Nuclear Safety Innovation with Ashley Stowe

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. I’m so pleased to be joined in person on this episode by Dr. Ashley Stowe, director of the Oak Ridge Enhanced Technology and Training Center, or ORETTC, part of Y-12 CNS.

0:47 Ashley joined the Y-12 National Security Complex in 2007 and has been director of ORETTC since 2021. Prior to that, his roles at Y-12 had included serving as a senior development chemist, as program manager of CNS’s university partnerships and minority-serving institutions partnership program, as a Googin Fellow, and as manager of that Fellows program, and as director of the Nuclear Forensics and Detection Initiative. Ashley received his PhD in chemistry from Florida State University and his MBA from the University of Tennessee. He holds a number of adjunct positions at several universities, including UT, and has been widely published and recognized for his work. Ashley, it’s great to have you join us in AMSEcast.

1:29 Alan, thank you for having me. Welcome. Glad to have you here at AMSE, in person. Yeah. It’s so nice to chat with you locally here, and I come to the museum all the time. Well, thank you for your support, sir. We appreciate it. So, I just told a bit about your background. I’m always curious when I talk to successful people how they came to their field of endeavor. You know, what led you, in your youth, to say, this is something I want to do? And then how did you end up at Y-12? I knew all along I wanted to do chemistry, chemical engineering, things of that nature. I was always curious about how things worked. I guess you would say I was a bit of a troublemaker I would always try to see what I co— I can’t see that, Ashley. I can’t see that. I used to always try to see what I could mix together and see how big of a boom it would make.

2:12 And I found that if you’re interested in engineering, science, that kind of stuff, there’s kind of two sides to people. People who want to build stuff or break stuff. I was more on the break stuff. But I found over the years it’s more fun to build stuff. So, I’ve always known that I wanted to do that. I also knew I wanted to play baseball, and so mostly I followed baseball, and my parents made sure I did a little bit of schoolwork as well. There you go. And when I got hurt in college, I kind of refocused on chemistry, and then had a really nice girl who’s now my wife who said, “Maybe you should pay attention to your classes,” and that kind of set me down this path of studying chemistry and doing research. And so, that’s kind of how I got into the field.

2:53 Actually, when I came to Y-12, I was interviewing at ORNL to work over the Spallation Neutron Source. And when I gave my presentation on my research, a couple of guys from Y-12 came up to me afterwards, and basically said, “You don’t know who we are, but you need to come work for us.” That’s how I ended up at Y-12. I had a certain set of skills through my education, and postdocs, and so forth, that allowed me to help solve a problem that Y-12 had when I first came in. So, that’s how I got to Y-12. Very interesting. I always think back to my college days, Ashley, where chemistry was the great unknown to me. I think I didn’t give it a good enough chance. It scared me, frankly, but now I’ve learned to really be kind of enthralled by it.

3:37 It’s really fascinating. And so, I’m impressed that you took that course, and your wife was very wise to tell you that. I assume you still follow baseball, though. Oh, always. Okay, good. Good. Thank goodness. We don’t want to lose you. So, let’s talk a bit about, for those listeners who might not know that much about Y-12, what is its mission overall and how is it operated? So, the Y-12 National Security Complex dates back to the Manhattan Project. We were one of the four sites created in the early-1940s for World War II and creating the atomic bomb. As we moved from World War II, through the Cold War, and even to today, Y-12 maintains that mission of the nuclear deterrent. We are part of the manufacturing process of the nuclear weapon within the nuclear security enterprise, and so, our primary mission is maintaining that nuclear deterrent.

4:27 We also supply fuel for the nuclear navy as well as leverage all of our expertise in the nuclear weapons process, and handling those types of materials to provide global security efforts across the globe. Y-12 is operated by a joint venture called Consolidated Nuclear Security, LLC. That joint venture involves Bechtel National, Leidos, ATK Launch Systems, and SOC, along with Booz Allen Hamilton. This is basically a group that manages our facility for the government through a contracting mechanism. I see. And that’s part of the Department of Energy the government part is— That’s correct.

