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2025 annual assessments out for U.S. reactors
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released its 2025 annual performance assessments of the country’s 95 operating commercial nuclear reactors. And of the 95 reactors, all but five earned the highest marks.
Nuclear power plant assessments can fall under one of five categories: Licensee Response, Regulatory Response, Degraded Cornerstone, Degraded Performance, and Unacceptable Performance. Ninety reactors fell under Licensee Response, the highest performance category in safety and security. Plants that achieve this level of performance are subject to a Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) baseline inspection.
Timothy P. Burke, Brian C. Kiedrowski, William R. Martin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 188 | Number 2 | November 2017 | Pages 109-139
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1350000
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Kernel density estimators (KDEs) are applied to estimate neutron scalar flux and reaction rate densities in Monte Carlo neutron transport simulations of heterogeneous nuclear reactors in continuous energy. The mean free path (MFP) KDE is introduced in order to handle the issues that arise from estimating the discontinuous reaction rate densities at material interfaces. Results show the MFP KDE is more accurate at estimating reaction rates compared with previous KDE formulations. An approximate MFP (aMFP) KDE is introduced to circumvent several practical issues presented by the MFP KDE. A volume-averaged KDE is derived and used to determine the bias introduced by the aMFP KDE. A KDE is formulated for cylindrical coordinates to better represent the geometry and capture the physics in two-dimensional reactor physics problems. The results indicate that the cylindrical MFP KDE and cylindrical aMFP KDE are accurate tools for capturing reaction rates in heterogeneous reactor physics problems in continuous energy, with local biases of less than 1%.