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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
IAEA again raises global nuclear power projections
Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.
IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.
In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.
Luciano Burgazzi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 161 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 1-7
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3908
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The focus of the present study is passive system reliability assessment, with reference to the thermal-hydraulic passive systems (i.e., relying on natural circulation). An approach based on system-relevant performance parameters is introduced to provide system-significant availability and reliability figures, within a reliability physics framework.The method exploits the fact that for thermal-hydraulic passive systems to perform as expected to accomplish the required mission, parameters must lie between certain limits according to defined safety criteria. Some relevant physical parameters are worth considering as significant indicators of thermal-hydraulic passive system performance, for instance coolant flow or exchanged thermal power. Within this methodology, the selected representative parameters defining the system performance are properly modeled through the construction of joint probability functions in order to assess the correspondent functional reliability. The application of the methodology to a realistic passive system design is illustrated.The results are shown to point out the relevance of the passive system functional reliability aspects with respect to the classical mechanical component malfunctions, serving as a foundation for continuous improvement of the passive system reliability assessment process.This paper aims to remedy some of the limitations following on from applying the functional reliability approach to the passive system reliability problem, as highlighted in an earlier paper [Nuclear Technology, Vol. 144, p. 145 (Nov. 2003)]. This concerns essentially the assumption of independence between the marginal distributions to construct the joint probability distributions to evaluate system reliability.