5:08 The Department of Energy, right? Yeah, it’s the NNSA, National Nuclear Security Administration, under the Department of Energy. I see. I see. So, I noted in your intro that you became director of ORETTC in 2021. When and why was ORETTC founded? Was that when it was founded or when was it founded, and what is its basic mission? The idea of ORETTC goes back about 15 years to a guy named Toby Williams, who still works out at Y-12. He recognized a need for a training mission for first responders, police officers, firefighters, people that worked at hospitals, at universities, that had nuclear radiological material, as nuclear medicine, for example, has continued to develop.

5:54 There are really good therapies and therapy centers that involve radioactive materials, and while they are excellent therapies to keep us safe, they also create a new threat. And when bad guys want to do bad things, it’s a whole lot easier to get that material from a hospital than it is from a place like Y-12, which is highly secured. And so, that created a need for a training mission to help close that training gap with first responders, with police officers, et cetera. For the last 15, 16 years, we’ve provided that service to the community through an NNSA program. And as we continue to grow and develop that program, there was a recognition that there was a need for a campus, a need for a facility that was purpose-built to provide that training near Y-12, but offsite of Y-12 so that we could de-risk activities—global security activities—on site, and make it easier for our training participants to come in.

6:57 And so, Toby and his team developed a plan and received funding for building that facility, and then I was asked to come in and lead it as we went through construction and stood it up. Our opening date was January 9th of 2023. We took all the time from when I started to set up our policies and procedures, even down to branding and things of that nature. An impressive facility it is. I wonder, of the people who come and take that training, how are they chosen? Is that something where you work with entities around, I assume, the country and the world? So, we have trained, over the last 15 years, individuals and departments from 48 of the 50 states—there’s two states that don’t have radioactive sources and so we don’t have a need to train them—as well as over 20 countries.

7:46 It’s a voluntary program. So, the way that the program works is, NNSA will provide a detection suite to the facility in return for their willingness to participate in the training. So, we’re providing them equipment that gets installed at their facility, and then our folks, along with other folks around the national security enterprise, train them on how the equipment works and how to think about the hazards as they do their response. We don’t teach tactics per se. We teach how to use the equipment and how to understand response to high consequence events in those types of hazard scenarios.

8:27 So, where do you find your trainers? Are those all in NNSA, or is it—how do you find the folks who do that type of work? Our staff are fantastic, and we find them in the field. Our subject matter experts are truly subject matter experts, having done the job, not just read about it in a book. So, for the most part, our physical security comes from folks who do physical security, whether that’s the Y-12 security force or special operations. We have emergency response personnel, firefighters who have been firefighters. And importantly, along with those technical subject matter experts in the technical areas of our training, we also have subject matter experts in education.

9:13 We have instructional system designers that are adult learning experts to make sure that as we design training, it’s designed for adult professionals in a way that will maximize their learning. And then of course as we move into technologies, we’re hiring experts in those fields. Now, that’s probably one of the more unique groups. We’re reaching into universities to find game designers because the platforms that we build on are the same platforms that you build video games, but we’re applying their unique skill set to serious games, to simulations and models that help with our unique training scenarios.

9:53 Tell me more what you can about those technologies. I know when we’ve spoken before, those are very exciting what you all are undertaking out there with new technology. Many of your listeners will have heard of virtual reality or augmented reality. These are some of the techniques that we’re using. The same kind of headsets that you’ve seen in the commercial industry, or perhaps even your kids may have, we leverage those types of technology, and instead of it being a boxing game or some sort of visualization for entertainment, we will put a manufacturing facility in there, or we’ll put in a hospital, or we’ll put in a radioactive source and help to visualize dosirings, so the amount of radioactivity that’s given off to help people understand the things they cannot see.

