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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. M. Perry, H. F. Bauman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 8 | Number 2 | February 1970 | Pages 208-219
Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT70-A28626
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As presently conceived at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and described in this issue, the single-fluid Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor, operating on the 232Th-233 U fuel cycle and based on a reference design, has a breeding ratio of ∼1.06, specific fissile inventory of 1.5 kg/MW(e), a fuel doubling time of ∼20 years, and fuel cycle costs of ∼0.7 mill/kWh(e). Start-up may be accomplished with either enriched uranium or plutonium, with little effect on fuel cost; the breeding ratio, averaged over reactor life, is reduced 0.01 to 0.02 relative to the equilibrium cycle. Operated as a converter, with limited chemical processing, the reactor may have a conversion ratio in the range 0.8 to 0.9 with fuel cycle costs of 0.7 to 0.9 mill/kWh(e).