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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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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Securing the advanced reactor fleet
Physical protection accounts for a significant portion of a nuclear power plant’s operational costs. As the U.S. moves toward smaller and safer advanced reactors, similar protection strategies could prove cost prohibitive. For tomorrow’s small modular reactors and microreactors, security costs must remain appropriate to the size of the reactor for economical operation.
Robert P. Martin, Simone H. Morgan, Christopher Cragg
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January 2016 | Pages 200-212
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the RELAP5-3D Computer Code | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-140
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Evaluation methodologies are under development at BWX Technologies (BWXT) to support licensure of the BWXT small modular reactor. In these evaluation methodologies, RELAP5-3D is being used as the computation engine for reactor coolant system performance. To facilitate analyses, the RelapManager code was developed as a Windows-based graphical user interface for RELAP5-3D. It is used to edit RELAP5-3D input models and develop simulation suites with unique attention to the preparation of Quality Program records required per 10 CFR 50 Appendix B. The software has been created with Visual Studio employing the .NET integrated development environment. The programming focal point for RelapManager is an XML schema that captures the modeling rules inherent in RELAP5-3D. It transforms an existing input model into XML, which, through a large library of functions created to support XML file types, provides a rich user experience capable of improving productivity and quality.
RelapManager includes specialized features for the preparation of uncertainty and sensitivity/importance analyses, execution on a remote server, plotting, and data checking against the modeling rules. As a demonstration of these features, an uncertainty and importance analysis has been prepared using the “Typical PWR” test problem provided with the nominal RELAP5-3D release package. RelapManager takes as input uncertainty models characterizing the expected domain of model parameter variability. Subsequently, a calculation suite derived from sampling the uncertainty domain is described, and a run script is prepared by RelapManager. Figure of merit results are gathered by RelapManager and analyzed using a variance-based sensitivity analysis method.