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NRC shares details on proposed rules to streamline hearing timelines
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s adjudicatory hearings have not received any significant reforms since 2004. In fact, according to NRC staff, these Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) hearings have only undergone major reform three times in the board’s history.
That would change under a proposed rule that was issued earlier this month. At a March 19 virtual meeting, NRC staff provided more details on the proposed changes.
S. C. Wilson, S. R. Biegalski, R. L. Coats
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 157 | Number 3 | November 2007 | Pages 344-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The primary shutdown mechanism of all-metal nuclear assemblies engaging in pulsed operations is thermal expansion of the fuel material. Typically, a fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity is acquired by building the apparatus and fitting the operational data to the Nordheim-Fuchs kinetics equations. This value may vary as a function of reactivity insertion because of thermomechanical effects in the fuel material, which leads to uncertainty regarding untested reactor designs. This paper presents a computational method for modeling power, temperature, and thermoelastic displacement behavior of a spherical Godiva-like assembly during a prompt supercritical excursion and provides a way of determining fuel temperature coefficients of reactivity without the use of operational data.