The current news about the possibility of developing new nuclear power plants in the U.S., the controversy over the radioactive waste disposal site at Yucca Mountain, and the appearance of a couple of recent Resource Shelf items had me wondering about the current access to technical information related to nuclear power production and waste. My curiosity was piqued because I’d spent months in the 1980s working with geologists and engineers who were characterizing sites for the disposal of nuclear waste for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and contractors. Now, many years later, commercial radioactive waste is still stored on-site at the power plants and no new power plants have been built in the U.S. since the 1970’s.
At that time, besides geology literature for the specific potential locations, we also needed access to scientific literature and government documents directly related to nuclear power plant engineering, radioactive waste chemistry, and safety. In those days we searched bibliographic databases such as the one produced by the DOE through the commercial vendor Dialog on a paper based terminal with the incredible speed of 300 bits per second (yes, bits–that is not a typo). Today, to get comprehensive coverage of these topics it is still important to use commercial engineering and energy bibliographic databases on Dialog or other systems (at preposterously faster speeds), but much information is now available online at no cost. Some technical papers can be found searching systems such as Google Scholar, but others will be buried in the deep or invisible web.
Below is a brief description of some of the topical search systems which cover nuclear science information. Some are bibliographic databases which may or may not also include the full document; others are factual databases that provide data.
Literature
Three major sources besides general engineering bibliographic databases for searching the range of scientific literature on nuclear energy (or all energy topics) in journals, technical reports and other documents are discussed below.
Energy Citations Database, from the DOE: Search over 2.6 million science research citations and 221,000 electronic documents, primarily from 1943 forward.
INIS, from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency): Resource Shelf related that IAEA has made INIS available for free; it was formerly only a subscription database. The INIS Database contains over 3 million bibliographic records with abstracts, as well as almost 200,000 full-text scientific and technical reports.
ETDEWeb, from the Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDE), which is an international energy information exchange agreement under the International Energy Agency (IEA). Their database contains citations to worldwide literature—both published and non-conventional–with links to full text documents when possible. It includes 4,291,000 literature references and more than 304,000 full text documents, including information from DOE and many other countries’ agencies.
Government documents
Both the DOE and NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Agency), the two major nuclear power-related agencies in the U.S., provide full text online access to documents produced by the agency and its contractors.
For subject searchable and access to DOE documents produced mostly since 1991, use The Information Bridge .
NRC ADAMS collections: Resource Shelf pointed out that the NRC has launched a user-friendly web tool for searching the ADAMS collections of NRC technical documents and reports. The link in that article points to the wrong tool, although the confusion is understandable; there are two search tools available through the web. I’ll try to clarify the differences between the two tools and the two collections they search.
The are two collections within ADAMS. The Publicly Available Records System (PARS) has full text documents, mostly since November 1999. The Public Legacy Library is mostly bibliographic, with just citations to documents from before November 1999. The two access points to NRC ADAMS include “Web-based Access”, which does not include the Public Legacy Library and “ADAMS Public Access”, which includes both collections. The second is more confusing to use; be sure to read the Sample Searches on that page before attempting to use it.
Facts
Besides the bibliographic databases above, several governmental agencies and other associations or companies provide actual data in factual databases. Some important examples are listed below.
PRIS (Power Reactor Information System): Since 1970, the IAEA has collected basic data about all power plants in the world including energy production and operational information. The IAEA lists about 100 other nuclear information resources at NUCLEUS.
The NRC has a lot of factual information available on their site, including a Facility Information Finder.
The major DOE contractors have a variety of interesting data available, such as the National Nuclear Data Center and International Nuclear Safety Center.
Other information is available from a variety of associations, companies and governments, including a Reactor Database from the World Nuclear Association, and a variety of Nuclear Data Services from the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
