Large nuclear power plants are becoming increasingly difficult to site and build. The solution, say some nuclear advocates, is to give up on gigawatt-scale, bespoke plants and—following in the footsteps of other energy system—go small and modular. Small modular reactors (SMRs), which would generate tens or a few hundreds of mega-watts, would have a lower price tag and could prove to be safer.

The current commercial hydrogen production has a significant carbon footprint. Now, projects co-funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and commercial nuclear utilities with operating nuclear power facilities aim to change that by exploiting the capabilities of nuclear power plants. This article delves into four projects aimed at demonstrating technology to make hydrogen from water on an industrial scale using energy from an operating commercial nuclear power plant.

In the early 2000s, the talk was of a so-called Nuclear Renaissance with hundreds of new nuclear plants to be ordered. We should be seeing the fruits of that now, but we are not. There have been several factors that have led to the stagnation of nuclear power industry. To revive the sector, it is important to evaluate the current status of the nuclear power industry, examine the requirements that all new power technologies in open and competitive markets must meet, and determine whether present and future nuclear-power technologies look to be capable of achieving those goals.

Many of the world’s largest cities are near the ocean, and more than 600 million people live within 10 meters of sea level. A lot of hard-to-replace infrastructure—ports, power plants, transmission lines, oil refineries, sewage treatment facilities, telecommunications cables, and highways—have been built close to the water. As glaciers melt and warmed waters expand in volume, that infrastructure will be threatened. In the face of this relentless tide, engineers are looking at what can be done.

Concentrated solar plants have been designed to store thermal energy so as to produce power after sundown, but heat storage should also be of interest to operators of nuclear power plants. Adding heat storage to light-water reactors is the enabling technology for a carbon-free electricity industry based on solar, wind, and nuclear power. And it can accomplish this with little disruption to the operations of existing nuclear plants. This article delves into the current heat storage technologies that are at various states of readiness to be deployed.

This article focuses on various aspects of research theory and development work concerning accidental combustion in nuclear facility and oil industry pipelines. The theory has safety implications for any pipeline where explosive gases can form in liquid-filled systems, and is consistent with pipeline accidents in nuclear power plants, such as Three Mile Island. Nuclear reactor accidents deserve further investigation, since reactor fires and explosions were ignited by sources that were reported to be unknown. The NRC documented extensive actions to improve reactor safety after the Three Mile Island accident; however, this new ignition theory has yet to be fully evaluated with respect to off-normal reactor operations in the United States and abroad. Several nuclear reactor fires and explosions warrant consideration. This new theory confirms a source of ignition. Reactor explosions can be stopped to improve nuclear reactor safety, prevent deaths, and avoid environmental disasters.

This article discusses why it is essential to develop new codes and standards for nuclear power industry. The reason for developing new codes for nuclear power sector is simple to understand. It has to do with the fundamental purpose of all standards: Standards exist to serve not only all the stakeholders in an industry – manufacturers, regulators, insurers, operators of equipment, but also the members of the general public who happen to be in the neighborhood. Standards support prosperity and, more important than that, they maintain public safety. Presently, different committees are working on the next generation of their standards in the nuclear power sector. They are incorporating recent experience and integrating new technologies, from materials to theoretical tools. The ASME/ANS Nuclear Risk Management Committee is currently expanding the scope of the standard to cover risk at shutdown and include long-term maintenance of containment and releases to the public after an accident. In addition, requirements for advanced reactors and the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident are under development.

This article highlights the efforts that need to be put in order to maintain and build nuclear power plants to ensure a reliable source of electric generation. With increasing carbon restrictions and the growing demand for electricity, reliable, carbon-free baseload electricity generation is more important than ever for the United States. The pertinent ASME Section XI Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code requirements were modified to support license renewal. Similar steps, plus the development of new solutions for emerging aging issues, will need to be applied for second license renewals, extending the operating life of these reactors to 80 years. Industry resources must commit to demonstrate the necessary understanding of any significant changes in aging issues beyond 60 years. It is important that industry bodies, such as the Electric Power Research Institute and utility owner’s groups, and suppliers – along with the individual utilities and plants that are the leading candidates for operation beyond 60 years – collectively assure themselves and the U.S. NRC that the pertinent aging issues are identified and appropriate aging management methods are defined or created.

