056 Heather Feldman, Director of Training & Development at EPRI

Heather (00:00)
And coming out of that survey, we said, okay, great. We have barriers in the nuclear industry.

and we have enablers in the nuclear industry. And then we dug a little deeper and we said, my gosh, the barriers are the same as the enablers.

And we said, OK, what exactly does that mean?

Mark Hinaman (01:27)
Okay. Welcome to another episode of the Fire to Fission podcast, where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. My name is Mark Hinaman and I’m joined today by Heather Feldman, the director of training and development at EPRI. And we have a co -host today, Ryan Pickering, the crew facilitator for the DOE’s Consent -Based Sighting Consortium. So Ryan’s a good friend of mine and we’re super stoked to talk to Heather. Heather and Ryan, how are you guys doing?

Heather (01:53)
Doing great. So happy to be here today with you, Mark, and with you, Ryan, looking forward to the conversation.

Ryan Pickering (02:03)
Yes, thank you Heather and thank you Mark. I’m looking forward to digging in here.

Mark Hinaman (02:07)
Cool. We’re gonna chat a lot about the Global Forum for Nuclear Innovation, which Heather, you’ve been working on. I think we’ll chat a little bit about training and development in the nuclear industry. But before we dive into that, Heather, why don’t you give us some background on yourself? Where’d you get yourself? Yeah.

Heather (02:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds great. That sounds great. So the two topics that you mentioned are really the intersection of two of my passions. So I’m hugely passionate about innovation, hugely passionate about education, training, all in this area of energy. And by training, by degree, I’m a mechanical engineer.

and have worked on the space shuttle program. That was a lot of fun and moved over to EPRI, gosh, about 18 and a half years ago now, and mainly focused in our nuclear sector, but worked in various roles throughout that sector. about two years ago, moved into the role I’m currently in, leading training and development for EPRI.

Mark Hinaman (03:22)
Awesome. Mechanical engineering near and to my heart. But I studied also, so.

Heather (03:26)
Yeah. It’s a great background. Great background to

Mark Hinaman (03:32)
Yeah. What was your time working on the space shuttle? What kind of stuff were you working on?

Heather (03:38)
You know, I was there just after the Columbia accident. So it was, yeah, it was a very interesting time to be there, sat next to astronauts in meetings, which really brought home to me the importance of the work that we were doing, the decisions that we were making very much from a safety perspective, you

Mark Hinaman (03:44)
Tough time to be there.

Heather (04:02)
decisions that I made could impact their lives, their families, their friends, and that really hit home to me. I was part of the Systems Integration Group, meaning we worked on the project when the space shuttle, the external tank, the solid rocket boosters were basically all together from launch until the system got into orbit. And…

After the Columbia accident, there was a redesign that took place. And in collaboration with many other people, I was part of a wind tunnel test that was done to understand the impacts of the redesign on the system during launch. So it was a tremendous amount of fun and excitement being a part of such a project that people

talk about in everyday lives and you see and you can watch on TV a space shuttle launch, for example. And it was a high pressure environment as well simply because of, you know, the safety implications, the accident that just happened. It was a great place to start my career. Learned a lot, learned a lot about project management, loved being a part of the wind tunnel test from an engineering

Mark Hinaman (05:27)
Yeah. Do you feel like that prepped you well for your roles at EPRI?

Heather (05:32)
It did, it did. In the space industry, there’s a safety culture. In the nuclear industry, there’s a nuclear safety culture. We’re protecting, know, ultimately we’re protecting people, the public, but it’s through astronauts and it’s through workers at nuclear power plants. And so when I got into the nuclear industry and was being sort of indoctrinated into the nuclear safety culture,

My colleagues that worked at nuclear plants, had one vision. I just went back to, I’m sitting next to an astronaut and decisions that I’m making are impacting that person because safety culture principles are very much the same, similar in concept. I also was able to really take a lot of what I learned about project management at the space shuttle program over to EPRI. When I joined EPRI, I joined our Office of Innovation, focused on the nuclear sector.

But outside, I wasn’t in that department. So I was looking at nuclear innovations from a different perspective. And having to manage all that and think through how I wanted to put together projects was a part of my role. And I had the basics from the work that I had done back at the Space Shuttle Program.

