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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.
Donald J. Dudziak
Nuclear Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | March 1971 | Pages 391-392
Technical Note | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT71-A30972
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The afterheat in a D-T fusion reactor of conventional design is shown to be a serious consideration for loss-of-flow or loss-of-coolant accidents. Some previous estimates of the radioactivation of a niobium vacuum wall and structure are shown to be grossly low. The major additional contributions to the afterheat are from 94mNb, 92mNb, 95Nb, 95mNb, and a long-lived metastable state of93Nb. By considering some of these additional decay sources, the afterheat from a 5-GW(th) D-T reactor of typical design is computed to be at least 30 MW. Early in the reactor lifetime, the decay of the after-heat power should be characterized by the 10.1-day half-life of 92mNb. A qualitative review of the activation cross sections of molybdenum, an alternate possibility as a structural material, does not give expectation of decay powers significantly lower than niobium.