10:43 It helps the first responders, whether it’s police or otherwise, gain a quick understanding, and a deeper understanding of the hazards that they face in a way that they may not be able to understand, having not gone through a physics curriculum and things of that nature. So, what about thinking in terms of what types of facilities you’re training to address these high consequence events? Hospitals, for example. Is it also places like nuclear power plants, that type of thing? Is that part of what you’re training for? So, right now our focus—well, I’ll say this. Our vision is to become the preeminent training facility for high consequence events around radiation response, nuclear processing, and then a place that leverages these emerging technologies to apply to training in these purposes.

11:32 And so, we’ve talked a lot so far about emergency response, these high consequence radiation response scenarios, and in those cases, yes, it’s mostly universities that have either medical centers or research reactors, it’s hospitals, therapy centers, and things of that nature. In the nuclear processing world, it could be training our next generation of workers at Y-12, or it could be folks that are working in this nuclear renaissance, whether that’s small modular reactors, nuclear fuel fabrication for these advanced reactors, or power plants directly. So, we envision the types of techniques and the types of training that we do applying very well for the nuclear power industry, especially since the governor has put so much meat into building that industry here in East Tennessee.

12:25 Yeah, he’s done an amazing job with that, and this is the place to be, Ashley. You know that [laugh] . Just is right around us right now, hundreds of companies, and certainly the federal government, such a big role in nuclear energy for the future. Well, Ashley, you also play a role in non-proliferation issues. What role do you play in that, in non-proliferation and counter-proliferation activities? Of course. So, I mentioned that one of Y-12’s missions is global security. In global security, that is the nuclear non-proliferation mission. So, we have experts—and this is looking beyond my specific group or the activities we do at ORETTC—we have experts who go all over the world and secure material, and bring it home to make sure that adversaries can’t get it and use it for nefarious means.

13:15 Again, as our workforce ages and we begin to take the Cold War pioneers who have 30, 40 years of experience and replace them with really excited 22-year-olds who have very little experience, we have to figure out how to accelerate their training process. And so, we believe that at ORETTC, we have a role to play in helping in that knowledge transfer, and then creating simulation scenarios that allow this next generation of workforce to apply the skills they learned in realistic ways, whether that’s creating a scenario where they have to identify certain types of materials or they have to learn how to apply protection measures, we have the ability to create those scenarios that take what they’ve learned in a classroom and apply it in realistic ways, and in a safe environment where they’re able to make mistakes, and learn, and recover and practice before they go out into the field where they’re working with real materials.

14:22 So, important. I know I just attended a program at the Howard Baker School at UT, and talking about the future of nuclear, one of the speakers noted that as we look at this nuclear renaissance two of the big factors we have to think about is, first of all, costs and how we address those, and SMRs and other things are part of that answer that question, but then proliferation and making sure that that’s handled. So, what you’re doing is not only vitally important to the security and safety of the world, but to the continued growth of that enterprise, that again, that is so important to climate change, and addressing the climate change issues. So, very important work you’re doing there. And I guess I would ask, in that and all the other training you’re doing, how do you evaluate, at the end of the day, how effective you’re being in that training?

15:07 Well, evaluation is probably one of the more important things that we do. There’s a lot of training out there that’s not effective. I know. I’ve been through some of it. And so, we spend a lot of time, even in the needs analysis on the front end, asking the question, what are we trying to get out of this training? And then as we work our way through it, we apply a number of evaluation methods, but Kirkpatrick’s levels of learning evaluation is one of the main ones. There’s four levels, and basically it starts with something as simple as a Likert scale, a simple, how did you feel? One to five, kind of, scenario as soon as you’re ending. Are you more familiar with it?

15:48 And then as it goes from the person attending the training, in that moment of completion and their first impressions to getting farther and farther away from that initial training, there’s levels of complexity that goes into it where you move from how did the individual experience the training to, how did they apply the skills in the training when they got back home, or back to their area? And then how does that build up to a department or a company level? And then finally, what kind of ROI, what kind of real impact are you having in behavior? Doing those higher levels of evaluation are exceedingly hard to accomplish, and many groups don’t put that effort in because it’s hard to quantify, but we are putting a concerted effort into getting to that level because that’s where the real value is.

