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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.
Kyung Mo Kim, In Guk Kim, Yeong Shin Jeong, In Cheol Bang (UNIST)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1161-1167
Guarantee of the diversity by installation of additional safety system, having different working principle from the existing systems, could mitigate the suggested issues on the passive safety systems. Hybrid control rod-heat pipe, which is a passive decay heat removal device combining the functions of heat pipe and control rod, was proposed by UNIST in Republic of Korea as a passive safety system improving the diversity of passive safety in small modular reactors. It was designed to perform both functions of decay heat removal and reactivity control simultaneously. From the performance analysis, it was found that the designed hybrid control rod has sufficient decay heat removal capacity and reactivity worth. Additionally, hydraulic control rod drive mechanism, which controls the movement of control rod by hydraulic resistance, was designed to achieve fully-passive operation of the hybrid control rods eliminating the malfunction of CRDM owing to electromagnetic signal error. Based on the feasibility study for the concept of hybrid control rod and hydraulic control rod drive mechanism, detailed design of passive in-core cooling system (PINCs) for SMR consisting of hybrid control rods, hydraulic control rod drive mechanism, and heat sinks, was constructed considering the operations of PINCs during normal and accident conditions of reactor.