Mr. MYERS. Are you expecting to have 16 additional operating stations? Mr. HENDRIE. We are looking at more than that in the way of licenses. Mr. MYERS. Would you provide for the record where you are going to put these 61 people? We need to have this clarified. Mr. HENDRIE. Yes, we will do that, Mr. Myers. [The information follows:] REVISED INSPECTION PROGRAM The revised inspection program involving resident inspectors will be gradually implemented between now and fiscal year 1981 when full implementation is scheduled. The plan that we are following for implementation is to draw qualified individuals from our existing workforce during the first two years of implementation. Concurrently, we will begin an intensive training program for newly hired personnel so that they will be available for resident assignment in two years. Thus, the number of people in the supplemental is determined by full program implementation requirements, not by the number of sites with resident inspectors in FY 1978. During this fiscal year, six of the additional positions will be assigned to the training staff and fifty-five will be assigned to the regional offices to begin formal and on-the-job training. Twenty inspectors will be assigned from the regional offices to resident duty at sites in fiscal year 1978; forty-five in fiscal year 1979; seventy in fiscal year 1980; and ninety-five in fiscal year 1981. Mr. VOLGENAU. Do not forget that we are going to put some people at sites under construction, not just operating sites. EXPENSES BORNE BY THE LICENSEE Mr. MYERS. Will the operating utility pay for this service? Mr. VOLGENAU. They will provide us the office space only. We will provide our own equipment. Mr. MYERS. Similar to meat inspectors? Mr. HENDRIE. Would you try not making that comparison, Mr. Myers? Mr. MYERS. Under the U.S. Department of Agriculture program, the company has to provide everything except pay the salary of the inspectors. Mr. VOLGENAU. Yes, sir, correct. It is administratively similar arrangement. SCHEDULE FOR SUPPLEMENTAL BILL Mr. MYERS. How soon do you have to have this supplemental enacted to bring these people onboard and spend this money this year? That is a lot of money to spend in a few months. Mr. HENDRIE. If we are going to get these new people into the pipeline so that they can get trained and we can get them out onto the sites in a reasonable time and replace the manpower that we will rob from the Regional Inspection Offices in order to get the sites manned immediately, we just need to get them started. It is going to take-it is pretty rigorous training. Mr. MYERS. When did you make this request? Mr. BARRY. It came in along with the 1979 budget. For the dollars that you see before you, we assumed an authorization in the month of May. Mr. MYERS. You are going to be lucky, I think. Mr. BARRY. Yes, sir. NUMBER OF SITES Mr. MYERS. The equipment request here is to man all 61 sites? Mr. VOLGENAU. Sir, may I clear that up a little bit? We are going to man this fiscal year, assuming that the supplemental is approved, 20 sites. The next year we are going to man 45 sites and so on, and then by fiscal year 1981 we will have all of the sites manned. Mr. MYERS. I am asking a question about equipment. Are you buying equipment for all the inspectors? Mr. VOLGENAU. No, sir, we are not. Mr. MYERS. Just for the 20? Mr. VOLGENAU. It is a little hard to break down, and that is part of what we are going to submit for the record. But we have to prebuy some equipment because we are very limited in terms of getting the equipment onboard right now, and we do not want to have that same kind of problem in the next fiscal year. But primarily the equipment that we will be buying, as I said before, for the inspectors going out on site, but also to support those 61 people, new people, who are coming into the regional offices we must support them in the regional offices because we are going to deploy experienced people out of our existing force. Mr. MYERS. Twenty inspectors are going to go on site as soon as you get this money? They will also have the necessary equipment? Mr. VOLGENAU. That is right. Mr. MYERS. Thank you, Madam Chairman. BENEFITS FROM RESIDENT INSPECTORS Mrs. BOGGS. Mr. Hendrie, what benefits and additional insurance do you see from the program? Mr. HENDRIE. I think it is going to be useful to us to have these mature and experienced people on the operating site. They will be able to become just more familiar with the operation of the units as they are absorbed into the nature of the operating organization that the utility has there, the idiosyncrasies of that organization. It will provide us with an immediate response capability in the event of any incident. We do not like to think about those things, but they happen. We have had criticism from