End State Vision Research Articles

Development of an End State Vision to Implement Digital Monitoring in Nuclear Plants

Nuclear plant sites collect and store large volumes of data gathered from various equipment and systems. These datasets typically include plant process parameters, maintenance records, technical logs, online monitoring data, and equipment failure data. The collection of such data affords an opportunity to leverage data-driven machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to provide diagnostic and prognostic capabilities within the nuclear power industry, thus reducing operations and maintenance (O&M) costs. In this way, nuclear energy can become more economically competitive with other energy sources, and premature plant closures can be avoided. From a maintenance standpoint, savings can be achieved by leveraging ML and AI technologies to develop data-driven algorithms that better diagnose and predict potential faults within the system. Improved model accuracy can help reduce unnecessary maintenance and foster more efficient planning of future maintenance, thereby lowering the costs associated with parts, labor, and costly planned, forced, or extended outages. From an operations perspective, cost savings can be generated by shifting from routine-based monitoring to online monitoring by taking advantage of advancements in sensors and wireless communication technologies. Advancements in data storage, mapping, management, and analytics would inform the transition from onsite- to cloud-based computing and storage services. Online monitoring would reduce the number of operator manhours required for taking routine measurements, while cloud computing services would generate cost savings by reducing the amount of hardware needing to be purchased and maintained all while scaling to both computational and storage demands. This paper summarizes an end state vision of how to shift from costly, labor-intensive preventative maintenance to cost-effective predictive maintenance.

The Philosophy of Globalisation and African Culture

This paper examines two claims about the ontology of globalisation. First, it interrogates the claim that the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation is underpinned by the theoretical construct of economic and information-epistemic determinism (EI-ED), which has been developmentally significant in the North. The paper contends that this claim is likely to propagate some values that ought not to undergird the end-state vision of the prospective global village (PGV) if the PGV is to be essentially conjunctive rather than essentially disjunctive. Second, the paper contends that if a cohesive and egalitarian PGV is truly the end-point of the philosophy of globalisation, then the African socio-cultural values of a relational understanding of the self and universal brotherhood ought to be globally recognised and emphasised by the North as fundamental to the realisation of the vision of the PGV. The paper seeks to illustrate that if properly applied to the globalising process, these cultural values are ontologically conjunctive in the sense that they have the potential to promote the building of a cohesive and egalitarian global village, since they tend to encourage acceptance and co-operation among the different peoples of the world.
 
 Keywords
 Africa, culture, determinism, globalisation, philosophy

Depicting the future strategic plans of the Royal Australian Navy using a roadmapping framework as a visual composite canvas

Strategic planning can be an arduous and complex task; and, once a plan has been devised, it is often quite a challenge to effectively communicate the principal missions and key priorities to the array of different stakeholders. The communication challenge can be addressed through the application of a clearly and concisely designed visualisation of the strategic plan – to that end, this paper proposes the use of a roadmapping framework to structure a visual canvas. The canvas provides a template in the form of a single composite visual output that essentially allows a ‘plan-on-a-page’ to be generated. Such a visual representation provides a high-level depiction of the future context, end-state capabilities and the system-wide transitions needed to realise the strategic vision. To demonstrate this approach, an illustrative case study based on the Australian Government's Defence White Paper and the Royal Australian Navy's fleet plan will be presented. The visual plan plots the in-service upgrades for addressing the capability shortfalls and gaps in the Navy's fleet as it transitions from its current configuration to its future end-state vision. It also provides a visualisation of project timings in terms of the decision gates (approval, service release) and specific phases (proposal, contract, delivery) together with how these projects are rated against the key performance indicators relating to the technology acquisition process and associated management activities.

Remediation, land use, and risk at Hanford

AbstractU.S. Department of Energy (US DOE) remediation responsibilities include the Hanford site in Washington State. Cleanup is governed by the Tri‐Party Agreement (TPA) between the US DOE as the responsible party and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Washington State Department of Ecology as joint regulators. In 2003, the US DOE desired to implement a “Risk‐Based End State” (RBES) policy at Hanford, with remediation measures driven by acceptable risk standards using exposure scenarios based on the 1999 Hanford Comprehensive Land‐Use Plan. Facing resistance from regulators and stakeholders, the US DOE solicited public input on its policy. This led to a Hanford Site End State Vision in 2005 and a commitment that the TPA would continue to control remediation. This article describes how regulator and public participation modified RBES to an end‐state vision. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Recreational rates and future land-use preferences for four Department of Energy sites: consistency despite demographic and geographical differences

The management of ecosystems has been improved by both a public understanding of ecosystem structure and function and by managers’ understanding of public perceptions and attitudes. This is especially true for contaminated lands where there are a variety of remediation, restoration, and future land-use decisions to be made. This paper synthesizes several surveys from four US Department of Energy (DOE) sites in the states of South Carolina, Idaho, Nevada, and New York. Although ethnic composition varied among the sites, age and gender did not. The percentage of the study population engaged in hunting ranged from 30% to 41% and that in fishing ranged from 55% to 74%. Average hunting rates ranged from 9 (New York) to 15 (South Carolina) days/year; average fishing rates ranged from 12 (New Mexico) to 38 (New York) days a year. Despite the demographic and recreational rate differences, there was remarkable agreement about future land uses. Maintaining these DOE sites as National Environmental Research Parks and using them for nonconsumptive recreation rated the highest. The lowest rated future land uses were current and additional nuclear waste storage and the building of homes and factories. People who participated in a recreational activity rated those future land uses higher than nonusers. While these data on recreational rates can be used to assess the potential risk to people using contaminated sites and to aid in setting clean-up standards based on potential risk, the information on land-use preferences can be used by managers to determine future use and to plan for such use. This information is particularly relevant to the Department of Energy's “Risk-based End State Vision.”