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Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
Luis E. Herranz, Claudia López (CIEMAT)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 318-324
Worldwide there has been an enormous interest to fully understand the Fukushima accident unfolding, as a way to gain key insights for prevention of these accidents and mitigation of their consequences. This paper focuses on the CIEMAT’s forensic analysis of the Fukushima Unit 1 (1F1) accident sequence. By identifying the major challenges faced for a consistent interpretation of the data available, a description of the MELCOR 2.2 model built to capture the main accident signatures is presented, with particular emphasis on fission product release and transport. Even though this study should be seen as a work in progress, the results here presented are based on a defendable set of hypotheses and approximations and highlight some interesting observations that might have affected fission product release and transport. Among them are worth mentioning the deposit remobilization during the transient (Cesium), the moderate retention in the suppression pool due to the WW bypass meant by direct leaks between RPV and DW and the potential reentrainment as a result of pool saturation. This being said, it’ll be hard to confirm any of these insights concerning fission products. This work is framed under the BSAF Phase 2 project of the OECD and it has been supported by the Spanish Nuclear Regulatory Body through the CSN-CIEMAT collaboration agreement on Severe Accidents (ACAS).