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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.
Marcel Straetz, Rainer Mertz, Jöerg Starflinger (Univ of Stuttgart)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 815-824
In the frame of the EU-funded sCO2-HeRo (supercritical carbon dioxide heat removal) project a heat removal system, based upon a Brayton cycle using supercritical CO2 as working fluid, is currently under investigation. The system should be able to work as a self-launching, self-propelling and self-sustaining decay heat removal system to be retrofitted to existing light water reactors. In case of an accident in a nuclear power plant with the combined initiating events of a station blackout and the loss of the ultimate heat sink this additional heat removal system will transfer the decay heat from the reactor core to the diverse ultimate heat sink, e.g. the ambient air. The system consists of a turbine, compressor, generator, compact heat exchanger and a gas cooler. Since the turbine of the turbo-compressor-system (TCS) provides more power than it is needed for the compressor, the system is self-sustaining and the excess electricity of the generator can be used for auxiliary devices of the power plant. To demonstrate the feasibility of this system, a small-scale demonstrator unit will be attached to the PWR glass model at Gesellschaft für Simulatorschulung (GfS), Essen, Germany. The components of the system will be designed, manufactured and experimental investigated within the sCO2-HeRo project. To determine the design of the compact heat exchanger for the glass model application, which is the objective of the Institute of Nuclear Technology and Energy Systems (IKE), experimental investigations on heat transfer between condensing steam and sCO? were performed in the SCARLETT laboratory. Based upon these experimental results, the compact heat exchanger was designed, manufactured, tested and delivered to GfS.