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The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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June 16–19, 2024
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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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Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Henk W. Kalfsbeek
Nuclear Technology | Volume 84 | Number 3 | March 1989 | Pages 296-304
Technical Paper | Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Risk Management / Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT89-A34213
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Abnormal Occurrences Reporting System (AORS) of the Commission of the European Communities is a data bank that contains homogenized information on safety-related events that have occurred in nuclear power plants in Europe and the United States, covering ∼780 yr of total reactor operation from 1969 to 1985. The use and analysis potential of this information system are illustrated, particularly with respect to the support it gives to incident analysts and probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) practitioners. As an example, attention is focused on a particular methodology for using the incident data during the modeling stage of a PSA study, or more generally, in the course of any type of incident analysis. In this case, a sophisticated multistep retrieval procedure identifies a set of event reports from the data bank, of which the (possible) relationship is unknown a priori, but which are brought together under the attention of the analyst. Seen together within the framework of the study in hand, these reports might yield valuable information for upgrading the completeness of the system, subsystem, and component models in terms of failure modes and effects, fault propagation paths, and unforeseen system interactions. This semiautomatic procedure exploits a feature that renders the AORS unique among international safety-related event data bases, namely, the codification and storage of causal sequences extracted from each event report.