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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
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.
Jun Liao, Dan Utley
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 191-205
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1599614
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Westinghouse Electric Company (Westinghouse) is developing its next generation of high-capacity nuclear power plants (NPPs) based on lead fast reactor (LFR) technology: a Generation IV compact, highly simplified, passively safe, and scalable NPP. In addition to superior economics for enabling competitiveness even in the most challenging electricity market, exceptional safety performance is actively pursued in the design of the plant, leveraging the inherent favorable properties of lead coolant as well as safety features intrinsic in the design. Being that decay heat removal (DHR) is an integral part of any NPP’s safety philosophy, a systematic process of concept selection has been employed across a wide variety of DHR system designs. Among them, air cooling outside of the reactor vessel (RV) is one of the concepts that has been actively evaluated by Westinghouse. In this paper, the use of air cooling in nuclear reactors is discussed together with the identification of benefits and challenges associated with RV air cooling in LFR technology. The heat removal capability of this system is assessed with three computer codes, differing in complexity and suitability to “rapid prototyping” design activities carried out by Westinghouse during different phases of plant design. Though the computer codes were developed separately, the results of the three evaluation models tend to support each other, thus increasing confidence in the information provided to progress the Westinghouse LFR design and establish its safety basis. Additional validation through existing and potentially new test data is foreseen as future work within the Westinghouse LFR program.