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What’s reshaping nuclear licensing and compliance today?
Mark Reidmeyer
It is the convergence of urgency, innovation, and modernization that is reshaping nuclear licensing and compliance today.
For decades, nuclear licensing operated in a relatively stable environment built around large light water reactors, predictable review cycles, and well-established regulatory pathways. Today, that model is evolving rapidly. Advanced reactors, AI-enabled tools, digital engineering platforms, grid reliability concerns, and aggressive decarbonization goals are all pushing the industry—and regulators—to move faster and think differently.
Kenneth A. Solomon, Robert C. Erdmann, David Okrent
Nuclear Technology | Volume 25 | Number 1 | January 1975 | Pages 68-71
Technical Paper | Reactor Siting | doi.org/10.13182/NT75-A24349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method and statistics given by V. E. Blake have been employed to estimate the probability per year that a nuclear reactor could be seriously damaged by a meteorite strike. The probability per year that a target area of 104 ft2 will be struck by a meteorite weighing more than a pound is estimated to be 4.3 × 10−9 per reactor year. However, only a fraction of these meteorites, corresponding to weights exceeding 100 lb (0.05 ton), is very likely to seriously damage or destroy the reactor to the point of an uncontrolled release of fission products. For a vulnerable target area of 104 ft2, this probability is estimated to be 7× 10−10 per reactor year. If the vulnerable target area per reactor were 102 ft2, the probability of serious damage is estimated to be 7 × 10−9 per reactor year. The probability that a coastal plant will suffer serious damage arising from either a direct hit of a meteorite or from a tidal wave induced by a meteorite is estimated to be of the order of 9 × 10−10 per reactor year for a target area of 104ft2.