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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.
David A. Greene
Nuclear Technology | Volume 14 | Number 3 | June 1972 | Pages 218-231
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT72-A31111
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A computer code has been written to predict pressure on the shell side of a steam generator during a large scale sodium-water reaction. A typical pressure transient has two main features. An initial pressure spike is followed by a secondary pressure pulse whose amplitude is a function of the inertia forces governing the growth of the hydrogen bubble. Unlike the primary pressure spike which lasts a very short time, the secondary pulse can last for a long time and must be considered a steady-state pressure acting on the shell. Rupture disks under sodium may not provide an effective means of relieving the secondary pressure pulse unless the sodium-water reaction occurs close enough to the disk to cause its rapid failure. It is concluded that both superheater and evaporator units of a reference steam generator design can withstand the pressure transient associated with the sodium-water reaction resulting from a guillotine failure of a single heat transfer tube.