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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Strong performances across the board
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Another year, another stellar performance by America’s nuclear plants. We’ve come to expect high capacity factors, and it’s a credit to the men and women of the profession. They’ve made routine something that was unimaginable not so long ago.
The decadal challenge for the nuclear enterprise now is to maintain this high level of operational excellence for the current fleet, while at the same time ushering in a new generation of technologies at scale. It will be a big job—but one that seems more and more likely with each passing day.
Eduardo Iraola, José M. Nougués, Lluís Batet, Josep A. Feliu, Luis Sedano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | May 2024 | Pages 374-390
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2260238
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear fusion depends on tritium breeding and self-sufficiency. Tritium represents a hazard due to its radioactivity and migration properties. Because of these difficulties, ITER, the largest fusion experiment so far, relies on a conservative static procedure to monitor the tritium inventory. Future commercial fusion plants can avoid operation halts if a dynamic monitoring strategy proves itself valid. Tritium plant models have been developed for this kind of monitoring and analysis task, but sensor accuracy and reliability are an issue still to be addressed, and the path to dynamic monitoring remains unclear. The present work shows the modeling procedure of the Tokamak Exhaust Processing system in a commercial simulator, Aspen HYSYS, to reproduce the inventories, streams, process conditions, and compositions of this subsystem during operation. The model is verified in a steady-state scenario using data from the available literature. A demonstration of such a tritium plant subsystem shows meaningful value for several reasons. First, this process has not been modeled before in commercial dynamic simulators, which are typically used in the process industry. It will also allow new stakeholders to participate in future fusion-related projects. Second, it will play a key role in industry-like tritium process monitoring, in which the new model will act as a digital twin of the plant. Data-driven diagnostics can be fueled by model data, helping engineers to generate additional data that could otherwise be expensive to get directly from the plant. For these reasons, models will represent an essential part of a dynamic monitoring system, necessary for feasible fusion projects.