ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS 2025)
May 4–8, 2025
Huntsville, AL|Huntsville Marriott and the Space & Rocket Center
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Delivering new nuclear on time, the first time
Mark Rinehart
The nuclear industry is entering a period of renewed urgency, driven by the need for stable baseload power, heightened energy security concerns, and expanded defense infrastructure. Now more than ever, we must deliver new nuclear projects on time and on budget to maintain public trust and industry momentum.
The importance of execution certainty cannot be overstated—public trust, industry investment, and future deployment all hinge on our ability to deliver these projects successfully. However, history has shown that cost overruns and schedule delays have eroded confidence in the industry’s ability to deliver nuclear construction. As we embark on many first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactor builds, fuel cycle infrastructure projects, and extensive defense-related nuclear projects, we must ensure that execution certainty is no longer an aspiration—it is an expectation.
Oliviero Barana, Adriano Luchetta, Cesare Taliercio
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 972-976
Plasma Engineering | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9036
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The current RFX-mod machine control system relies upon proprietary products for control (PLCs) and supervision (SCADA). To improve the software versatility and to overcome increasing difficulties with legacy products, a major overhaul is being implemented. The new architecture retains the modularity of the current one, but Javais used to program most of the control tasks and the graphical user interfaces, moving the control functions to a new PC-based layer. The physical layer of the communication employs Industrial Ethernet technology for the local area network; data exchange is based on TCP/IP and OPC communication protocols, and on MDS plus technology. The master scheduler talks to non-PLC subsystems using TCP/IP and exchanges data with the tasks on the PLCs through the MDS plus transport layer and OPC. One Windows PC hosts the OPC and MDS plus servers; other PCs execute the control functions and provide the graphical user interface.This paper describes and analyses the current architecture of the RFX-mod machine control system and the renewed one, which is under development. The first encouraging tests, concerning mainly the communication performance, are reported.
