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  A trip abroad
  Hash Hashemian president@ans.org
  In my August column in Nuclear News, I reflected on the importance of ANS’s annual conferences for bringing together our nuclear community at the national level. In September, after speaking at Tennessee’s Nuclear Opportunities Workshop, I focused my NN column that month on the value of state-level conferences.
  Also in September, alongside ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy, I shifted my focus to another key front in nuclear collaboration, the international stage, by attending the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
  The timing of the IAEA’s General Conference could not have been better; it took place the same week the U.S. and U.K. kicked off a new wave of transatlantic partnerships in the nuclear sector between both government and industry. This fortuitous overlapping gave us a timely and concrete reminder of international collaboration’s unparalleled benefits.
  The General Conference was an expectedly busy event. To cover as much ground as possible, Piercy and I took turns attending either the U.S. delegation meetings with other countries or the General Assembly of the IAEA, where the American Nuclear Society has a seat among other critical nongovernmental organizations.
  We listened to presentations by several of the 180 IAEA member states, including, of course, the United States. Aside from ANS, the U.S. presence at the conference included U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, NRC Chair David Wright, and DOE Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.
  U.S. representation was further bolstered by an industry delegation that included 65 participants from 32 companies, many of whom used the opportunity to report progress on their plans for the international expansion of their nuclear fleets. Meetings of that industry delegation were coordinated by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
  Aside from the main conference, Piercy and I also attended the embedded meetings of the International Nuclear Society Council. INSC exists to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration between 18 different member nuclear societies from around the world.
  The INSC meetings within the General Conference brought together the presidents and senior members of those societies to give presentations and explore new opportunities. I made a presentation on the state of nuclear in North America, covering the latest developments and deployments in the U.S. and Canada.
  This presentation emphasized the new nuclear lift in the U.S. that is being heavily supported by the Trump administration. I recapped the four executive orders issued by President Trump in May, the recent momentum at the DOE, and how these changes are capitalizing on a broader groundswell in both industry development and public support.
  I also pointed out the success of our neighbor Canada in progressing on the first water-cooled small modular reactor in North America using BWRX-300 technology, which was supplied by an American firm and international partners—a perfect symbol of the value of global nuclear collaboration.
  In all, I have now represented ANS at the state, national, and international levels, gaining useful insight into the work that needs to be done at each. From this vantage point, it’s clear to me that the path forward from the country to the globe is to, above all else, keep working together and supporting each other to bring about the next age of nuclear.
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A previous study concluded that the robust, multimodule design of the NuScale small modular reactor plant can provide power at an unprecedented level of availability to mission critical facilities. This study extends the analysis to include a microgrid power distribution and delivery system to demonstrate the increased availability of power delivered to a customer. A hypothetical 12-module NuScale plant located on the Clinch River site in Tennessee is assumed to supply power from three modules to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) through the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) transmission system. Combinations of transmission and power generation equipment failures that might interrupt power, and the associated frequency and duration of these failures, are identified and the potential for power interruption to ORNL is evaluated. The analysis first evaluates the existing transmission infrastructure and availability of power to ORNL to establish a baseline availability. Then, a connection from the NuScale plant through the local TVA transmission system (option 1) and a direct connection from the NuScale plant to the ORNL distribution system (option 2) are evaluated, as well as three sensitivity cases. The existing power distribution and delivery system at ORNL is already highly reliable resulting from multiple diverse power generators feeding a robust power delivery system. The primary driver of macrogrid power unavailability is the existing power generation sources, which includes two coal plants and two hydroelectric generators, rather than transmission equipment. Adding a 12-module NuScale plant to the system further reduces the unavailability of power to ORNL by over two orders of magnitude in both cases of considering only local power sources and the macrogrid as a whole. When considering only local generators, the inclusion of a NuScale plant improves the average availability of power to ORNL from three-nines to over five-nines. If the large-scale macrogrid is also included, average availability is increased to nine-nines.