This article elaborates the evolution of code and standards for nuclear power plants. In the 1950s, need was felt for a revised set of design and fabrication rules to facilitate the development of safe, economically competitive water-cooled reactors contained in pressure vessels. These rules were codified in the first edition of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Section III, which was completed in 1963 and published in 1964. From the outset, both regulators and industry realized that the best way to develop many of the needed rules for the design, construction, and operation of nuclear facilities was the national standards consensus process. This process, followed by the American National Standards Institute and other recognized standards-issuing bodies such as ASME, brings together the expertise of individuals from government, industry, academia, and other stakeholders. In the years following the first publication of Section III, the coverage of the Code expanded to incorporate piping requirements, pressure-retaining components for pumps and valves, equipment and piping supports, reactor vessel internal structures, and other features of nuclear power plants.

This article provides an insight into critical elements, challenges, and next steps of the ASME’s Presidential Task Force, which has been formed to examine unforeseen nuclear plant events and their implications. Within its broad charter, the ASME Task Force chose to build on the growing body of United States and international technical assessments of different events, and to examine the Fukushima Daiichi accident in the context of the broader lessons learned from a half-century of nuclear operations. This initiative could be perceived as just another layer of requirements limiting the economic viability of nuclear power. On the contrary, the intention is to support the overall viability of safe nuclear generation. The ASME Task Force is convinced that a new nuclear safety construct can be developed that addresses the safety issues from the Fukushima lessons learned with reasonable and well-defined provisions. The ASME Task Force report recommends a set of next actions in this regard, particularly using the experience, stature, and capabilities of ASME in convening workshops, to bring together worldwide stakeholders including industry, regulators, professional societies, government agencies, and industry organizations worldwide.

This article discusses the obstacles in producing ultraheavy duty products for nuclear reactors in the United States. There has not been much call for making reactor vessels in the United States for decades. Even in the 1970s, the peak decade for building nuclear power plants in the United States, only around a dozen reactor vessels were installed in the best years. To produce ultraheavy products, entirely new forging facilities would have to be built. As per some estimates, one new ultraheavy forging facility would cost $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion, and it would take five to seven years to build. There is also problem related to profit making. Changing these conditions to favor building domestic ultraheavy forging capability would take a coherent energy policy for the United States regarding nuclear power, making it much more important in the energy capabilities.

This article presents an overview of a pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) power plant. A PBMR power plant is a gas turbine nuclear power plant that completely eliminates the possibility of a devastating loss-of-coolant accident. In a PBMR power plant, uranium dioxide nuclear fuel, coated with mass diffusion and radioactive fission product containment layers of pyrolytic carbon and silicon carbide, is formed into nuclear poppy seed-sized fuel particles. Some 15,000 of these are embedded in a tennis ball-sized graphite sphere, which is encased in a thin carbon shell, sintered, annealed and machined to a uniformed diameter of 6 cm. The PBMR reactor vessel, 90 ft high and 20 ft wide, is packed with about 450,000 heat-producing nuclear pebbles. Helium gas coolant then flows around and between the pebbles stacked in the reactor vessel, emerging at about 900°F. The Chinese are currently building two pebble reactors that will be used to generate steam for a conventional Rankine cycle.

This article discusses improvement in nuclear power plant’s operational efficiencies in the USA in the past 40 years. The increase in nuclear generation has been achieved by a substantial increase in the overall capacity factor of the US plants from about 60% in 1980 to over 90% today. This large increase in capacity factor was achieved by reducing outages, having longer fuel cycles, using higher burnup fuel, and reducing unplanned outages and fuel failures. Combined with increases in power in various plants, this allowed nuclear power to maintain and increase its share of electricity generation. Such an increase in nuclear generation is the equivalent of having built 25–30 nuclear power plants during that period. The length of the planned outages has reduced from 106 days for an average operating plant in 1991 to 38 days in 2008. The fuel performance has also improved to a very high level over the last 20–30 years.

This article elaborates the advantages of underground nuclear parks over conventional nuclear power plant designs. Locating the reactors a few hundred feet underground in bedrock at a suitable site eliminates the need for containment structures, and the site would be largely impervious to physical attack from terrorists. (Indeed, it would be far easier to secure the few access points to an underground nuclear park than it is to protect the large perimeter of an isolated nuclear power plant.) A properly constructed underground facility would also be less subject to weather-related construction delays or the effects of hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, or heat waves. Also, if designers were careful in the site selection, an underground nuclear park could virtually eliminate the transportation of hazardous nuclear waste material. Spent nuclear fuel could be moved via tunnel from the reactors to an array of storage tunnels; high-level waste could be permanently stored in another set of tunnels. When the reactors reach the end of their productive life, they can be decommissioned in place.

