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NRC to add new items to categorical exclusions list
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has identified five categories of action to add to its list of categorical exclusions to reduce its documentation work under National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures.
These revisions are included in the final rule, “Categorical exclusions from environmental review,” which was published in the Federal Register on March 30. The final rule will become effective on April 29.
Cole Gentry, Benjamin Collins, Eva Davidson, Gregory Davidson, Thomas Evans, Andrew Godfrey, Shane Hart, Germina Ilas, Seth Johnson, Kang Seog Kim, Scott Palmtag, Tara Pandya, Katherine Royston, William Wieselquist, Gary Wolfram
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 3 | March 2021 | Pages 320-337
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1820797
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The CASL reactor simulation package VERA has been adapted to provide high-fidelity simulation capabilities for modeling source range detector response during subcritical reactor configurations. New features include the activation and shuffling of secondary-source assemblies, use of burned fuel neutron emission data from the ORIGEN depletion solver to the MPACT deterministic neutron transport solver, allowance of user-defined sources in MPACT based on material composition, ability to solve the subcritical source-driven system with neutron multiplication using the MPACT diffusion solver, and transfer of the calculated fission source from MPACT to the continuous-energy Monte Carlo solver Shift for final detector response evaluation using the CADIS methodology for variance reduction. These new capabilities were benchmarked against Watts Bar Unit 1 plant operating data for the first few fuel loading steps and were found to demonstrate excellent agreement with the measured data.