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Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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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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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Jean-Christophe Lecoy, Jean-Yves Sauvage, Camille Charignon
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1567-1577
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1580528
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Combined approaches are now applied in safety analyses of design-basis accidents. They consist of using best-estimate models in the computer codes together with their estimated uncertainties, and require the most unfavorable initial and boundary conditions (IBCs) to be found with respect to the plant operating conditions. This implies determining first the worst-case scenarios, then predicting the figures of merit (FOMs) that must fulfill safety criteria. Such scenarios can be identified by sensitivity studies on IBCs resulting in an input vector of fixed values to realize a deterministic bounding calculation. However, it is a difficult and time-consuming iterative task especially for complex transients with interactions between parameters. Alternatively, the RIPS (Reduction of the Interval of variation of the Parameters of the Scenario) method has been developed in a best-estimate plus uncertainty approach to find the worst IBCs as a set of reduced ranges of variation of the related inputs, rather than by a vector of discrete values. It defines a critical zone for which the FOM is maximized (or minimized). To this end the RIPS method provides quantitative and graphical outcomes enabling identification of the detrimental (or favorable) ranges of variation of the preponderant IBC parameters. This is done through a statistical analysis of a large set of calculations in which all the input parameters and code model uncertainties are randomly sampled. The RIPS method analyzes the higher (or lower) quantiles of the FOM cumulative density function and determines for each input parameter the critical zone within its variation interval, i.e., where it is the most influential. Correlations between parameters are also detected. This paper describes the RIPS method and demonstrates with several examples its ability to adequately identify the critical zone of the IBC configuration space.