§9703 Research, Development, and Demonstration Program; Establishment; Purposes; Implementation

Summary

The Secretary must set up a research, development, and demonstration program to make nuclear power plants safer. The program must study and improve generic plant designs and operations. It must deepen risk studies of how failures spread through systems, find cost‑effective design and operating changes to cut radioactive releases and worker exposure, create better ways to help operators perform in normal and emergency situations, and look at how partial or full automation affects safety and costs. The program must run experiments mainly for light water reactors on topics like high burn‑up fuel failure, fuel‑cladding and coolant interactions, core thermohydraulics, hydrogen control, better core monitoring, barrier failure modes, and fission product release. The Secretary may examine donated fuel or parts offered at a nominal cost (for example $1) but only take as many samples as needed. The Secretary must coordinate with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and, when useful, other federal agencies, foreign governments, and industry to avoid duplicated work. The Secretary should use underused federal test reactors and facilities when possible and make practical recommendations to simplify plant systems and operations. Agreements made to help this work must not delay starting the program.