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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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NRC engineers share their expertise at the University of Puerto Rico
Robert Roche-Rivera and Marcos Rolón-Acevedo are licensed professional engineers who work at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also alumni of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) and have been sharing their knowledge and experience with students at their alma mater since last year, serving as adjunct professors in the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. During the 2023–2024 school year, they each taught two courses: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.
Stéphanie Tillement, Frédéric Garcias
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1291-1311
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1868892
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Very few papers exist in the field of social sciences that follow and study nuclear infrastructure design projects from the inside. Such a perspective would make it possible to understand the mechanisms of their successes or difficulties at their very origin. At a time when high hopes are placed on civil nuclear energy to solve the climate issue, but when simultaneously, nuclear industry actors are facing major difficulties in a great number of flagship projects, this situated understanding of any given project’s trajectory becomes crucially important. This paper proposes an analysis, from the inside, of a project that, about ten years ago, raised great expectations from both the French and global nuclear industry, but which, in 2019, was finally halted. This project is that of a so-called fourth generation sodium reactor: the Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration (ASTRID). ASTRID was a new sodium-cooled fast reactor. Begun in 2010, the project’s development was suspended at the end of 2019 by the French authorities. Through an inductive study of the project in the making, conducted from 2015 to 2019, the research team was able to follow the project trajectory and carry out nearly 30 interviews with actors directly involved in the project itself. By studying ASTRID as an infrastructure development project and building on the concepts of scale and infrastructure from the literature, the ASTRID project’s halt can be understood. The project’s suspension was the result of the increasing complexity and ambiguity faced by project members and stakeholders in aligning the local and global scales as the new infrastructure was developed, and more precisely, the ASTRID project infrastructure and the global nuclear infrastructure. Our analyses show that ASTRID’s trajectory gradually drifted as a result of three misalignments between the project’s infrastructure and the global nuclear infrastructure: a temporal, social, and physical misalignment. As a result, the project identity can be described as having been vague and ambiguous. This paper sets out how such a lack of clarity impacted design practices, the project organization as a whole, and the ASTRID trajectory. In consequence, it is crucially important that lessons are learned from the project’s cessation to understand both the difficulties related to the nuclear renaissance and in terms of the field of project management in general.