| dc.description.abstract | In the United States, comprehensive reactor design certification, site permitting, and operating licensing processes exist to ensure the safe and reliable operation of nuclear power plants (NPPs). Most of these plants have belonged to the same design class: large, centrally located Light Water Reactors (LWRs). Thus, our regulatory processes were tailored for their phenomenology and the unique challenges associated with their operation and maintenance. However, these types of plants may be impractical for specific energy markets, where smaller, non-LWR, highly flexible, and multi-faceted NPPs can be more optimal. The novelty of these designs and their use cases has further inspired new operating paradigms, which will be referred to as Semi-Autonomous, Highly Automated, or Remote Operations (SAHARO) in this thesis. While some of these new reactors have seen limited progress in design certification and licensing efforts under current regulatory practices, there remains little precedent for these novel operating approaches. To facilitate discussion, guide designers, and inspire regulatory progress, I begin by looking at existing regulations, licensing practices, technical guidelines, and other rules that govern the NPP design and operations. I then dive into current applications and discussions of the sub-components of SAHARO, across different technical domains as well as nuclear power, to gather technical, operational, and regulatory insights. To provide reactor design evaluators with an additional tool, I define a Risk-Complexity Score (RCS), which couples simple system complexity quantification with existing risk measures and can support risk-informed system analyses. I then conduct an internet network Quality of Service (QoS) test to demonstrate one of the many important considerations for remote operations stress-testing, which proposes an approach for evaluation within the SAHARO licensing process: the “SAHARO Coping and Minimum Inventory Assessment Strategy.” Lastly, based on my literature and industry reviews, I have constructed a framework that informs reactor designers on how to iterate through the SAHARO-based design process, while also enabling vendor-regulator collaboration and shared learning. Ultimately, I aim to help designers and regulators in the nascent fields of autonomous, automated, and remote NPP operations identify the key questions these technologies and systems must address to ensure safe, effective, and practical application. | |