Mark Hinaman (06:54)
Awesome. Okay, so you held a bunch of roles at EPRI. You’ve been there for a while, but some of your most recent were director innovation in the nuclear sector. one of the topics that we’re gonna be chatting about are the Global Forum for Nuclear Innovation. So, Ryan, as Heather dives into this, feel free to chime in, ask questions at any point. If something is just curiosity to you, just jump right in.

Ryan Pickering (07:23)
Thanks, Mark. Yeah, I’m just here to learn. You know, I’ve been reading about GFNI and it sounds like a phenomenal initiative and I want to see how we can accelerate

Heather (07:34)
Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (07:35)
So Heather, why don’t you give us an overview of what the program is.

Heather (07:39)
Yeah, so let me back up and talk about EPRI as an organization to start. yeah, yeah.

Mark Hinaman (07:45)
Yeah, yeah, that’s probably helpful. We’re just using the acronym here, just assuming the listeners know what it is. We’ve had some every guest song before, but yeah, that’s helpful.

Heather (07:55)
Right, right, right, right. So just to set the stage of who EPRI is as an organization, we were founded in the early 1970s, just after rolling blackouts in the late 1960s, that really led to a sort of an outcry from the public of, hey, we’re having a lot of blackouts and we need to address this.

And so out of that need from the public, EPRI was born as a non -for -profit organization so that the work that we do on research and development and energy is really for the public. We have members that are basically the utility organizations, the utility companies in the United States and around the world.

We are a very innovative company. are looking to the future, thinking strategically about what is needed in 2030, what is needed in 2050. How are we going to get there? We also do, I’ll say more incremental research to understand, you know, for example, in a nuclear power plant, water chemistry is very important

help the materials last a really, really long time. And so we’ll do research in that space and then incrementally update our guideline documents along the way. So EPRI as an organization is a really innovative company. And we look at everything within the electric power system to make move and use electricity and energy.

as a backdrop of who EPRI is, when it comes to innovation and nuclear, we recognize that there is a desire to focus more narrowly on innovation and nuclear energy and a bit more disruptively. So if you imagine working in a nuclear power plant, it’s really important to focus on operations

follow procedures, do what you need to do to operate that plant to keep the public safe. And there’s also a need to look towards the future and what are some incremental innovations that are needed to get implemented in the plants. And so it’s almost these two different mindsets that at times can come in conflict with each other. And so we recognize the importance of thinking more about innovation, thinking a little bit more disruptively

about innovation and EPRI decided to place focus on that through having an innovation department in the nuclear sector. within that was our advanced nuclear technology group, flexible power operations, long -term operations, and some other things like that. At that same time, this idea of the Global Forum for Nuclear Innovation, GFNI for short, was born.

And like all good ideas, the idea was born in a cafe in Paris with a conversation among leaders that kind of were talking about the industry and talking about really what’s needed. And this was June of 2018. And these leaders sort of after a while got into this idea of nuclear needs, more innovation, more disruptive innovation, innovation in a

And from there, they went back to their respective organizations. Neil Wilmshurst came to me and he said, so I’d like you to take on something. And it was very vague. And it sounded something like, we need to accelerate the deployment of innovation in operating nuclear power plants. And you will be working with the international

Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA. You will be working with NEA, the Nuclear Energy Agency, associated with OECD. You’ll be working with the National Nuclear Laboratory in the UK. And we’re going to host this in South Korea. So the utility there, KHMP, will be a part of this as well. And I thought, OK, that sounds wonderful, but I have no idea what this is.

So the organizations, EPRI plus the four other organizations, the sort of guiding committee got together and we just started brainstorming ideas of what’s needed at this point in time for the nuclear industry. And fast forward to a year later, we delivered the first GFNI. It was focused on three things, one being technology innovations. What are those innovations that the nuclear industry is not yet using today?

And how can we take those and move those into the nuclear industry? Coming out of the event, in particular, there was focus placed on artificial intelligence machine learning. So think back to 2018. Digital twins, advanced manufacturing, and a framework for shareable data. So that was one bit of what we focused on. The second bit of what we focused on was learning from organizations outside of energy.

So we had an astronaut there. And this is where my past and my current job sort of intersected in a great way. But we had an astronaut there who worked for NASA, went to the space station several times, experienced that type of working environment, and then became an advisor to Elon Musk at SpaceX. And he compared and contrasted the two cultures.

Ryan Pickering (13:55)
Thanks.

