News

Comedian George Carlin once said, “Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.”  We know the current processes for accreditation renewal.  In 2020, as a result of a joint industry and INPO effort, we will see significant changes and as these changes happen seven of our stations have accreditation team visits from December 2019 to December 2020.

How did the industry and INPO develop these changes?  The project was called “re-imagining accreditation” and the idea was to look at the entire process and determine if there were ways to do it more effectively and efficiently.  Early on it was realized that more was needed than tweaking so the effort looked for ways to spur true innovation.  Enter DaVinci and the Fighting Irish.  Who knew that Notre Dame has innovation expertise including a process that can be used for a problem when you are looking for ways to develop and launch a new approach and don’t know where to start?  Somebody should tell their football team!

The project team used this DaVinci process over a nine-month period and although there are changes in final piloting, things will be different in 2020 as the approved changes are phased in.  INPO recently announced approved changes as well as items still under review and please refer to the INPO website for this communication.

As the INPO announcement states, these changes maintain effective oversight of industry training, promoting resource reallocation to continuous learning rather than to administrative processes.  Also please note that regulations are not changing; we will continue to have accreditation of our programs using an independent board, and the accreditation objectives & criteria remain in place with a foundation built on a strong systematic approach to training.

For USA, it will be business as usual for Prairie Island and their Ops ATV in December of 2019.  For DC Cook, Monticello, and Susquehanna (all have Ops ATVs in the second quarter of 2020) no Accreditation Self Evaluation Report (ASER) will be required and each facility will subsequently go through a remote board process.

In the third quarter, Comanche Peak for their Ops ATV will also not be required to submit an ASER and will have a remote board.  South Texas may implement another change where instead of reviewing the typical six training programs, STP will have all 12 of their training programs reviewed during an August ATV.  We end the year with Columbia also having all 12 of their training programs reviewed in December.  The feasibility of doing all 12 programs is something still being finalized but INPO reached out to STP and Columbia to see if they were interested in doing all 12 and both stations stepped up.