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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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!
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Lightbridge announces first U-Zr fuel rod samples extruded at INL
Lightbridge Corporation announced today that it has reached “a critical milestone” in the development of its extruded solid fuel technology. Coupon samples using an alloy of zirconium and depleted uranium—not the high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) that Lightbridge plans to use to manufacture its fuel for the commercial market—were extruded at Idaho National Laboratory’s Materials and Fuels Complex.
Kwang-Il Ahn, Joon-Eon Yang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 154 | Number 2 | May 2006 | Pages 155-169
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3725
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper provides a formal approach for integrating systematically the decoupled levels 1 and 2 probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) models that are developed sequentially and differently in nature into a single PSA model for risk-informed applications (RIAs), with which the change of the level 1 events can be directly reflected in the level 2 model, and thus, the plant is able to evaluate easily the risk associated with important operational issues at the system and component levels. Its fundamental concept is the direct propagation of the level 1 core damage sequence cut sets into the level 2 model so that they are directly linked to the level 2 risk metrics [such as large early release frequency (LERF) and large late release frequency] as well as the level 2 accident sequences. Practical implementation of this approach is achieved through a sequential integration of matrix functions that would be made at successive stages for the level 2 risk calculation. Then, the final result of the integration process is given as a type of Boolean function for the level 1 core damage sequences (or cut sets) solution of each plant damage state (PDS) and PDS solution of the level 2 containment event tree sequences and the release frequencies. The plant-specific application has shown that while the present approach gives a well-formulated single operational model for RIAs, there is no essential difference with results obtained from the conventional level 2 PSA approach that directly uses the numerical results of the level 1 core damage sequences to obtain the level 2 risk metrics.