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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.
A. B. Reynolds, C. A. Erdman, M. Kirbiyik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 26 | Number 2 | June 1975 | Pages 165-171
Technical Paper | Reactor Siting | doi.org/10.13182/NT75-A24415
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Methods to calculate bounding values for the generation of fuel vapor during disassembly and during expansion of the fuel after disassembly in a fast-reactor core-disruptive accident were developed. Isentropic expansion of the fuel following disassembly with no fuel mixing before expansion was assumed. It was necessary to develop consistent thermodynamic fuel properties for the analysis. The method was applied to a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor disassembly, first with sodium in the core and then with sodium removed. Bounding values were also compared to lower values obtained by assuming mixing and thermal equilibrium of the fuel prior to expansion. For the bounding calculation with sodium removed, 4.6% of the fuel vaporized when the expanded fuel occupied all of the available volume. This value was reduced to 0.9% when mixing and thermal equilibrium prior to expansion was assumed.