Heather (14:07)
and the pluses and the minuses of the two cultures. And it was so insightful to hear him say, fail fast when the consequences are low. going back to that sort of environment of the nuclear power plant, when you’re operating plant, failing fast is not an option. But when you’re innovating, yes, absolutely, let’s try something. Let’s see what works. Let’s break it and have that fail fast mindset. So we learned a lot from outside of nuclear.

And then the third piece was what is the culture of innovation at a nuclear power plant? And are we talking about it and how is that working? so that was the third bit from the first Global Forum, which really led us to the second Global Forum. We said, okay, we’ve got these technologies, technology innovations, we can move those forward. And we did. But there’s this need for culture.

in a focus on innovation in the culture. And so that brought us to the second Global Forum, which was in London in 2022. And we really focused on behaviors. So we focused on courage as being a behavior that’s needed as part of innovation. And we did that at the event through a game called the Million Pound

drop since we were in the UK. It was a British game. And it was really all about having the courage to take a chance. And people got to experience that. Having a challenger mindset is a second behavior. And so what we did is we asked people to build a wind powered vehicle and showed them an image of a sale car with wheels and a sale and

And at the end, we talked about how much that image biased people in designing and building their sale cars and the fact that they really needed to think outside the box because the winning car was a crumbled up piece of paper, looked like a ball.

Role model was another behavior, another sort of trait that was needed. And we talked about this in the context of different leaders that are out there and the ingredients that are within those leaders from an innovation perspective. And then we made smoothies. So we had vegetables, we had fruits.

We had blenders and we matched up fruits to innovation traits and we let people make their smoothies and explain why they chose the traits that they chose to have in an innovator. And the last one is all around thinking differently. So each of us

tends to have our own biases, our own mindset. Some people are positive, some people are optimistic, some people have that negative view, but we need all of those views. So the last area was really all about thinking differently and that ability to challenge things from the perspective of, this is gonna work out, this is gonna be great, followed by, what if it doesn’t work out? What’s gonna happen then?

followed by maybe a word that not everybody’s comfortable with, but how do I feel about this? What do my feelings tell me? And sort of that brought in thinking differently in that fourth behavior, if you will, around innovation. And so we call those bite -sized behaviors. And since then, we’ve had the opportunity to take those to COP 28 last year.

with some early career folks. We had the NAYGN event here in Charlotte about a month ago and a handful of folks came over to EPRI and did a workshop on them. We also integrated those concepts into the World Nuclear University, which is run by WNA, the World Nuclear Association. And it’s a five week course.

There were 70 participants from 29 different countries, something like that, but we integrated the behaviors in as they talked about innovation. So that second global forum was really all about what do we need to make a difference? And I’ll also mention we started it with a very professional MC talking about her experience in the nuclear industry. Her grandfather worked at a nuclear power plant.

And then somebody in the audience awkwardly kind of raises their hand and says, I have a question. It wasn’t time for questions, but I have a question. And it was pre -planned. It was a little cheesy, but the MC eventually invited him up on stage. And he’s a science writer and rapper. And he wrote a rap about nuclear energy. And I tell you, the look on the faces of people in the audience was one of, I’m not sure really what to do here.

Not sure if I like this, kind of, this is cheesy, but ultimately it is, yeah.

Mark Hinaman (19:28)
Is this recorded, Heather? Do we have this wrapped? Can we post this wrapped?

Heather (19:34)
sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s, it’s, you know, people weren’t sure what to do. But by the end, people were like, you know, getting into it and in, in all and what it did is it broke down that barrier of thinking outside the box and being disrupted and thinking differently. People kind of like through the rest of the event that was a

one of the first things we did the first morning, the rest of the event, that barrier was gone. I can think differently. I don’t have to worry about the status quo. I can challenge things. you know, it was cheesy. It was pre -planned, but I think it got the message across of, yeah, we can be disruptive. So we had, you know, all those experiences in the second event. And as we left the second event, what we heard were things like, this is great.

How do I sustain this? How do I bring this back to my home organization? And so that brings us to the third event, which was in Miami just a few weeks ago. And the theme was Ambition into Action. And it was all about creating a toolkit for how to take an idea and get it across the finish

And we all might be thinking about things like, we have a project management training and framework that we can follow. And we have these other things that we can follow. And we thought about that as well. But we thought, let’s do some research and really figure out what does it take to go from an ambition and get that ambition really across the finish line and turn into action. And so we started with everyday people talking about everyday lives.

