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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Ho Nieh nominated to the NRC
Nieh
President Trump recently nominated Ho Nieh for the role of commissioner in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission through the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029.
Nieh has been the vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though he is currently working as a loaned executive at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, where he has been for more than a year.
Nieh’s experience: Nieh started his career at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, where he worked primarily as a nuclear plant engineer and contributed as a civilian instructor in the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Power Program.
From there, he joined the NRC in 1997 as a project engineer. In more than 19 years of service at the organization, he served in a variety of key leadership roles, including division director of Reactor Projects, division director of Inspection and Regional Support, and director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.
A. F. Debosscher, W. L. Dutre
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 69 | Number 3 | March 1979 | Pages 347-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19951
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper deals with the exact stochastic analysis of the low-frequency neutron density fluctuations in an on-off controlled nuclear power reactor without delayed neutrons and perturbed by Gaussian white reactivity noise. The stochastic process, being Markovian, is completely characterized by its first-order probability density function (pdf) and the transition pdf The first-order pdf is the normalized solution to the time-independent Fokker-Planck equation (FPE). Using this pdf, a general expression for the moments is obtained. The conditions for stochastic stability in probability, in the mean, and in the mean-square are derived. The time-dependent FPE is solved using the Laplace transform technique, which results in four distinct expressions for the transition pdf, according to the relative magnitude of initial and final reactor power with respect to the regulator level. After Laplace inversion, a physical interpretation of the controller's effect on the stochastic process becomes possible. Finally, making use of the obtained pdf's, the spectral density of the reactor power fluctuations is calculated.