Members of the Congress and other officials on occasion when something would happen at a plantsite and we are not onsite quickly. People would start from the regional office that have inspection over that plant and would run into a snowstorm or just take several hours to get there, or whatever, and then we would get criticized for not having people right there on the spot. One of the benefits of this program will be an immediate response in terms of having our guy there to provide us the information that we need and so on. But, more than that, the resident inspector, because he does not have to travel back and forth from the regional office to make a visit to plant A and then plant B, and then go back to the regional office to get his report written up and so on, he has a sub stantially higher contact time with the licensee operations than a guy who has to travel back and forth. I think that will have-will be an effective addition to the inspection force and will in part relieve some of the manpower need that we would otherwise have for the regional offices for the traveling teams. URGENCY OF REQUEST Mrs. Boggs. Do you think that we will have a compartment of benefits to demand the urgency of this request in the supplemental? Mr. HENDRIE. Yes, Ma'am, I do. FUTURE COSTS Mrs. Boggs. I understand full well that you have to have the necessary equipment so that when an inspector does go to a site, all of this will be in place. When everything is in place, what do you suppose the annual cost of the program will be? Mr. HENDRIE. Let us see, should I ask the Controller or Mr. Volgenau? Mr. VOLGENAU. Mrs. Boggs, there a fairly significant first year cost associated with the program, essentially because of the pre-hiring and all of the attendant support. But if you compare our fiscal year 1978 budget with our 1979 budget, you will note that although our workload is demonstrably growing, the size of our work force is not. In other words, with the supplemental, the number of people in the Office of Inspection and Enforcement in both fiscal years 1978 and 1979, is 715. You are not in the process of considering the fiscal year 1980 budget, nor have we formulated it, but we believe that primarily as a result of this program we can improve our efficiency. Now I am using a very simple measure of efficiency; that is the number of people divided by the number of reactors that they inspect. So although there are in fact costs totaling several million dollars, two or three million in both fiscal years, attendant with this program, the ultimate result will be a more efficient program, a less costly program than if we had continued with the current program. You just begin to see that in fiscal 1979, and I hope you will see it in fiscal year 1980 as well. Mrs. BOGGS. You have no estimate of what the full annual cost will be? Mr. VOLGENAU. Well, the increase is two million to three million this year, and it is about three million Mr. MYERS. That is seven million over what it was in Mr. VOLGENAU. Not for our program. PRIOR INCREASES Mr. MYERS. In 1977 you had $27,894,000 and you are asking for a total of $35,775,000 for fiscal year 1978, so that is incorporating the growth that you have had. Mr. VOLGENAU. Yes, but you see we had a very large increase in our workload between fiscal year 1977 and 1979. In the form of more reactors under construction, in the late phases of construction, but more important in the commercial operation. Mr. MYERS. I have some more along the same line. For fiscal year 1978, the current fiscal year, you received 65 additional people over the 1977 level. Now, you are asking for a supplemental of 61 more. What happened to the increase you already have? What are your traveling inspectors going to do when they do not have to go out to the site? Mr. VOLGENAU. To address that question properly, one must realize that we have two different types of inspectors. They are the generalistic inspectors, who are very good at evaluating the operations of the plant. They have a background in the control room. That is their specialty. They can also do other things, such as examine to see if the guards are properly manning their stations, and check to see if the health physicists are properly performing their tasks. But when it comes to a highly technical inspection, which we simply must have, then we have technical inspectors, specialists, people who are experts in a number of technical disciplines. Mr. MYERS. Are you just adding another layer of inspection? Mr. VOLGENAU. No, sir, we are not. We have always had those two types of people. What we are doing is putting those generalists who qualify out on sites. Mr. MYERS. Why do you have to have additional slots for them? Mr. VOLGENAU. Because we must-we are trying to man all of the sites by fiscal year 