16:41 We’ve all been through training where it was a really fun week, we learned a few things, and then we get back home and put that training manual back on the shelf, and don’t change anything about what we’re doing. That’s a waste of the training. So, we have to make sure that we are engaged to the point to help our learners take what they’ve learned with us back home and put it into practice. Do they come back? Is that something where you say, well, I’m going to come back next year and do another set of training? What’s the ongoing engagement with that specific person? I’ll answer that not just for the person, but for the department or the facility.

17:22 We have a few training courses that they would go through, and it’s kind of like a scope and sequence in an academic curriculum. Everything from engagements before they arrive with a little bit of pre-work to their engagement in what I would call a 101 level course. For us, it’s the alarm response training course for this one program around radiological emergencies. And then we would send them back home with a new set of fundamental skills, and some encouragement to apply those back in their work setting. We will then reach out to them 6 to 12 months later for follow-ups on how it’s been applied or implemented back home.

18:09 We then will go through tabletop exercises that will help them to test how they’ve applied it. And then ultimately, we would send a team to their facility to do exercises that, again, provide a level of realism in dynamic practice to how they’re applying these new skills or implementing these new skills. From there, we can continue to go, and we end up partnering with other national labs, to do other aspects. But it ultimately will grow from an individual learning the fundamentals to applying it in their space, in their facility, and then out to joint groups, joint departments, doing exercises together that would interact beyond the Department of Energy with other cabinet departments for some of these joint exercises.

19:00 I guess, I know we’ve talked before, Ashley, and I’d missed the fact that you also go out in the field then, as part of this. And if someone—I’m sure you have amazing communications with folks who would benefit from this, but if someone happened to be listening to AMSEcast, which I hope, frankly, everyone in America is listening right now, and they had an interest in taking part in this training, where do they go to find out how they connect with you? Well, so they can reach out to me directly. It’s ashley.stowe@pxy12.doe.gov. And then very soon we’ll be standing up a ORETTC website, ORETTC O-R-E-T-T-C—dot energy dot gov. We are exceedingly close, but never close enough to getting that website pushed forward and out to the public.

19:48 We’ve just gotten, I think, our final approval to be able to go live, as of this morning. Hopefully by the time this airs, your audience will be able to reach our website directly. Good. Good. They used to make fun of me. I was director of the George W. Bush Library and Museum, and it took forever to get our website there done, and so I would start every staff meeting with, “When do I get the website?” And I was a, beat the drum incessantly for that, Ashley, and I got it done, finally [laugh] . So, it takes some effort. But kind of in that same vein of how to find out more information, if we have parents listening, who their kids might be interested in this type of work in the future, or frankly someone out there who wants to—some student out there who wants to study and be in Ashley Stowe’s world when they go into their career, how do they do that?

20:32 What’s your advice for them? So, I think my overall advice would be to stay curious. Always ask questions. Most of my experience, most of my success has simply been from asking questions, for being willing to participate in things that I didn’t know the answer to when I started, and being willing to listen to those who do have more information and learn from them. In a more pointed way, if you’re interested in science or technology, there are great museums, like AMSE, that have STEM programs. It’s never too early to start those. For those who are high school or college age, there are excellent engineering programs, especially in East Tennessee, at the University of Tennessee, of course, but as well as Pellissippi State and Roane State Community Colleges.

21:25 We’re partnering currently with Roane State to create a nuclear technology program specifically designed at the two-year level to create workers to work in our industry. And we’re actually partnering with them directly on a unique training mechanism that will teach these students how to work inside of glove boxes. So, we have a virtual reality system with something called haptic gloves that allow you to touch and feel digital objects. So, even though there’s nothing in your hand, it feels like you’re holding a baseball. It has the weight of a baseball. It has the texture of the seams, and you can feel that.

