Standing on the brink of the nuclear renaissance emerging in the United States and globally, we find ourselves asking serious questions about the future of nuclear power.

• What have we learned?
• What did we do well?
• What can we improve?
• How can we make nuclear power safer?
• How can we improve reliablity?
• How can we make nuclear electric generation more affordable?

These questions, and countless more, have driven our thinking as we strive to push the practices we know as configuration management forward. Our exercise has not been to find fault with existing practices, but to take what we have learned, and drive a necessary evolution to produce a science of nuclear configuration management that is appropriate for the design, construction, operation, and maintenance over the projected life of these new facilities.

The challenge is more than a technical one. It is not enough to have processes, practices, policies and programs tied together in a sophisticated software package, because those are just tools we use to do the job we call configuration management.

In the end, we have responsibilities to the public, our regulators, our governments, and our shareholders that must be fulfilled day in and day out for the next eighty to one hundred years regarding the safe design, construction, operation, and maintenance of the facilities that use nuclear energy to generate electricity.

We manage the configuration of our plants, not because we are required to, or because it is cost-effective, or even because it just makes sense, but because we do so to earn the trust of those we wish to allow us to responsibly run the business of making electricity with nuclear energy.

This is the start of our journey.