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Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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The human factor in licensing and operating the next generation of nuclear plants
As human factors specialists working at the intersection of human performance and nuclear operations, we are witnessing one of the nuclear sector’s most significant transitions in decades. The emergence of small modular reactors, microreactors, and other advanced designs is reshaping the industry’s landscape. Digital instrumentation and controls, passive safety systems, and increased automation are creating opportunities for greater safety margins and more flexible operation. These same features also fundamentally redefine what it means to “operate” a nuclear plant. Interactions among human roles, automation, and passive systems shape how people maintain awareness, exercise judgment, and intervene when necessary. These developments affect both operational realities and the regulatory foundations on which nuclear safety is built.
Workshop
Saturday, April 10, 2021|12:00–1:00PM EDT
Session Chair:
Nicholas W. Touran
Alternate Chair:
Ishita Trivedi
Session Organizer:
Edward Chen (NC State Univ.)
Track Organizer:
Session Producers:
Cao Da (NC State Univ.)
TerraPower will be presenting and interactively demonstrating its nuclear engineering automation platform which was recently open-sourced on GitHub (see https://github.com/terrapower/armi). This system provides a reactor at your fingertips. When you hook your existing analysis tools into it or build a new analysis tool upon it, you can automate entire analysis methodologies with a high-level Python interface. This allows new levels of cross-team communication and collaboration that we believe (from our internal experience) can revolutionize productivity in nuclear engineering analysis. We open sourced it specifically to inspire collaboration in the industry and to minimize re-work of “commodity” data management so you can focus on what really matters: pushing the envelope in reactor delivery. In this session, we will introduce the ARMI framework as a concept, explain how to download it, and go through a few interactive demonstrations to give you an idea of how to use it. If you want to follow along, try downloading and installing it off of github in advance. After this workshop, you should know enough to connect your team’s research tooling into the ARMI framework.
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