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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.
Q. T. Pham, N. Tauveron (Grenoble Alps Univ), N. Alpy (CEA)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 441-450
Co-existence of nuclear-renewable energies in a single hybrid power plant has been considered as an efficient and economical option to significantly reduce environmental impacts due to combination of two clean and climate-friendly decarbonized energy sources. The concept refers to an innovative system to balance the fluctuating renewable energy source such as wind, hydro and solar with the constant, base load nuclear output in order to smooth the energy production and to respond to the increasingly varying electricity demand. In the literature, few works have been reported on hybridization of a solar power plant with a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) employing the proven pressurized water reactor technology wherein steam Rankine cycle is used for power conversion system at relatively low pressure. The current work suggests an integration of a SMR and a concentrated solar power plant (CSP) equipped with a thermal energy storage (TES) in which supercritical CO?Brayton cycle is adopted for power generation. The nuclear energy loop transfers heat to the electrical generation loop and the solar heat serves for raising the incoming gas temperature at the turbine inlet. The implementation of the thermal energy storage system enables continuous gas heating and non-stop plant operation. The proposed hybrid configuration is aimed at benefiting the technological advancements in exchangers and gas turbines to reach the plant thermal efficiency as high as feasible. The plant’s performance at design point is simulated by Engineering Equation Solver software. The simulation data present the potential enhancements of the suggested nuclear-solar hybrid plant’s thermodynamic efficiency in comparison to a single nuclear plant. In addition, advantages of utilization of SCO? Brayton cycle instead of classical steam Rankine cycle in such innovative hybrid system is also investigated. It is highlighted that hybrid operation could provide a substantial gain for cycle efficiency, up to 9-10 points, compared to single nuclear one’s, with possibly slightly improved performance for SCO? compare to Steam.
