The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Idaho National Laboratory are hosting a hybrid event on April 4 to launch a coordinated effort focused on leveraging consensus codes and standards to support deployment of new and advanced reactor technologies.

The meeting will be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (EDT) at the NRC’s Rockville, Md., headquarters and will be accessible online through Microsoft Teams. Participants must register to attend either in-person or virtually.

The Advanced Reactor Codes and Standards Collaborative (ARCSC) held its second workshop on November 30, 2023, in Washington, D.C. The hybrid event had just over 200 participants, including representatives from standards development organizations (SDOs), the Electric Power Research Institute, the Nuclear Energy Institute, national laboratories, government agencies, vendors, advanced reactor designers, and consultants as well as representatives from other U.S. industry and international organizations, including the International Atomic Energy Agency. ANS Standards Board chair Andrew Sowder, senior technical executive at EPRI, welcomed attendees to EPRI’s offices, where the workshop was held.

Hosted by Waste Management Symposia, the annual Waste Management Conference is widely regarded as the premier international conference on the management of radioactive material and related topics. The theme of this year’s conference, being held February 26-March 3 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona, is “Planning for the Future: Innovation, Transformation, Sustainability.” The featured country for 2023 is France, which will be represented by numerous panels, papers, posters, and exhibits demonstrating the country’s continuous innovation and pragmatism in the management of the nuclear fuel cycle. The featured Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management topic is “EM’s Transformation in Radioactive Liquid Tank Waste Management.”

Each year, the two best oral presentations/papers from the previous year’s conference are recognized. Honoring the highest-quality presentations, the American Nuclear Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers each present an award for best presentation/paper. The following are the abstracts for the best ANS and ASME papers of 2022. The full papers are available to 2023 WM Conference participants through the WM Symposia website, at wmsym.org.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers/American Nuclear Society Joint Committee on Nuclear Risk Management (JCNRM) has issued a new edition of its flagship standard, ANSI/ASME/ANS RA-­S-­1.1-­2022, Standard for Level 1/Large Early Release Frequency Probabilistic Risk Assessment for Nuclear Power Plant Applications. This standard was approved by the JCNRM, the ANS Standards Board, and the ASME Board on Nuclear Codes and Standards before being approved on May 11 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), earning the title of an American National Standard. With most of the text stable for the past year, the production process was started early, allowing the 400-­page standard to be published on May 31, 2022.

Holtec International’s SMR-160 is a pressurized light-water thermal spectrum reactor that relies on natural circulation, thereby eliminating the need for reactor coolant pumps during normal operation. The reference design incorporates a lower pressure conventional steam turbine and wet cooling via a tube-and-shell condenser coupled with forced-draft cooling towers. Optionally, the plant can use dry cooling via Holtec’s HI-KOOL air-cooled condenser.

ANSI/ASME/ANS RA-S-1.4-2021, “Probabilistic Risk Assessment Standard for Advanced Non-Light Water Reactor Nuclear Power Plants,” has just been issued. Approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) on January 28, 2021, this joint American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)/American Nuclear Society (ANS) standard sets forth requirements for probabilistic risk assessments (PRAs) used to support risk-informed decisions for commercial nuclear power plants and prescribes a method for applying these requirements for specific applications.

ANSI/ANS-RA-S-1.4-2021 and its preview are available in the ANS Standards Store.

When it comes to advanced, high-temperature reactors—using working fluids such as molten salt, high-temperature gases, or sodium—there simply are not many qualified materials for nuclear component construction. Alloy 617 is not a new material, but it made the news after Idaho National Laboratory announced that it was recently added to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Boiler and Pressure Vessel (BPV) Code for high-temperature nuclear applications, bringing the total number of qualified high-temperature materials to six.