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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.
Yiyang Zhang, Zhu Fang, Xinxin Wu, Haitao Wang, Libin Sun, Xiaowei Luo, Xiaowei Li (Tsinghua Univ)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 84-93
The graphite dust, produced by friction of fuel pebbles, is a significant concern in potential accidents of HTGR because the graphite dust is closely coupled with radioactive fission product. The study of graphite particle-wall impaction is important to accurately estimate deposition rate of graphite dust. In this paper, both the spherical and non-spherical particle-wall impaction process are discussed based on FEM. By combining derived adhesion force with FEM, the results agree well with JKR model. The damping dissipation is employed to describe the energy loss, corresponding dimensionless damping coefficient is defined to establish the relation between damping coefficient and material properties. Meanwhile, the results of non-spherical particle impaction are also well predicted by dimensionless damping coefficient. It is also shown both adhesion force and damping dissipation are important at low incident velocity, while the effect of adhesion force is negligible and the dissipation is the dominant mechanism at high incident velocity. Besides, the contact area remains perfectly elastic deformation and never gets into failure when the incident velocity is lower than 20 m/s due to size effect. The results provide a possible approach for non-spherical particle-wall impaction, which can be combined with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to estimate the deposition rate of graphite dust in HTGR.