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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
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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DOE issues new NEPA rule and procedures—and accelerates DOME reactor testing
Meeting a deadline set in President Trump’s May 23 executive order “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” the DOE on June 30 updated information on its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) rulemaking and implementation procedures and published on its website an interim final rule that rescinds existing regulations alongside new implementing procedures.
Pegah Farshadmanesh, Tatsuya Sakurahara, Seyed Reihani, Ernie Kee, Zahra Mohaghegh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 3 | March 2019 | Pages 442-463
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1494439
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A major challenge facing the nuclear energy industry is to remain competitive under current market conditions. Utility operators are searching for innovative methods to reduce nuclear power plant (NPP) operation and maintenance costs while complying with safety and reliability requirements. To support these goals, the authors suggest a streamlined approach that implements a conservative risk-informed method to reduce the costs of satisfying emergent regulatory requirements. As a streamlined approach, the Risk-informed Over Deterministic (RoverD) method was developed by some of the authors of the current paper to resolve the concerns associated with Generic Safety Issue 191 (GSI-191). The RoverD method is designed around U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Regulatory Guide 1.174 (RG 1.174), which defines “risk-informed” regulation as comprising a blend of risk-based and deterministically based elements. This paper offers the Safety Hazard Analysis for earthquaKE (SHAKE)–RoverD (SHAKE-RoverD) methodology, an extension of the original RoverD methodology developed for GSI-191, to evaluate the impact of an increased seismic hazard on the performance of NPP protective systems. SHAKE-RoverD aims to reduce the cost required for developing, validating, and documenting detailed fragility curves in seismic probabilistic risk assessment by using deterministic fragility curves. The SHAKE-RoverD methodology assesses whether an increase in a seismic hazard would result in an unacceptable increase in NPP risk. If the conservative estimate of plant risk, computed by the streamlined approach, satisfies the regulatory acceptance criteria (e.g., Regulatory Guide 1.174), the plant likely would not need to make a design change (as long as defense in depth and adequate safety margin are satisfied); therefore, the use of streamlined methodology could lead to significant cost savings for the utility operator. Future work will advance SHAKE-RoverD and analyze risk management strategies based on this method.