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NRC to add new items to categorical exclusions list
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has identified five categories of action to add to its list of categorical exclusions to reduce its documentation work under National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures.
These revisions are included in the final rule, “Categorical exclusions from environmental review,” which was published in the Federal Register on March 30. The final rule will become effective on April 29.
Pola Lydia Lagari, Styliani Pantopoulou, Miltos Alamaniotis, Lefteri H. Tsoukalas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1270-1279
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1816743
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since radionuclides have unique characteristic gamma-ray spectra, usually maintained as a set of (energy, counts/energy) ordered pairs, an explicit functional representation would be indisputably useful. In this paper, the Gamma Detector Response and Analysis Software has been used to simulate the gamma-ray spectra as it would be collected by an NaI detector for a set of 70 radionuclides. Gaussian radial basis function (RBF) networks that offer simple, closed-form expressions are then trained to represent each of these spectra. Hence, a library consisting of 70 RBF networks for the corresponding radionuclides has been built. The presence of these library-contained radionuclides in a given gamma-ray spectrum of an unknown source is identified by an algorithm that employs a linear combination of the library spectra to approximate the unknown spectrum. The combination coefficients are then determined by minimizing the squared deviation error function under convexity constraints.