Our hearts and prayers go out to our Japanese colleagues and the people of Japan as they recover from the calamity and damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.

Our nuclear expertise provides insights into the challenges and difficulties being faced by the operators and support crews at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station as they recover from the effects of an earthquake, tsunami, and the resulting extended loss of external ac power to the six nuclear units.  At the same time, we recognize the robust nature of commercial nuclear power plants in areas of:

• defense-in-depth (multiple barriers to fission product release),
• redundant safety systems with appropriate diversity,
• margin in design to allow safety functional performance in beyond design basis scenarios,
• operator and emergency planning training in beyond design basis scenarios, and
• flexibility to address all manners of externally induced severe accident events.

Our industry is already studying the nuclear events in Japan to determine if there are any “lessons learned” that can be applied to make our already extremely safe nuclear plants even safer.  Tetra Tech Advent and our sister companies within Tetra Tech stand ready to assist nuclear plant owners in many ways including:

• immediate on-site staff augmentation support for evaluating INPO Event Reports and US NRC regulatory correspondence,
• hardening or improving the robust nature of spent fuel pools (we have several innovative ideas),
• assisting in responding to longer term “lessons learned” from the Fukushima Event, and
• expert reviews independent of normally relied upon reactor vendor, A/E, or other contractors that can stand up to regulatory and public scrutiny.

Our readily available severe accident management skills include:

• safe shutdown path analysis,
• emergency response guidelines and emergency operating procedures,
• emergency planning & evacuation,
• thermal-hydraulic analysis,
• dose assessments,
• stress analysis,
• compliance assessments and regulatory responses,
• equipment qualification,
• Appendix R / fire protection,
• aging management,
• 50.59 reviews,
• MOV / AOVs,
• subject matter experts,
• system engineering & operability reviews,
• design basis / configuration management,
• accident monitoring,
• ISFSI,
• design mods,
• special designs and,
• probabilistic risk assessment