22:09 If we apply that to a glove box, you feel the pressure of the gas inside protecting the material. As you put your hand into the glove box, you feel the weight of the object that you’re trying to pick up. You feel the pain and frustration of lost dexterity because you have oversized gloves. And so, we’re trying to bring those technologies into the classroom so that people who are interested in moving into this field can learn as early as possible what it’s actually going to be like, and make an informed decision about whether they want to continue in the program. It also helps us on the CNS Y-12 side, as well as other companies that use glove boxes because it reduces that training and onboarding process.

22:55 Yeah. I should tell you, I started working with Joe and the folks at Rhone State on that very program of seeing how we can help with the K-12 part of that, and I think it took part the last couple of weeks in some pilot work they were doing there with Tennessee Tech, I do believe. Yes. And Tennessee Tech is also creating a nuclear engineering program. We just heard about that. So, it’s—yeah— Yeah, I’m really excited to see how that grows. As we’ve talked about, East Tennessee’s the epicenter of the nuclear renaissance right now, and so we need as many workforce efforts and curriculum to build that workforce of the future because there’s going to be a lot of companies.

23:37 We already have seen a lot of companies coming into the area. Another shortfall in workforce that we have currently that I hope we’re going to be able to address very soon is as we have more companies coming into this area, as we have more companies moving to simulation technologies, there’s a shortage of people who are experts in game design or game craft. We’ve also begun partnering with the University of Tennessee to create a certificate program that we’re hoping will grow into a full degree program through the new University of Tennessee College of Emerging and Collaborative Studies called Game Craft. And I have the privilege of participating and teaching that first class this fall, an intro to Game Craft.

24:19 And the idea about all of it is, we’re helping to teach people how to build these simulations, whether that be for digital twins to understand the engineering design of a facility, or the operational protocol of that facility, all the way down to emergency response. And the idea when you’re dealing with such high hazard environments as a nuclear power plant or nuclear materials for nuclear manufacturing, you want to train people in a realistic way without having the hazard in front of them, especially early in that learning curve. That way they can get hands-on, they can get that experiential learning, and are able to make mistakes and still go home at the end of the day.

25:04 So, that’s really important to us, but we have to reach into other states to go find our workforce, and we’re hoping to build that here in East Tennessee. I should note as part of that, University of Tennessee Nuclear Engineering Department is one of the best in the country. Wes Hines, who helped build that over the past many years, is on our board of directors, and really great guy. I’ve known him for many years. But just an amazing work they did there with nuclear engineering. What’s next for ORETTC? What do you see on the horizon in the short term or long term? Well, I think one of the most exciting things for us is we’re about to break ground on our second facility. We talk about ORETTC as a campus, but we’ve only had one building, so I’m excited that we can actually get to a second building and truly start to become a campus.

25:49 ORETTC was built as a unique state-federal partnership, and so the building we’re in now is actually a county-owned building that was funded through appropriations from the state of Tennessee from Governor Lee. CNS now leases that building, and our second building will actually be a federally funded, federally owned building. And what that allows us to do is mix and match our hazard envelopes. So, our first building, we’re able to have ease of access, a lot of classroom and simulation spaces, but low hazard. As we move into our second facility, it will have a higher hazard envelope, allowing us to take what we’ve learned in the classroom, and what we’ve practiced in simulation space, and then interact with nuclear materials at a pilot scale, again in a very controlled way.

26:42 But it gets closer to real life, closer to real scale of interaction. So, we should be breaking ground on that in August of 2024, and then moving into that facility by the end of 2025, if all things go on schedule. So, that is one thing I’m very excited about. Let’s see, beyond that, a couple of technology things that are, I think, unique to us, we have an LED volume that’s 10 feet high, 36 feet across, 16 feet deep, and it makes, basically, a room that we can put any environment we can create onto it. And so, we use these simulation technologies to bring a facility, at scale, in to the user, in to that training participant to allow them to have a level of immersion and realism that they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise.

