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Phoenix, AZ|Arizona Grand Resort & Spa
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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.
B. R. Leonard, Jr.,
Nuclear Technology | Volume 20 | Number 3 | December 1973 | Pages 161-178
Technical Paper | Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT73-1
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The 14-MeV neutrons from a controlled DT fusion plasma can potentially be used to produce neutron source multiplication and energy multiplication through fission in a heavy-element blanket surrounding the fusion plasma. Concepts which involve the use of fusion-produced neutrons to ultimately produce fission are generically classed as fusion-fission hybrids. The conceptual purposes of hybrids can be many and varied: to relax the fusion plasma confinement conditions to allow further development of fusion power; to breed fissile material for fission reactors; as a subcritical fission lattice which is more energetic than the pure fusion concept; and the ultimate reduction of radioactive heavy element waste to fission product. The concept of a hybrid is based on an analysis of the neutronic behavior of the blanket. The status of studies of the neutronics analyses of proposed hybrids has been reviewed. These results have been used to determine the need for further development of hybrid technology.