ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Tim H. J. J. Van Der Hagen, Imre Pázsit, Ola Thomson, Bengt Melkerson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 107 | Number 2 | August 1994 | Pages 193-214
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34987
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measurements, taken in the Ringhals-1 boiling water reactor after revision in 1990, showed that instability occurred at high power and low core flow. Measurements in several points of the power-flow map showed that the decay ratio (DR), obtained by conventional methods, jumps from a moderate value directly to unity. This was valid for DR values calculated from both average power range monitor (APRM) and local power range monitor (LPRM) signals. Thus, the conventional DR cannot be used as a measure of the margin to instability. It was found that both global (in-phase) and regional (out-of-phase) oscillations occur, the global with low DR but large signal amplitude, and the regional with high DR but low signal amplitude. The former dominates the DR calculated from both APRMs and LPRMs, except when the instability is fully developed and impedes detection of the actual margin to instability. Methods for obtaining the stability characteristics of both modes separately from neutron noise signals were developed. The DR of the out-of-phase mode appears to be a good indicator of the margin to instability.
