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Nuclear Criticality Safety
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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
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Tunc Aldemir
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 3 | March 2007 | Pages 497-507
Technical Note | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2680
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Probabilistic dynamics (or continuous event tree approach) is a methodology used for the probabilistic risk assessment of systems where statistical dependence between failure events may arise because of indirect coupling through the controlled/monitored physical process and/or direct coupling through software/hardware/human intervention. Both the continuous and discrete time/space forms of the probabilistic dynamics frameworks assume that the set of possible trajectories describing the evolution of the system as a function of time in its state-space consists of measurable (and hence compact) subsets. Using a reduced-order boiling water reactor model, it is shown that this assumption may not be valid for systems of practical interest to nuclear engineering. The consequences of violating the measurability assumption on the probabilistic model accuracy are illustrated for the discrete time/state-space approach. Some guidelines for the choice of time/state discretization are also proposed.