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The transformation of the NRC: 50 years of commissioners
The dust is beginning to settle following the whirlwind of changes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the past year, and 2025 ultimately may be viewed as a transformative year, as well as the year the NRC celebrated its golden anniversary. The 12 months of that milestone year brought more change to the agency in its composition, its mandate, and its relationship to the executive branch than any comparable period in the preceding four decades.
Now at 51 years and counting, the NRC is working with a full commission and issuing new rulemakings to both regulate and support the next round of nuclear deployments. With the turbulence of 2025 still fresh in our minds, Nuclear News decided it was a good time to revisit the professional backgrounds of all 42 NRC commissioners who have served over the agency’s 50-year history to see how the composition of the commission has evolved over time.
Jarod Wilson, Sara Hauptman, Akshay Dave, Kaichao Sun, Lin-wen Hu (MIT), Ruimin Ji, Yang Zou (CAS)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 76-83
The growing global demand for emission-free energy is creating a market for advanced Generation-IV NPP, and the Fluoride salt-cooled High-temperature Reactor design with a pebble-type fuel is a promising candidate. However, this design also brings unique challenges, namely evaluating the effects of the fuel’s distribution and dynamic movement. Generating explicitly described fuel pebble loading patterns is non-trivial. This study serves two main purposes: 1) to investigate the neutronic performance of pebble type fuel within the TMSR-SF1, and 2) to conduct a preliminary comparison between pebble coordinate generation methods. The first method of coordinate generation, the Discrete Element Method (DEM), is a particle-tracking model which accounts for inter-particle forces. While this method generates packing distributions closer to real-world scenarios, it is computationally intense. The alternative method analyzed is a mathematical model (MM), which fills arbitrary domains through simple geometric rules on the addition of particles. This method, while less realistic, generates coordinates significantly faster. Afterwards, fuel pebble coordinates from both methods are utilized to generate inputs for high-fidelity neutronics modelling. The results of these simulations, with the aid of various tools within Python, allowed for the neutronic analysis of the core, specifically when considering the eigenvalues of each coordinate set, and the fission power distribution within the fuel pebbles. It was found that the packing fraction in the axial direction to be consistent within the MM coordinate generation method, and the general trends similar between it and DEM-generated coordinates. Additionally, the eigenvalues of the simulated core were found to be proportional to the number of pebbles within the core. Finally, the fission power distribution of the cores was found to be qualitatively consistent both within many sets of MM-generated coordinates, and in comparisons of the two coordinate generation methods.