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Conference Spotlight
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.
T. L. Gordon, M. M. R. Williams, M. D. Eaton
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 2 | February 2025 | Pages 223-238
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2348859
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An approximate method for determining the maturity time is presented for applications in low neutron source nuclear reactor startup simulations. This new method relies only on the calculation of the mean neutron density and does not require the additional calculation of the variance in the neutron density as the traditional method does. The most accurate method for determining the safe neutron source strength, required to sufficiently mitigate the probability of a rogue transient during nuclear reactor startup, uses the Pál-Bell equations. However, as space and energy dependencies are included, the numerical computation become computationally demanding. Therefore, approximate methods that significantly reduce the computation time and improve the computational efficiency of the simulation while remaining very accurate are extremely useful. The approximate method for determining the maturity time presented in this study has shown excellent agreement with traditional methods while offering an order of magnitude reduction in computation time.