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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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!
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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.
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.