Criticality Accident Requirements

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is amending its regulations to give licensees of light-water nuclear power reactors greater flexibility in meeting the requirement that licensees authorized to possess more than a small amount of special nuclear material (SNM) maintain a criticality monitoring system in each area in which the material is handled, used, or stored. This action is taken as a result of the experience gained in processing and evaluating a number of exemption requests from such licensees and NRC's safety assessments in response to these requests that concluded that the likelihood of criticality was negligible.