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NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
Elham Gharibshahi, Miltos Alamaniotis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 5 | May 2024 | Pages 868-883
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2254168
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear terrorism resulting from the illicit trafficking of nuclear and radioactive materials consists of a serious threat against the security of countries. Hence, the transportation of hidden nuclear materials in large-scale cargos has emerged as an important public issue that requires immediate attention. The security architecture should merge the nuclear security systems and execute a procedure for the detection of nuclear and radioactive materials. In this regard, the detection of special nuclear materials (SNMs) in liquid-filled cargo containers is an essential matter of homeland security because of the difficulties imposed by liquids in performing efficient manual inspection. This paper presents a new artificial intelligence (AI) system implemented with fuzzy logic tools for detecting composite materials, including Pb-Th, Pb-U, and Pb-Co, in containers filled with water by utilizing optical signature information obtained with COMSOL. The developed AI system and its underlying method are validated for a scenario of detecting Pb-Th, Pb-U, and Pb-Co in water-filled containers.