Chinese politics – a single-party authoritarian political system with an extremely fragmented institutional structure in nuclear energy policy making, implementation and regulation and with highly competitive market forces in play. It provides a cautionary tale about the Chinese as well as global nuclear future. This paper discusses the challenges of nuclear energy development, using China as an example. It asks who drives it, what technology is selected and adopted, how human capital is developed, what the rules of the games are, and more importantly, which institutions are responsible for issuing licenses, regulating standards, and overseeing the compliance, and what forms of regulation do they use. At the core of these questions is if and how countries can ensure safe, secure and sustainable nuclear development.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Xu Yi-chong is a research professor of politics and public policy at Griffith University. Before joining Griffith University in January 2007, Xu was professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is author of The Politics of Nuclear Energy in China (2010); Electricity Reform in China, India and Russia: The World Bank Template and the Politics of Power (2004); Powering China: Reforming the electric power industry in China (2002); co-author of Inside the World Bank: Exploding the Myth of the Monolithic Bank (with Patrick Weller 2009) and The Governance of World Trade: International Civil Servants and the GATT/WTO, (with Patrick Weller 2004); and editor of Nuclear Energy Development in Asia (2011) and The Political Economy of Sovereign Wealth Funds (2010). All these projects were supported by the research grants from either Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) or Australian Research Council.