Edison (Edison) agreed to pay its Illi-nois customers $1.3 billion, the largest refund issued by any public utility in United States history. The company also agreed to reduce its electricity rates by $339 million per year. This refund and rate reduction settled a decade-long series of cases with consumer advocates over the billions of dollars Edison spent constructing five nuclear power plants...

Recently, especially after the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, the need for treating residual risks and cliff-edge effects in safety-critical facilities has been widely recognized as an extremely important issue. In this article, the sophistication of seismic designs in safety-critical facilities is discussed from the viewp...

Nuclear power plants alone are not a proliferation risk. Without enrichment or reprocessing capabilities, power-reactor fuel, whether fresh or spent, cannot be used for the production of nuclear weapons. There are various ways, however, in which reactor projects and related nuclear fuel-cycle facilities could be used to further a nuclear-weapons development programme. This chapter describes the...

The nuclear meltdown in Fukushima has given renewed momentum to the anti-nuclear power movement across Europe. However, the degree of momentum varies greatly from country to country, and considering the geographically widespread consequences of a nuclear accident, it hardly appears optimal for one country to ban nuclear power while multiple nuclear power plants are still active in neighbouring ...

An analysis is made of the synergism of electric propulsion and non-nuclear power for deep space applications (i.e., to the asteroid belt and beyond). In current generation systems, electric propulsion is usually considered to be impractical because of the lack of high power for deep space, and non-nuclear power is thought to be impractical partly due to its high mass. However, when taken in co...

The Carrier Pigeon-like Sensing System (CPSS) is a future-present computing archetype that will enable the human race to observe inaccessible natural spaces, such as the contaminated forests around the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The system aims to elucidate the scientific knowledge underlying the self-repair mechanisms of contaminated natural areas and allows users to maintain a connection ...

Results of the codes simulating transients and abnormal conditions in nuclear power plants are inevitably uncertain. In application to thermal-hydraulic calculations by thermal-hydraulics codes, uncertainty importance analysis can be used to quantitatively confirm the results of qualitative phenomena identification and ranking table (PIRT). Several methodologies have been developed to address u...

The current regulations for nuclear power plants focus on light water reactors (LWRs), and as such they may not be properly applied to non-LWR reactors such as Generation IV Reactors. For instance, there is no plant state comparable to core damage in pebble bed reactors [1]. As a result, the surrogate safety goal based on core-damage frequency (CDF), as being applied to LWRs in many countries d...