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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Senate EPW Committee to hold Nieh nomination hearing
Nieh
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as commission at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Trump nominated Nieh on July 30 to serve as NRC commissioner the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029, as Nuclear NewsWire previously reported.
Nieh has been vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though since June 2024 he has been at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations as a loaned executive.
A return to the NRC: If confirmed by the Senate, Nieh would be returning to the NRC after three previous stints totaling nearly 20 years.
Yeongshin Jeong, Koroush Shirvan, Michael Buric
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 868-885
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2102388
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work establishes a generic multiphysics tool for liquid-fueled molten salt reactors (LFMSRs) to select key installation locations and specify the expected operating temperature range for the development of advanced instrumentation and control systems, particularly distributed temperature sensors using fiber optics. A commercial computation fluid dynamics package (STAR-CCM+) is used to formulate a neutronics and thermal-hydraulic coupled solver, showing good agreement with a recent benchmark problem developed for evaluating the coupling methodology of neutronics and thermal hydraulics. The multiphysics model is then applied to the reference molten chloride salt fast reactor (MCFR) design under development by TerraPower based on publicly available information. The available two-dimensional axisymmetric model for the reactor core is used for coupling calculations, and system component details are leveraged using the lumped method to complete the energy balance. The dynamic responses of the MCFR model are investigated during operational transients, such as unprotected loss-of-flow and uniform perturbation scenarios. Maximum temperature and local temperature distributions are characterized during unprotected loss of flow and unprotected loss of heat sink events. The thermal responses of the fuel salt and core components are analyzed from induced perturbation of the system parameters, such as the flow rate and the heat sink capacity. The results motivate the use of continuous monitoring of the temperature variation in real time along the reflector region with the use of fiber optics to validate the multiphysics code to support a reactor’s licensing basis, as well as to support the structural longevity and improve safety in LFMSRs.