Preliminary Siting, Operations, and Transportation Considerations for Licensing Fission Batteries in the United States
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper is very interesting and provides future regulation guide about nuclear batteries including SMR.
However, the authors provides general findings from references and provide your opinions only in the discussion part.
Thus more consolidated results are expected by additional data and simulation results by your own.
Some minor comments are as follows:
-The figure and table legend are not provided well in the text due to file converting errors.
-In page 5, section 1.2.3 only the characteristics of fuel is explained. More design descriptions are required to be innovative and safe such as reactivity control system, cooling system, and heat removal system.
-In page 8, line 250-251, where the 30 m and 25 m comes from? More explanation is required.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 1,
Thank you for your review. We found your comments extremely helpful to improve the paper in terms of readability and clarity. We also tried to address the comments, as it can be seen below.
Regarding the major comment,
- This paper is very interesting and provides future regulation guide about nuclear batteries including SMR. However, the authors provides general findings from references and provide your opinions only in the discussion part. Thus more consolidated results are expected by additional data and simulation results by your own.
This paper shows the results from an investigation of regulatory gaps for licensing fission batteries in the United States. We have reviewed the appropriate licensing literature and gave our preliminary insights. We have additional work that is under review for how probabilistic risk assessment can support the safety case for the transportation of fission batteries according to the current regulations and how to perform dynamic probabilistic risk analysis to risk-inform for fission battery autonomous operation design aspects.
Regarding the minor comments,
- The figure and table legend are not provided well in the text due to file converting errors.
We made sure the cross references do not have any errors when the word file is converted to pdf.
- In page 5, section 1.2.3 only the characteristics of fuel is explained. More design descriptions are required to be innovative and safe such as reactivity control system, cooling system, and heat removal system.
We have incorporated the fuel type description part of section 1.2.2 in which we describe the other notable fission battery design features.
- In page 8, line 250-251, where the 30 m and 25 m comes from? More explanation is required.
We corrected the wrong value and expanded the reasoning for the potential 25 m target.
The 300 m is from reference Small nuclear power reactors - World Nuclear Association (world-nuclear.org) that includes the statements that “SMRs are defined as nuclear reactors generally 300 MWe or less.” and “Since small reactors are envisaged as replacing fossil fuel plants in many situations, the emergency planning zone required is designed to be no more than about 300 m radius”.
In Table 3 and Table 4, we can see the relations between EPZ size and power output. From Table 3, it shows when power output increases 10 times from 10 MWth to 100 MWth, EPZ size also become large 10 times from 0.5 km to 5 km. So, if we assume that the power level is proportional to the fission productions that are produced and potentially released and that the relation above could apply to advanced reactors, such as SMRs and fission batteries, we could expect that the EPZ size of fission batteries whose power output may be less than 25 MWth would be 25 m.
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper investigates the regulatory gaps for the licensing of a type of advanced nuclear reactor - fission battery which is far different from the current nuclear power plants. It aims to identify possible regulatory challenges for the licensing of fission batteries and suggest countermeasures to support the successful development and licensing, with a focus on three licensing topics, siting, operations staffing, and transportation. The authors reviewed relevant regulatory codes, including the U.S. NRC Title 10, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and IAEA INSAG-12. The applicability of the current licensing framework to fission batteries is reviewed and possible response strategies are proposed. This study may be of certain reference significance to future licensing of fission battery research and development.
The main concern is that the paper incorporates quite a few figures which are reproduced from other references, which may affect the originality of the article. The authors may re-evaluate the necessity of referencing certain figures. Besides, it is recommended to check all the references of the tables/figures. There are multiple occurrences of “Error! Reference source not found”.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 2,
Thank you for your review. We found your comments extremely helpful to improve the paper in terms of readability and clarity. We also tried to address the comments, as it can be seen below.
Regarding the major comment,
- This paper investigates the regulatory gaps for the licensing of a type of advanced nuclear reactor - fission battery which is far different from the current nuclear power plants. It aims to identify possible regulatory challenges for the licensing of fission batteries and suggest countermeasures to support the successful development and licensing, with a focus on three licensing topics, siting, operations staffing, and transportation. The authors reviewed relevant regulatory codes, including the U.S. NRC Title 10, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and IAEA INSAG-12. The applicability of the current licensing framework to fission batteries is reviewed and possible response strategies are proposed. This study may be of certain reference significance to future licensing of fission battery research and development.
Thank you for your kind review.
Regarding the minor comments,
- The main concern is that the paper incorporates quite a few figures which are reproduced from other references, which may affect the originality of the article. The authors may re-evaluate the necessity of referencing certain figures.
We removed the figures that were referenced from other sources.
- Besides, it is recommended to check all the references of the tables/figures. There are multiple occurrences of “Error! Reference source not found”.
We made sure the cross references do not have any errors when the word file is converted to pdf.
