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2025 annual assessments out for U.S. reactors
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released its 2025 annual performance assessments of the country’s 95 operating commercial nuclear reactors. And of the 95 reactors, all but five earned the highest marks.
Nuclear power plant assessments can fall under one of five categories: Licensee Response, Regulatory Response, Degraded Cornerstone, Degraded Performance, and Unacceptable Performance. Ninety reactors fell under Licensee Response, the highest performance category in safety and security. Plants that achieve this level of performance are subject to a Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) baseline inspection.
Swetha Veeraraghavan, Chandrakanth Bolisetti, Andrew Slaughter, Justin Coleman, Somayajulu Dhulipala, William Hoffman, Kyungtae Kim, Efe Kurt, Robert Spears, Lynn Munday
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 7 | July 2021 | Pages 1073-1095
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1807282
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Seismic analysis and risk assessment of safety-critical infrastructure like hospitals, nuclear power plants, dams, and facilities handling radioactive materials involve computationally intensive numerical models and coupled multiphysics scenarios. They are also performed in a strict regulatory environment that requires high software quality assurance standards, and in the case of safety-related nuclear facilities, a conformance to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Nuclear Quality Assurance (NQA-1) standard. This paper introduces the open-source finite-element software, MASTODON (Multi-hazard Analysis of Stochastic Time-Domain Phenomena), which implements state-of-the-art seismic analysis and risk assessment tools in a quality-controlled environment. MASTODON is built on MOOSE (Multi-physics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment), which is a highly parallelizable, NQA-1 conforming, coupled multiphysics, finite-element framework developed at Idaho National Laboratory. MASTODON is capable of fault rupture and source-to-site wave propagation using the domain reduction method, nonlinear site response, and soil-structure interaction analysis, implicit and explicit time integration, automated stochastic simulations, and seismic probabilistic risk assessment. When coupled with other MOOSE applications, MASTODON can also solve strongly and weakly coupled multiphysics problems. This paper presents a summary of the capabilities of MASTODON and some demonstrative examples.