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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Senate EPW Committee to hold Nieh nomination hearing
Nieh
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as commission at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Trump nominated Nieh on July 30 to serve as NRC commissioner the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029, as Nuclear NewsWire previously reported.
Nieh has been vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though since June 2024 he has been at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations as a loaned executive.
A return to the NRC: If confirmed by the Senate, Nieh would be returning to the NRC after three previous stints totaling nearly 20 years.
Yaoli Zhang, Jacopo Buongiorno, Michael Golay, Neil Todreas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 203 | Number 2 | August 2018 | Pages 129-145
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1433935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Offshore Floating Nuclear Plant (OFNP) integrates an advanced light water reactor into a cylindrical, double-hull, floating platform. It offers a series of potential benefits in economics and safety. The 300-MW(electric) version, named OFNP-300, uses an ocean-based direct reactor auxiliary cooling system (DRACS) to remove decay heat from the core passively and indefinitely during loss of feedwater or loss of off-site power events. In the ocean, the OFNP platform may roll during storms or even statically tilt following asymmetric flooding of underwater compartments. The effects of rolling motion and static tilt on the engineered safety systems are investigated in this paper using a RELAP5-3D (version 4.3.4) model of OFNP-300. The oscillations of the platform are described as the superposition of sinusoidal motions for the six degrees of freedom, i.e., heave, roll, pitch, yaw, sway, and surge. The plant’s thermal-hydraulic responses to two postulated accidents, i.e., loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) and station blackout (SBO), are then studied in three scenarios: (a) a design-basis 100-yr storm, (b) a bounding scenario in which the platform is assumed to pitch and roll with an amplitude of 20 deg, and (c) a bounding scenario in which the platform experiences a static tilt of 30 deg. The results of the RELAP5 analysis show that the safety margins of OFNP-300 are not challenged in the aforementioned three postulated scenarios. From a thermal-hydraulic point of view, the pitch and roll motions affect the flow in the DRACS but have no negative effect on the temperatures in the core during LOCA and SBO. Static platform tilt is tolerable up to 45 deg, beyond which the emergency core cooling system can no longer function.