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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.
R. Austin Freeman, Thomas Martin, Elwyn Roberts, Travis W. Knight (Univ of South Carolina)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 605-611
Uranium Silicide (U3Si2) is being evaluated as a fuel for use in light water reactors as its desirable thermophysical properties suggest an improvement over UO2 with respect to accident tolerance, However, much is still unknown about the in-reactor performance of U3Si2, making an accurate assessment of the fuel challenging. To better understand the behavior of U3Si2 across a wide range of possible environments, high temperature compressive creep testing has been performed on U3Si2 pellets. Using the combination of constant stress and constant temperature testing, a numerical model was developed that can predict both primary and secondary creep rates under a wide range of temperature and stress conditions. This model was implemented in BISON, a coupled multi-physics finite element nuclear fuel performance code, to simulate the performance of U3Si2 under a range of reactor conditions and analyze the effect of creep on fuel behavior from startup through pellet-clad mechanical interaction (PCMI). These models indicate that while thermal and irradiation volumetric effects are dominant during normal operation, under extreme stresses and temperatures creep can become a significant factor. Specifically, under PCMI creep was found to have a noticeable impact on the rate of stress change in the cladding and could extend the lifetime of the cladding by months.