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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.
Izabela Gutowska, Taylor N. Coddington, Brian G. Woods (Oregon State Univ)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1183-1192
To support the development of the scientific and technical bases that could lead to the commercialization of the Pebble Bed High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor, Oregon State University (OSU) is in the process of developing a conceptual Pebble Bed experimental test program. OSU designed and constructed the integral effects test (IET) facility to study Very High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors (VHTR). The facility, called the High Temperature Test Facility (HTTF), reproduces the integral transient thermal hydraulic response under various accidents conditions of the prototype reactor design. The test data will serve as a basis for thermal hydraulic code validation. The OSU HTTF, currently configured to model a prismatic core block design, may be capable of meeting the needs for a pebble bed reactor system integral test program. In order to do that, a redesign of the facility is required. Redesign criteria should not only conform to the existing facility layout but also follow the similarity criteria and be coherent with dimensional analyses with reference to the selected prototype, pebble bed reactor model. The objective of this paper is to expand the utilization of a currently operating integral gas cooled reactor thermal fluid test facility to the validation of the design and safety thermal-hydraulic methods of the pebble bed reactor. The experiments that will be used to generate data for the NGNP thermal-fluids validation matrix will most be related to the Chinese HTR-PM reference reactor via scaling relationships. This paper summarizes test facility redesign aspects including scaling parameters, materials selection, components replacement, heating concept and instrumentation needs.