And we talked to about 50 different people and asked them simple questions around what’s an ambition? Did you get to that outcome? Did you get it across the finish line? If not, why not? And so we heard many, stories. We heard a story about a woman who had the ambition to go to sing

And it seemed like every single time she was getting ready to save money or had money, something would pop up and she couldn’t make it. And her particular story, when she talked to us, she hadn’t made it to Singapore. But by the time months had passed, she reached back out to us and she said, by simply asking me those questions about my ambition,

I have now gone to Singapore. I’ve picked it back up and made it happen. That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. So we interviewed 50 people and out of that we said, okay, there’s this framework that’s there. You’ve got an ambition, you’ve got an outcome, and you have to take actions to get there. And there’s barriers. Like she didn’t have enough money to get there. There’s enablers.

Maybe her dad or friend helped her with the money. But how does it all work together? So we put together a survey and sent it out to professionals in the nuclear industry. And it was a pretty detailed survey. And we got something like 75 responses back. And coming out of that survey, we said, okay, great. We have barriers in the nuclear industry.

and we have enablers in the nuclear industry. And then we dug a little deeper and we said, my gosh, the barriers are the same as the enablers.

And we said, OK, what exactly does that mean? And some of the top barriers were financial resources and planning. But that’s also an enabler. Communication is a barrier, but it’s also an enabler. Too little leadership. Leadership can be a barrier. Leadership can be an enabler. we said, OK, there’s something there around these barriers and enablers.

And the last bit of research that we did were focus groups. We hopped on the phone with about 25 different people in smaller groups and shared with them what we had learned thus far about the framework and then listened to different insights that they had as they saw what we had done so far. And

we through those conversations, we identified 56 behaviors. So we’ve got barriers enablers, we’ve got these 56 behaviors, we’ve got this insight of, well, wait, barriers enablers are the same. So what we what we learned was, if we take the same concept and look at it from a professional development perspective, there’s a paper written by Kaplan and Kaiser in the Harvard Business Review.

that talks about over -cooked strengths. So if you take one of your strengths, there’s times where you’ve dialed it up too much and it’s just not effective for that situation, or you’ve dialed it down too much and it’s not effective for that situation. And we said, okay, these barriers and enablers are the same. They’re really attributes. And those attributes need to be dialed up in the right way, depending on the action that you’re needing to take.

And so that was really one of the big insights coming out of this Ambition Into Action framework. So we’ve published this framework and it goes through the research that we did. It talks about, you’ve got an ambition, you have an outcome that’s a smart outcome. It has very specific goals that you want to achieve in a certain timeframe, all those types of things. And you’ve got actions in between.

But then you’ve got these attributes that there’s 14 of them. You can take a look at them. You can dial them in. You can dial them down. And that was really important to have tools that people could walk away from this most recent global forum with and take home to the organization. And as we were going through the Ambition Into Action framework and thinking about how to convey

in the Global Forum at GFNI, we decided that we would break it down into smaller tools. thinking about this dialing in the attributes behavior, what we did at the Global Forum is we played games. We played giant games. We played giant Jenga. We played Connect 4. We played Kerplunk. But it wasn’t just about playing the games. Imagine playing giant Jenga and then you get

a barrier. You can only use one finger to move a block. And then you feel how that barrier, you experience that barrier. You see how it feels as you’re having to use one finger. And that’s really hard to make jingler. And then you get an enabler. And the enabler’s collaboration, everybody at your table can now touch the blocks. And it just felt so much easier to have that collaboration, have that enabler

And so you can take those and you can break them down into the attributes and dialing things up, dialing things down. And it was very experiential. We also had a silent disco. What we did at the silent disco is we learned about the different models that are needed to make the actions happen. So we learned about agile. We learned about innovation, different approaches to innovation.

in a very different way than sitting down and reading a paper. We had a session on storytelling to turn an ambition into action, to turn an ambition into an outcome. The story that you’re telling all of your stakeholders is so important. And so we talked through a framework of how do you tell a story? And we had several other sessions that were really, like I said, focused on these tools. From

we brought it all together under the umbrella of a hackathon. So we warmed people up with a little bit of design thinking and started out with things like, how about think about designing a pencil for a penguin to write a letter to his mom? And people were like, all right, why are we designing a pencil for a penguin? Like a pencil can’t, a penguin can’t use a pencil.

