ADAMS Public Documents

The Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS) is the official recordkeeping system, through which the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) provides access to the following "libraries" or collections of publicly available documents: 

• The Publicly Available Records System (PARS) Library contains more than 2 million full-text documents that the NRC has released since November 1, 1999, and several hundred new documents are added each day. From July 2019 to December 2020, the agency digitized more than 1 million documents from the public legacy library to the PARS Library.
• The Public Legacy Library contains more than 2 million bibliographic citations (some with abstracts and full text) for earlier documents with the majority dating back to 1980, which are available in microfiche formats.  

NRC, at its discretion, shall pull back publicly available records that may contain sensitive information.

Web-based ADAMS

Web-based ADAMS (WBA) was introduced in October 2010 and is the latest interface to ADAMS. This powerful, versatile, and easy-to-use search engine enables searching of official agency records in the ADAMS repository (PARS and Public Legacy libraries). Examples include publicly available regulatory guides, NUREG-series reports, inspection reports, Commission documents, correspondence, and other regulatory and technical documents written by NRC staff, contractors, and licensees. WBA permits full-text searching and enables users to view document images, download files, and print locally. New documents become accessible on the day they are published, and are released periodically throughout the day.

ADAMS documents are provided in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). (To obtain a free viewer for displaying PDF files, see Plugins, Viewers, and Other Tools.)

• Begin Web-based ADAMS Search

For more information about ADAMS, please see the following pages:

• Hours of Operation
• Help and References (including Lists of Licenses and Docket Numbers)
• Frequently Asked Questions
• ADAMS User Group
• Web-based ADAMS User Guide (with sample searches)
• ADAMS How-To Video Series

To ask questions, send comments, or make recommendations about ADAMS, contact the librarians in the Public Document Room (PDR). Also, please note that Web-based ADAMS differs from both the LSN Library, which provides access to publicly available documents related to High-Level Waste (HLW) hearings regarding the geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and the Electronic Hearing Docket (EHD), through which the NRC provides access to libraries of docket materials related to hearings held by the Commission or ASLBP.

For historical information, see also the 2004 ADAMS Survey Results (in SECY-05-0046).