Richard Barrett, AdSTM, participated in a workshop on Advanced Capacity Building in Preparation and Response to Nuclear and Severe Radiological Accidents at College Station, Texas. The workshop was sponsored by the Nuclear Power Institute, an adjunct of the Nuclear Engineering Department of Texas A&M University.
The workshop hosted 22 participants from countries with emerging nuclear power programs throughout Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The focus of the workshop was to provide hands-on experience with the practices of U.S nuclear utilities regarding emergency planning and emergency response. Workshop participants heard presentations from federal officials, state and local emergency responders, subject matter experts and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The group visited Disaster City, the largest search-and-rescue training facility in the world. The 32.000-square-foot Emergency Operations Training Center (EOTC) of TEEX uses state-of-the-art simulation and computer-based technologies to train incident managers, supervisors, and jurisdiction officials in the management of a large-scale crisis using a unified command approach, which can be tailored to any group. In addition, participants visited the South Texas Project nuclear power station and observation of preparation for a graded emergency exercise.
As a former NRC, Director of Emergency Response, Mr. Barrett shared his experiences and insights on the importance of emergency planning and emergency response with workshop participants. He also gave a presentation outlining NRC’s response to the core melt accident at Fukushima in March, 2011; and provided an overview of NRC response activities, which focused on four specific issues: external hazards to nuclear plants; the station blackout accident scenario; accident management and containment response; and the disruption of emergency response efforts by external events.