But it really got people opening up their minds so that when we got to the hackathon and we focused on grand challenges like no talent, no sector, safe doesn’t have to be slow, operating a lean machine, and nuclear beyond electricity, people’s minds were opened up to, wow, there’s a lot that’s possible here. Let’s not constrain our thinking. And they pitched back different ideas. I’ll say interwoven within all of

was a podcast recorded live. Dan Monaghan, one of my EPRI colleagues stepped in as the host of EPRI’s podcast for a limited series, six episodes. We recorded the last one live at the event. And he was partnered up with Abby Smith, who worked for the Federal Aviation Administration. And they chatted about drones and they chatted about working in a regulatory environment.

And it was fantastic. We heard from six different people in TED talks, TED style talks, if you will, on innovations that they’ve deployed and some of the lessons that they’ve learned along the way. We had a panel titled You and Me versus the Problem, because there’s a tendency to point fingers at other people and say, well, it’s the regulator that’s not allowing me to do this or.

my boss is holding these things up or whatever it may be. And so we got this panel together to really focus on if we work together on a common problem, we can find a solution. And there was a lot of conversation about the application of artificial intelligence. And there was a lot of conversation about this concept of sandboxing where you can create a safe space working between a utility and a regulator.

to experiment with a new technology such as artificial intelligence. I tell you what, we wrapped up the event on Thursday at noon and there was a table sitting there together talking about sandboxing and how to make it happen that walked away with concrete actions to go do so.

It was a personal journey. a it was a an amazing week and everybody is individuals really walked away with their own insights. It was a very organic event, so we had. Facilitators that were. That were there to facilitate, but also there to learn and some people started the week thinking about their facilitation role very.

and they transformed throughout that leap to a place of comfort and to a place knowing that they were able to move through and just have that experience of, I’m not sure what I’m doing. Okay, I got this. Okay, I did this. That was great. And they’ve learned something from it and are moving things forward. So, you know, that’s really the journey of the Global Forum. It was this grand ambition

by leaders in Paris of June of 2018. And through these three events, focused on technology innovations, focused on culture, focused on turning ambition into action and having some tools, we’ve really achieved that original vision that those leaders had relative to accelerating the deployment of innovation in nuclear energy.

Mark Hinaman (32:14)
That’s so cool, Heather. What a fantastic overview. I was like, hey, give us an overview and you just dove right in and told us all about it, which was awesome. I that’s great. I’ve got so many questions. was writing them down.

Heather (32:22)
I did.

Okay. All

Ryan Pickering (32:27)
Yeah, I’ve got so many notes. just, you know, for an acronym review, we’ve got EPRI.

Electric Power Research Institute. Y ‘all are a nonprofit based in the United States. Thousand employees. Legends have gone through your organization. You’ve really shaped the American electricity system. And so thank you for that. And then we have all these other huge organizations involved. You have the IAEA. You have the OECD. What does OECD stand for? It’s like the…

Heather (32:39)
Thank you.

It’s the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Ryan Pickering (33:04)
And this is a, this is for many things and this is the nuclear energy version of OECD or the…

Heather (33:10)
Yeah, it’s like the nuclear energy agency. It’s like a division or a segment of OECD. And they’re really an intergovernment agency focused on basically transferring knowledge and expertise within nuclear energy.

Ryan Pickering (33:29)
Amazing. And then you have the National Nuclear Laboratory in the UK all coming together to put on this global forum. And we’ve had three events now over the last three years wrapping up in Miami last month. And is there is there plans for more or is this what’s next?

Heather (33:55)
think that’s a great question. And after every one of these events, we’ve always paused and really listened for what’s needed because this is not a meeting for the sake of the meeting. This is not, we’re going to keep doing this because we’re going to keep doing this. It’s very, very purposeful. So we’re in this moment of let’s pause and listen and see what’s next. And also let’s reflect on the successes that we’ve had.

For example, the IAEA has created a network, an innovation network. The acronym is ISOP, and I’m not going to come up with what that stands for, but they’ve created this network of innovators around the globe that are focused on nuclear energy that meet periodically. share ideas. That’s a huge success.

coming out of the Global Forum. That’s just one example. And each organization that’s been a part of this as the co -organizers has had their own individual takeaways from the Global Forum, just like every participant that’s come through and been a part of it. They’ve had their personal takeaways. So we’re in this moment of, right, we just wrapped up Miami. We have these tools out there. Let’s listen and see what’s next.