1981. Mr. MYERS. You say you already have them. You have been doing that inspection. Mr. VOLGENAU. But they have been located in the regional offices. Mr. MYERS. Take them out of the regional offices, and put them out on the sites. Mr. VOLGENAU. That is what we are doing for the initial increment. Mr. MYERS. What are the 61 people in the regional offices going to be doing? Mr. VOLGENAU. We have an initial increase in the size of our force, because we do not have enough of the generalists who are qualified to be resident inspectors. Now, those generalists, when they get out on site, and when they stop having to travel back and forth from our five regional offices to the site, will be ultimately more efficient out there in the succeeding years than we are today. But we cannot hire these generalists, and just put them out there, and we do not have enough generalists, we do not have enough generalists to put one at each site. AUTHORITY OF RESIDENT INSPECTORS Mr. MYERS. What kind of authority are the resident inspectors going to have? Can they stop a reactor? Mr. VOLGENAU. No, they cannot. Mr. MYERS. Do they have the authority to stop it? Mr. VOLGENAU. No, I am the only one in my office that has that authority. Mr. MYERS. They do observe, and make reports? Mr. VOLGENAU. They do, indeed. But we have a very good duty officer system, and a very good system for rapid communication. FUTURE PERSONNEL REQUIREMENTS Mr. MYERS. I am going to make a prediction here, and I hope I am wrong. Two years from now we are not going to have just one inspector per site, we are going to have 24 hour inspectors in each location. With weekends and holidays, we'll have at least five inspectors per site. Who is going to be typing all the reports? We'll have to have a clerk-typist as well. Mr. Hendrie, do you think I will be wrong? Mr. HENDRIE. I think so, but I prefer to keep it in a general sense. In some ways I share your cynicism about the tendencies to grow. Mr. MYERS. This has been my experience as a member of the Appropriations Committee for several years. It starts as a small pilot program. We'll try something out and see how it works. Then it will grow and grow. I predict it will happen here. Mr. HENDRIE. Maybe in a couple of years we can see whether we have been successful in keeping it, keeping it an efficient point. That would certainly be my intention. Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. Myers, I would urge that you ask that question very hard next year. Mr. MYERS. I will be asking about this next year. I'm predicting you'll come in with a large increase for this program in next year's budget. It's the normal growth pattern. When you were in the old Atomic Energy Commission, you had about 1,200 people. Now, it's 2,700 and growing. Mr. HENDRIE. When the regulatory staff was with the Atomic Energy Commission, we had the necessary support staff. Now we have to provide much of this support ourselves. Mr. MYERS. That is all I have. Mrs. BOGGS. Mr. Chairman, Chairman Bevill has several questions which we will submit to be answered in the record at this point. Mr. HENDRIE. We will be pleased to have them. [The information follows:] QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY CHAIRMAN BEVILL Question. You are requesting a supplemental appropriation of $5,350,000 and 61 additional positions for the inspection and enforcement and the nuclear material safety and safeguards program. You are also requesting $5,350,000 for the federal pay increase. These requests were prepared by your agency some months ago. Do you believe that both the program and pay supplements are still needed? Answer. Yes, in considering our supplemental request we made a careful analysis of the program requirements and FY 1978 funding availability and have predicated our planning for use of the supplemental funds on a May 1978 availability. The NRC examined the alternative of transferring funds from one or more Congressionally approved NRC FY 1978 programs in order to satisfy the identified requirements. It was determined that program reductions or eliminations would preclude NRC from adequately discharging its responsibility and accordingly NRC had no viable alternative but to submit a supplemental request. OMB also concurred in the need for NRC to request Congress for supplemental funding. This determination was based largely on the following considerations: 1. At the beginning of the fiscal year the agency has had to make program adjustments in order to absorb a $3 million general reduction and still maintain a balanced program that would accomplish adequately its responsibilities. 2. The agency and OMB determined that the FY 1978 Congressionally approved programs were all essential and funds could not be reallocated in order to preclude a supplemental request. |