ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The Nuclear Family: Empowering parents and caregivers
The Diversity and Inclusion in ANS Committee is hosting a webinar today to celebrate the contributions of parents in the nuclear industry while fostering diversity and inclusion within the community.
Register now: The webinar, from 1:00-2:00 pm ET, will highlight how the nuclear industry supports caregivers, new parents, and new mothers, and will focus on life transitions and parental responsibilities.
Claudia Picoco, Valentin Rychkov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 11 | November 2023 | Pages 2778-2786
PSA 2021 Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2196227
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) is used to estimate potential risks associated with a nuclear power plant. Event trees (ETs) and fault trees (FTs) describe accident scenarios following initiating events. They allow for identifying and quantifying the consequence frequencies. Based on success criteria, support studies are used to determine each scenario’s consequence. They are also used to define the time available for the operators to carry out the actions involved in the scenario, and consequently, the corresponding human failure probability.
In this paper, we use a dynamic PSA toolbox to optimize support studies for a classical (ET/FT) PSA model. We analyze medium-break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) initiating events with the possible failure of the high-pressure safety injection (HPSI) system for an internal event Level 1 PSA for a pressurized water reactor plant. In order to prevent core uncovery and subsequent core damage, operators must depressurize the primary circuit to reach the low-pressure safety injection set point. This scenario represents a significant contribution to the core damage frequency. The dominant cut sets corresponding to this scenario involve HPSI failure to run over 24 h, while the thermal-hydraulic analysis supporting the human reliability assessment (HRA) analysis for this sequence assumes the unavailability of HPSI pumps at the beginning of the accident.
We update the thermal-hydraulic assumptions in the support study by performing simulations for different values of the HPSI failure time. We find that even a short HPSI operation time buys significant (from the HRA point of view) available time for operators and drives significant improvement in estimating the human error probability (HEP). We postprocessed the minimal cut-set probability by integrating the obtained HEP. This result allows for more realistic quantification of the contribution of the medium-break LOCA in the core damage frequency.