There will be something. I’m just not sure exactly what it is.

Mark Hinaman (35:27)
That’s tragic, Heather. It’s not guaranteed to happen again. As you were talking through it, I’m like, man, I’m sold. Why did I miss this? Was it invite only? Did I need to get an invite? How do I get an invite to the next one?

Heather (35:42)
Yeah, yeah, it’s open to everybody. what one of one of my sort of personal missions is to really take what we’ve done and and spread it out. So the bite size behaviors that I mentioned earlier, there’s a train the trainer available on every’s website that if somebody wants to host those four workshops and do those activities, they can do

And I mentioned earlier that we took it to COP28. We worked with the World Nuclear University. There was the NUIGN conference. so there’s that that’s available. There’s Ambition that’s to Action that’s available, plus all those tools as well. And taking those and really getting them out, because it’s really about that pollination. It’s not necessarily about the meeting. You’re there at the meeting. You’re learning. You’re transforming. It’s a personal journey. But you’re also taking that back.

and getting it out through the world in their own way. but yeah, stay tuned. Absolutely stay tuned. We’ve got Global Four for Nuclear Innovation on LinkedIn, and that’s probably the best way to stay in touch with what’s going on and what’s

Ryan Pickering (36:58)
Well, I fully support listening. And I think that’s something that the nuclear industry maybe is learning that we need to do more of right now. You know, I think a lot of times we engineer solutions and we feel really good about them in a small room and then we bring them out to the world and we say, isn’t this great? And people say, what? You guys even talking about? And so I love to hear that this is like a time of reflection for you. And it sounds like so much creative energy was expended and so many

young people were all, you know, sparked out working on all these big ideas. So I can’t wait to see what comes up next. For people who went to the program, are people, is there like a follow -up mechanism? Is there a cohort? Like, what are the alumni of these forums? What can we expect from them moving forward?

Heather (37:56)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. think that’s a great question. So we’ve got an insights report that will be coming out in the upcoming weeks or maybe months, which will share what happened, share the insights from the event. We’ve got the LinkedIn page, which is a great way to connect with people that were there. We had an ambition

during the event. Good old school note cards and a bulletin board with pushpins. And we ask people, what’s a personal ambition and what’s a professional ambition? And that is another great way for people to connect and stay in touch. So, you know, I’ll share my personal ambition is to learn more about yoga.

I started a 200 hour yoga teacher training in June. And so I put that up on, I pinned that up on the ambition board and I had several people come up to me and say, oh, yoga. Yeah, I’m really interested in that. And so we’ve connected on that and we’re going to stay in touch on that. But we’re also going to be talking about professional work related stuff too, along the way. And I know various other connections were made that way as well.

Mark Hinaman (39:24)
How many people attended this event,

Heather (39:28)
We were probably around 150 people were there. That’s about what we’ve been the the last two as well.

Mark Hinaman (39:39)
Okay, yeah. Good target size, right? That’s enough that you’re have a lot of pollination, lots of ideas, but not so big that you get lost in the weeds, right? Something special about that 150 person number mark.

Heather (39:49)
Right, right. Yeah, and it was very global. I can’t remember the exact number of countries that were represented, but it was somewhere between 15 and 20 different countries represented. And when you have that many people from so many different countries that are at different phases in the maturity of their nuclear program, it’s so interesting to

with them. Some of the countries, the people that are there representing countries that are earlier in the development of nuclear energy have all these ideas and concepts that are absolutely wonderful and can bounce them off of people that have that more senior experience. And the senior people can learn from all of those new ideas. It’s just wonderful to have that diversity in sort of maturity of the nuclear.

program in the countries.

Ryan Pickering (40:48)
And what I’m learning about nuclear is, as Secretary Granholm says, this is a society -wide mobilization. And one of our challenges in building this energy workforce of the future is there’s so many different jobs. There’s so many different roles. A nuclear energy generating station employs this enormous range of roles. How do

bring all of these people together and train up for these roles? What are the common threads that are present across nuclear in the United States, around the world? I guess we kind of talked about that, but I guess we’re all trying to just figure out how do we add tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people around the world to this space? And I think what the Global Forum is doing is

EPRI is one of the first to see this opportunity like, wow, we got to kind of wrap our brain around this and take an open ended approach. What have you learned from the people coming through? how are we? What what’s working about this program? That’s, you know, now that we’re reflecting after our third event.