This article discusses the need for improved leadership, sustainability, and clear nuclear technology. Nuclear plants face many issues ranging from financing, cost, licensing, designs, and construction in a globally fragmented energy marketplace, to associated international proliferation, security of energy supply, climate change, and national pride issues. Despite the hurdles, costs, and glacial timeframes, many owners and operators are successfully extending the life of the old and also committing to the process of building new plants. The sustainability issues are (1) finite resources ultimately affecting price; (2) finite energy content that is not being replaced; and (3) lack of other resources in the places that need it. The article concludes that when we are prepared to foot the bill of increased cost for energy from renewable and sustainable resources, why would we not also foot the bill for an endless supply of nuclear fuel, that is used, recycled, and bred forever in advanced reactor designs.

This article discusses the real-world practicality of nuclear power. Neither reactors nor casks of spent fuel have the capability of going “prompt critical” like a bomb. The laws of nature prohibit it and engineers must make clear that facts of nature are not matters of opinion. The Chernobyl reactor, which failed so spectacularly in Ukraine in 1986, became for many a symbol of the dangers represented by nuclear reactors. But that is not warranted; such an accident is simply impossible for the kind of commercial reactors now being planned or built. From a public safety standpoint, the most important feature of our current reactors is that, after any event that ruptures the reactor coolant system, a large amount of water and steam would be violently swirling around inside the containment structure, even if containment structure has been ruptured. In the emerging context of realistically reexamining many long-held assumptions, engineers will find opportunities to drastically improve the way nuclear power plants are built and operated.

This article reviews that for the first time in a generation, utilities are starting the regulatory process to build nuclear reactors. There has been a virtual moratorium on new nuclear power plants in the United States during the past generation, and it has many causes. But one significant factor in the industry's decline was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process. There are now dozens of applications being submitted and approved for 20-year license renewals for established nuclear power plants. But before the nuclear power industry truly can be said to be reborn, new reactors must be constructed. The new rules allow for an early site permit and for a separate combined construction and operating license. Although the commission invited the nuclear power industry to test the two new processes when they were first announced, no company volunteered. One of the thorniest technical issues faced by the early applicants so far involves a new way of calculating, for a specific plant site, the ground motion that would result from a seismic event. When older plants were designed and built, the best available technique for these calculations was deterministic.

This article discusses the promotion of Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) by US Department of Energy. GNEP is a strategy for dealing with the accumulation of radioactive waste from power plants by reprocessing some of the spent fuel. The primary domestic benefit of this initiative would be to reduce the quantity of plutonium and other transuranic waste that would have to be buried in Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site identified as the national depository for nuclear waste. The objective of GNEP is to fission all of the transuranics, aside from process losses. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study scaled its cost estimate to 62,000 tons of spent fuel because that is approximately the amount of spent fuel that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act allows to be placed in Yucca Mountain before a second repository in another state is in operation. The huge cost of the GNEP would likely be more of a burden than a help to the future of nuclear power in the United States.

This article highlights how risk analysis calculates the probability and consequences of failures so that appropriate action can be taken to forestall them. Factories judge the best maintenance intervals for machinery, and military planners rate the soundness of missions. A broad group of experts from industry, government, and academia are trying to adapt risk analysis methods to problems of protecting the nation's infrastructure from acts of terrorism. The program, dubbed RAMCAP (from "risk analysis and management for critical assets protection"), is intended to give the federal government a means of evaluating risk across the country. Having a means of judging relative risk can help the government decide where to spend federal money for public defense or where to concentrate the expertise of the national laboratories as they develop technology to protect the country's infrastructure. There are a lot of other people-risk analysis engineers, security consultants, and safety experts-stepping back.

This article reviews that the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA, is developing the self-diagnostic monitoring system (SDMS) with the aim of improving the situation for plant operators. The SDMS differs from current monitoring systems in two ways: its wireless and it has predictive capability. SDMS uses multiple sensors that are housed on radio-frequency tags, each with its own power source. The system monitors current conditions and by focusing on the root causes of degradation, the sensors identify problems and help predict failure of components. The SDMS as well as decision support for operations management (DSOM) systems include protocols in which the sensors can self-check, to make sure that data sets are logical. Potential data corruption from electromagnetic interference in the plant can be dealt with by data encryption as well as by other means, such as using more than one sensor or running current or voltage checks to ensure that sensors are functioning correctly.