27:37 So, imagine that you’re trying to learn how to work in a building that hasn’t been built yet. If we have the engineering drawings, we can build that environment and train the staff before the building is done. We’re also hoping to bring in a holographic table technology. So, the things that at least I admired from Star Wars and Star Trek, we’re bringing those things to life. We’re not quite to a holodeck yet, but we’re getting close. [laugh] . Let me know when you are. I mean I’m— [laugh] . And all of this is for a learning purpose, and that’s what’s really exciting. All of these technologies that seemed like they’re science fiction, seemed like they were child’s games that, at least, I played all the time, we’re now using as adults to train adults in very realistic ways.

28:27 And it’s certainly a lot more engaging than PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide. So, that’s what’s coming for us. That’s amazing. The advance of technology, the rapidity of it, it’s amazing to me. I remember just not that many years ago hearing about 3D printing. And I thought, “Well, that’s magic. That’s not going to happen.” And now look how it’s everywhere. Oh, it’s ubiquitous. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely is. So, Ashley, I’m really interested in this LED volume. Can you tell me more about it? Yeah. So, the LED volume is basically a server with a huge, huge screen. And in our high bay, we use this to bring people into a variety of environments.

29:07 One of the ones that we’ve created more recently—and there’s actually a training purpose. We had one of our subject matter experts drive through downtown Knoxville with a GoPro on his vehicle. So, he does a few laps through downtown, down Market Street—or Market Square, Main Street, et cetera. Through UT’s campus. And then he brought it back, put it on the LED volume as a video. He then will move a vehicle into that space. And when you sit in the vehicle, it’s so immersive, we’ve had people slam on the brakes. For a vehicle that’s not even running. [laugh] . Right. The people, when you turn left, will lean the way they would in a moving vehicle.

29:52 When it comes to a stop, they will lunge forward because your brain is filling in the gaps, and it makes you feel like you’re actually moving. Now, why would we do that? We work with teams that are sent around the country and around the world to make sure that we’re safe from harm, from explosives, or radiological devices in large public gatherings. And some of their vehicles have certain unique detection systems that if we were going to help them practice in the real world, we would have to take an actual radiological source into a public area.

30:32 We can spoof that by having them come into our facility, get the experience of driving around, and then use the source in our facility in a very controlled way to set off their detectors, and practice their response. They’re able to observe what’s happening. And oftentimes we will plant an actor as we’re driving around that does something that looks a bit suspicious, and then we’ll make that part of the training profile, the training video that we’re working off of, and line up all of these events. So, that’s one scenario of the things we’re thinking about doing on our LED volume. That’s amazing.

31:12 I can vouch just in terms of your technologies in general, how realistic they are. You brought in the virtual reality glove box, is that right— That’s right, yes. For one of our Nuclear Education Discovery Day and did a great job. Thank you for doing that. And I put on the goggles, and handled some materials in the glove box. And at one point you had to say, “You know, Alan, it’s not really there,” because I was leaning around, I was leaning in trying to do it correctly, but it felt so real. I felt like I had to do those actions to perform the function. And that’s why we do what we do. When you have—we start leaning and reaching because you think there’s a physical object separating you, a barrier in front of you, even though you’re standing in empty space.

31:56 That’s where we start to see the true value of this type of training. Just truly amazing what you’re doing, to a very important purpose, Ashley. We appreciate what you’re doing and I appreciate you being on AMSEcast. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person. You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org.

32:40 Thanks to our production team with Matt Mullins, plus our supportive colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Environmental Management, and Office of Legacy Management, as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, NNSA, and the AMSE Foundation. And of course, thanks to our wonderful guests today, and to all of you for listening. I hope you’ll join us for the next episode of AMSEcast. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I would like to ask that you consider becoming a member of the 117 Society, the newest membership opportunity offered by the American Museum of Science and Energy Foundation. By joining the 117 Society, you will help us continue this podcast and our other innovative programming.

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