Heather (42:06)
Yeah, it’s exciting to think about what’s possible with nuclear energy in that 2050 timeframe. There’s a big opportunity there relative to getting to address climate change and all that. And like you said, it’s going to take a workforce of people to do so. And I think about it from the perspective of it’s one conversation is a

at a time. And it’s everything from talking with your family and friends about nuclear energy to, you you’ve got that opportunity and going from home to the airport in a ride share situation and strike up a conversation and, you know, help people understand what nuclear energy is and what’s possible for the future.

When we were in Miami at the Global Forum, there was a comment by a senior leader who’s been in the nuclear industry for many, many years on workforce. And it was really from the perspective of changing times in transition. And it was almost advice that he was giving to the next generation and the next generation. And it was really all about

The way my generation did it is not the way your generation should do it. It should be different.

He reflected on making sacrifices from my work -life balance that maybe this next generation should choose differently. His message was really be different. Having a senior leader say that really empowers people to, okay, it’s okay for me to be different. I don’t have to do it the way the senior people did it. I can do it differently.

I think that comes into play, especially as we start to think about advanced reactors, small modular reactors. They’re different, and they’re different for real reasons, and they need to be sort of treated differently in all regards, but a workforce perspective as well. when I think

workforce. I’ve got two teenagers, two kids in high school, and you know, they’re starting to sort through what their interests are for college or career and experimenting with different concepts, ideas. And I’m also looking at, okay, well, what opportunities do they have to learn about different fields? And so in high school, there’s various clubs that you can

And I’m learning that there’s not really a club that’s focused on energy, not just nuclear energy, but broadly energy as a career. Yes, there’s a robotics club or yes, there’s a STEM club, but it’s not energy focused in a way that really gets the word out on the awesome careers and opportunities that they are in the industry that we work in. So I think that could be a game changer as well as we think about the generations to come.

but it really needs to start in kindergarten and with really young kids just getting this idea of energy as a career out there in a fun way.

Mark Hinaman (45:49)
Yeah. Ryan, I love your comment about what do the alumni do moving forward and Heather, yeah, this idea of being different and how people can continue to.

be connected after the event. Like the LinkedIn page is awesome. But I’d be curious to know if like, you know, there could be micro forums or mastermind groups that evolve out of this conference or these types of conferences that people could connect with in the future. So I don’t know if you have thoughts on that or comments on that. But I would challenge you to, or I would just ask if you do have thoughts or comments. And you mentioned that the Ambition into Action framework was published.

Where was that published?

Heather (46:35)
yes. So let me start with that one. The Ambition Into Action framework is published. It is available on EPRI’s website, so just epri .com. And in the search box, type Ambition Into Action, and it will get you there. And with the click of a button, it’s downloaded to your computer. So it’s available, and it’s out there. And in terms of the global forum network and staying connected,

The IAEA ISOP International Network on Innovation to Support Operating Plants is out there and available for member organizations of the IAEA. And then beyond that, we’re really in this think and reflect mode. And we’re in this mode of taking what we have and getting it out to other places.

I, of course, think back to the personal connections that I made during the event, and I know I’m going to organically continue those engagements. And there’s real conversations that happened where collaborations are going to come out of this as an end result.

Ryan Pickering (47:49)
And I’m on EPRI’s website right now on the Ambition to Action microsite. And it’s amazing. You have all these different subjects and all of them have a podcast. So you recorded and published all of the sessions as a podcast.

Heather (48:04)
So what we did with the podcast is we had six episodes. The first episode was an introduction to our host Dan Monaghan because he’s not a podcast host and his day job and he was gracious enough to take this on. And then the middle four episodes, each individually focused on a grand challenge. And we had somebody from within the nuclear industry and somebody outside

the industry on each of the podcasts. So for example, when we focused on no talent, no sector, we had Steve Layton from the Nuclear Skills Academy in the UK partnered up with Sanjay Sarma, who wrote a book called Grasp, which was all about the science of learning and

We partnered those two up. also happens to be a mechanical engineer, Mark, going back to your level of mechanical engineers. So we partnered those two folks up with Dan and just had this wonderful conversation about no talent, no sector, where we’re headed, how the education systems need to adapt and adjust as we move forward. And so we have episodes on the three other grand challenges. So safe doesn’t have to be slow, nuclear beyond electricity, and operating a lean machine. And operating a lean machine,

we partnered up Kimberly Cook Nelson with somebody who, with a very small crew on a yacht, sailed around the world, not on a yacht, but on a sailboat, sailed around the world. And they talked about operating a lean machine. And then the last episode was recorded live that I mentioned earlier. And it just brought somebody in from outside of the industry and just talked in general.

what we can learn from outside of the industry. yeah, those podcasts are all on EPRI’s podcast channel as well.

