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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Joseph Oncken, Linyu Lin, Vivek Agarwal
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 12 | December 2024 | Pages 2274-2289
Review Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2342206
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Microreactors, a specific class of nuclear reactor, feature a thermal power output of <20 MW, with intended use cases ranging from power production for remote localities and industrial facilities, to military applications, to disaster relief. Because the remote locations of these reactors make repairs difficult, and with continuous power production being essential for the intended use cases, the control system for microreactors should be able to operate or safely shut down the reactor under abnormal conditions (e.g. cases of component failure). The nuclear industry is currently pursuing various microreactor designs, one of which is the heat pipe (HP)–cooled microreactor. A potential failure mechanism in this type of microreactor is individual HP failure. The present work explores the notion that even if a single HP fails, an HP-cooled microreactor may still be controllable in its degraded state. A framework is presented for the stable control of an HP-cooled microreactor system’s thermal output power and temperature regulation under both normal and HP failure conditions, using adaptive model predictive control (A-MPC). A-MPC was implemented for its ability to maintain optimal controller performance under changing plant state and system constraints. The complex, nonlinear physical phenomena present in an HP-cooled microreactor make using a physics-based model as the A-MPC controller’s internal predictor impractical. Thus, a data-based surrogate predictor model was developed for use under both normal and HP failure conditions.
The subject under study is a 37-HP system intended to simulate the HP and core thermal behavior of an HP-cooled microreactor. This system was modeled and simulated in DireWolf, a Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE)–based application designed to simulate HP-cooled microreactors. The resulting model was used to generate training data for the data-based predictor model and served as the plant simulator when coupled with the A-MPC controller. This paper presents the data-based predictor model of the 37-HP system, the A-MPC controller architecture that proved suitable under both normal and HP failure microreactor conditions, and the performance of the controller when coupled with the DireWolf simulation of the 37-HP system under both normal and HP failure conditions.