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2025 annual assessments out for U.S. reactors
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released its 2025 annual performance assessments of the country’s 95 operating commercial nuclear reactors. And of the 95 reactors, all but five earned the highest marks.
Nuclear power plant assessments can fall under one of five categories: Licensee Response, Regulatory Response, Degraded Cornerstone, Degraded Performance, and Unacceptable Performance. Ninety reactors fell under Licensee Response, the highest performance category in safety and security. Plants that achieve this level of performance are subject to a Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) baseline inspection.
Jiashuang Wan, Pengfei Wang, Shifa Wu, Fuyu Zhao
Nuclear Technology | Volume 198 | Number 1 | April 2017 | Pages 26-42
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1292822
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The objective of this paper is to design a reactor power control system for the advanced small pressurized water reactor that adopts a constant average coolant temperature and a secondary-side steam pressure program. Based on the nonlinear core model with the one-group delayed neutron and simplified nonlinear once-through steam generator model, a two-input and two-output linear nuclear steam supply system (NSSS) model is obtained. Three types of control systems are then proposed and designed on a Bode diagram using analytical methods and second-order approximation. The comparison of the control performance and robustness of the three control systems shows that the double feedback control (DFC) with both power feedback and temperature feedback provides the best performance for reactor power and average coolant temperature with parameter uncertainty due to control rod differential worth variation. The simulations based on the high-order nonlinear NSSS model also show good performance of the DFC system.