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Division Spotlight
Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
Standards Program
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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August 2024
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July 2024
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Latest News
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.
Lucas Wodrich, Alvin J. H. Lee, Tomasz Kozlowski, Caleb S. Brooks
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 809-834
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2161276
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Microreactors present an opportunity to revolutionize the role of nuclear energy via the development of these technologies in a diverse and distributed energy network for a clean energy future. Because of the limited output of these novel systems, the deployment of microreactors should be focused on high-value applications in order to realize their full potential. This involves understanding the microreactor performance and how it interacts with the preexisting infrastructure. In this work, an energy-diverse embedded grid is modeled using OpenModelica in order to study the impact of microreactor integration under several distinct deployment approaches. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is used as a prototypic market due to its well-characterized energy ecosystem with available extensive real-time and historical data. The UIUC model recreates the existing chilled-water, steam, and electricity infrastructure, including wind, solar, and cogeneration sources. The infrastructure model simulates the interplay between the three utilities and how different microreactor integration approaches would impact UIUC’s embedded grid. From this study, the deployment of a single microreactor under electric load-conditioning, steam production retrofit, or a hybrid of both is found to be the most appropriate in consideration of their unique advantages toward cost savings and grid resilience. Meanwhile, if grid resiliency is not a main objective, the greatest emissions reduction and cost-savings benefits can be obtained by operating the reactor in a base-loading configuration. This study employed historically low coal and gas prices and provided a conservatively low estimate for the benefits from a microreactor. Given the price volatility of fossil fuels, the benefits of the microreactor are expected to be greater than this estimate. Finally, the modular nature of the modeling framework allows for an extension of the analysis to other similar embedded grids.