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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.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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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Latest News
Canada clears Darlington to produce Lu-177 and Y-90
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has amended Ontario Power Generation’s power reactor operating license for Darlington nuclear power plant to authorize the production of the medical radioisotopes lutetium-177 and yttrium-90.
L. Fiasca, L. Boncagni, C. Centioli, F. Iannone, M. Panella, V. Vitale, L. Zaccarian
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 994-997
Plasma Engineering | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9040
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Feedback control system running at FTU has been recently improved by the adoption of an Object-Oriented model, obtaining many advantages regarding the software extensibility, re-usability and testing capabilities. This new structure has been ported into a virtual environment using the QEMU processor emulator, in order to simulate, as close as possible to the hardware level, the control system behavior during the real experiment. This new approach introduces the advantage of decreasing dramatically the risks related to coding errors and operating system bugs arising at runtime, whereas it still supports the real-time control features. Moreover, the Real Time Workshop fast controller prototyping interface eliminates the model-translation related problems thanks to its automatic C code generation tools. The entire project flow is now completed: using Simulink, it is possible to design the diagram implementing a new control law, then synthesize the controller library. At this point, we can transfer the new library to the virtual machine, simulate the plasma control experiment in an open-loop configuration, and finally compare the simulation results to those from the past experiments, for a consistency check. The proposed framework is remotely managed by a new Matlab interface. After a satisfying simulation/validation of the new control model, the module can be easily transferred to the control system andhooked up to the real experiment, where it can operate in closed-loop. In this paper, we illustrate the advantages of this new approach and report on some experimental tests where the actual experimental data is compared to the simulations provided by the above-mentioned virtual environment.