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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Bipartisan Fusion Energy Act pushes for regulatory clarity
Sen. Alex Padilla (D., Calif.) introduced the Fusion Energy Act (S. 4151) last month with a bipartisan group of cosponsors—John Cornyn (R., Texas), Cory Booker (D., N.J.), Todd Young (R., Ind.), and Patty Murray (D., Wash.). The legislation would codify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regulatory authority over commercial fusion energy systems to streamline the creation of clear federal regulations that will support the development of commercial fusion power plants—and would require a report within one year on a study of risk- and performance-based, design-specific licensing frameworks for “mass-manufactured fusion machines.
“Congress must do everything in its power to ensure continued U.S. leadership in developing commercial fusion energy facilities,” said Padilla as he introduced the bill. “The Fusion Energy Act would provide regulatory certainty for investors as the NRC develops and streamlines frameworks for such facilities.”
Ki-Yong Ra, Byong-Whi Lee, Soon-Heung Chang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 101 | Number 2 | February 1993 | Pages 149-158
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34776
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With most of the current probabilistic safety criteria (PSCs), it is difficult to select a unanimously acceptable single-point safety goal and to evaluate the uncertainties in the results of a probabilistic safety assessment (PSA). A new PSC is proposed, in which the distribution of the public’s safety goals (DPSG) is used as a benchmark for evaluating the results of a PSA rather than a single-point safety goal. With this approach, the DPSG and the uncertainties in the results of a PSA can be handled properly so as to give a clear answer of “how much of the public feels a nuclear reactor is safe” to the question of “How safe is safe enough?” The proposed PSC is compared with the current PSCs and the expected utility model. If the actual DPSG is unavailable or difficult to obtain directly, a lognormal distribution is recommended as an appropriate DPSG for core melt frequencies in terms of maximizing entropy and minimizing total social cost. The proposed DPSG and PSC for core melt frequency are applied to the results of NUREG-1150.