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Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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RIC session focuses on interagency collaboration
Attendees at last week’s 2026 Regulatory Information Conference, hosted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, saw extensive discussion of new reactor technologies, uprates, fusion, multiunit deployments, supply chain, and much more.
With the industry in a state of rapid evolution, there was much to discuss. Connected to all these topics was one central theme: the ongoing changes at the NRC. With massively shortened timelines, the ADVANCE Act and Executive Order 14300, and new interagency collaboration and authorization pathways in mind, speakers spent much of the RIC exploring what the road ahead looks like for the NRC.
S. B. Kim, S. L. Chouhan, P. A. Davis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 960-963
Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12575
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The high mobility of tritium as HTO implies that, under steady-state conditions, the T/H ratio (or equivalently the HTO concentration) is the same in all water compartments of the environment. This is the basis of the specific activity (SA) model, which underlies almost all environmental tritium models. SA concepts apply to organically bound tritium (OBT) as well, since the OBT formed by a given plant process at a given time has a T/H ratio that reflects the ratio in the water that enters into that process. There is no empirical evidence that the bioaccumulation of tritium in aquatic and wetland plants will occur. OBT/HTO ratios less than one is consistently found in the laboratory where the HTO concentrations to which the plants are exposed can be held constant. These data suggest a value of 0.7 for the OBT/HTO ratio under equilibrium conditions in the laboratory. Theoretical considerations suggest that the value of the OBT/HTO ratio in plants is significantly different from one and, in most cases, greater than one. This is primarily due to the much longer residence time of OBT in plants as compared to HTO. The observed HTO concentrations are much higher than OBT concentrations, which makes OBT/HTO ratio smaller than unit in contrast with SA based expectations. In addition to this, the IMPACT model overpredicted HTO and OBT concentrations in plants and animals by a factor of 3 or 4, on average. This work is summary of the AECL funded research project (1).