The U.K. Office for Nuclear Regulation was established as a public corporation under the Energy Act of 2013 as the “independent, statutory regulator of nuclear safety, nuclear security, and conventional health and safety at nuclear sites in the UK.” (This would seem a bit tardy due to the fact that the first commercial power reactor in the world went into operation in the U.K. in 1965.)
Westinghouse, a major U.S. corporation, owns and operates the Bluff Road nuclear fuel fabrication facility near Columbia, South Carolina. The plant was built in 1969 and employs about one thousand people. It is one of a few facilities in the U.S. that makes nuclear fuel assemblies for commercial nuclear power plants.
The U.S. Navy operated a nuclear power reactor at McMurdo Station in Antarctica from 1962 to 1973. The reactor was similar to the reactors on U.S. Navy vessels and it supplied electricity and desalinated water to the McMurdo Station. There were over four hundred documented safety problems at the reactor during that period of time.
I have written about the use of robots in the nuclear industry in prior blog posts. A number of robots were used in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The primary use of these robots was to explore the areas of the ruined reactors that were too radioactive for human beings to inspect. Unfortunately, many of these robots were rapidly destroyed by the heat and radioactivity.
The short-lived radioisotope technetium-99m (Tc-99) is used for more than thirty million medical procedures each year for treatment and diagnosis around the world. Tc-99m is the most widely used radioisotope for medical imaging. Tc-99m is generated from molybdenum-99 (MO-99) which also has a short half-life. They have to be used quickly after they are produced.