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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.
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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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Latest News
DOE-EM finishes cleanup of legacy Oak Ridge reactor lab site
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that the 30-foot-long, 37,600-pound reactor vessel from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Low Intensity Test Reactor was shipped to EnergySolutions’ low-level radioactive waste facility in Clive, Utah, in late April.
Dušan Babala, Kåre Hannerz
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 90 | Number 4 | August 1985 | Pages 400-410
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE85-A18488
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current light water reactors (LWRs) depend for the protection of core integrity on a multitude of active systems and components, such as instrumentation, cables, electronic logics, relays, actuators, etc., and on human judgment. This approach to safety has led to a complex and expensive plant design in which all parts of the plant where these systems are present must be protected against damage due to, e.g., earthquake. It has also failed to persuade the public about the safety of the reactors because of the existing (but very small) probability of multiple failures leading to core meltdown. With the process inherent ultimate safety (PIUS) approach, this dependence on active systems is eliminated. The safety is now no longer a result of their intervention but is built into the thermohydraulics of the primary system itself. The PIUS primary system response to a number of severe anticipated transients without scram (ATWS) is described, as studied by means of a specially developed computer simulation program. The method is shown by which the thermohydraulic self-protection properties of the primary system terminates these ATWS transients, which could have severe consequences in a conventional LWR, with neither the core nor the rest of the plant suffering any damage (beyond the initial failure assumed). This has important economic consequences. The surveillance and control systems used to run the plant and the buildings in which they are housed can be designed as for a fossil plant, since they no longer have the ultimate responsibility for nuclear safety. The ensuing design simplification pays for the more expensive pressure vessel and primary system. Inherent safety is obtained as a bonus.