Mark Hinaman (50:07)
Awesome. I can’t wait to consume those. This is why we do podcasts, Heather, so that we learn what’s available and what’s out there and then we can share with other people.

Heather (50:16)
Yeah, it’s great.

Ryan Pickering (50:16)
podcast on top of podcasts on top of podcasts, but I gotta say I want to dig into this nuclear beyond electricity. I know you’re, Eprue’s big on electricity, but I love to see

this energy realism going beyond electricity. I think for the public, often think electricity is energy. And then when you recognize that electricity is only a fraction of energy and we have all these heating needs and these transportation needs, which can be addressed by…

by industrial heat from nuclear. For me, as someone who used to be anti -nuclear, that’s really what tipped it over for me. I’m so concerned with saving the environment and having affordable energy for everyone. Nuclear is a pretty elegant solution beyond just electricity, and it’s good to see leadership like EPRI kind of leaning into that opportunity.

Heather (51:08)
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s the right technology for the right tasks. So there’s going to be a time and a place where one of these in particular advanced reactors fit for those non -electricity applications. And there’s other times where it’s going to be, hey, not a nuclear solution. And that’s fine, too. In my mind, optionality is the only option. You’ve got to have options out there in order to achieve the goals that have been set for the 2050 time frame.

not 100 % nuclear. It’s nuclear and wind and solar and hydrogen and other technologies that are out there. Battery storage, all kinds of things. So everything working together.

Mark Hinaman (51:52)
Yeah. Hello, this has been really excellent. We’re coming up on our time. We only have time for a couple more questions. You know, you talked about innovation and you guys have thought about it critically and things that you can do to help people innovate and like take real tangible actions moving forward. I know that you said that, you you guys are your next steps are to listen. But, you know, we have a common goal that we want to build more nuclear in the US and around the world.

over the next 10, 20 years. What’s in your mind one of the most impactful steps that people can take? And sometimes I think people under appreciate that impactful doesn’t necessarily mean big step. Sometimes it can be a small step. And when I think about innovation, it’s all the small steps that add up along the way that can lead towards something that often seems like a daunting goal, like building more nuclear throughout the world.

What are some of the, what’s a small step but impactful step that people can take?

Heather (52:53)
Yeah, and I’m going to answer, I’m going to say there’s two, maybe two small steps that we can take. Collaboration is one of them and that’s really around, there’s going to be first movers, there’s going to be fast followers, we need to get an order book out there, we need to get a supply chain built. So it’s, there’s collaboration that’s needed through all of that. And then second to that, people are at the heart of everything that we do.

So there’s a focus on the workforce. And I’ll go back to what I had mentioned earlier, which is it starts by conversations. Those simple conversations with the people that are around you that build out to something larger in a bigger time frame so we can have the workforce that we need for the supply chain, for the plants that we’re going to have in the future.

Mark Hinaman (53:46)
Excellent.

Heather, leave us with your most positive view of the future. What’s the world going to be like in 10, 20 years?

Heather (53:54)
Oh, Whenever I get questions like this, I put it in the context of my kids. you know, 10 to 20 years from now, you know, I envision my kids are out of college or school or whatever they decide to do next. And I’m really optimistic about the future. There are so many exciting technology changes that are happening. Artificial intelligence as an example in terms

humans working in parallel with artificial intelligence and shifting the tasks that we’re working on. So I think that’s gonna change the future in a positive way. I can see us, let’s see, 10 years from now, we’re in the mid 2030s. We’ve got some nuclear power plants, maybe small modular reactors coming online in the United States.

Canada, around the world. It’s an exciting future. I think we have a lot to look forward to.

Mark Hinaman (54:58)
Absolutely. Heather Feldman, thanks so much for your time. And Ryan, thanks for co -hosting today. Really, really enjoyed it.

Ryan Pickering (55:05)
Incredible to hear it all. Thank you, Heather. Thank you so much for your leadership.

Heather (55:06)
Thank you, Mark.

Yeah, thank you, Mark. Thank you, Ryan. This has been fun.

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