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Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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
Federal Power Act amendments focus on grid reliability
Fedorchak
North Dakota’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican freshman Congresswoman Julie Fedorchak, has introduced the Baseload Reliability Protection Act.
The bill aims to “amend the Federal Power Act to prohibit retirements of baseload electric generating units in any area that is served by a Regional Transmission Organization or an Independent System Operator and that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation [NERC] categorizes as at elevated risk or high risk of electricity supply shortfalls, and for other purposes.”
A summary of the legislation is available on Fedorchak’s House website.
Amendments: The Baseload Reliability Protection Act would amend the Federal Power Act in the following ways:
Andy Rivas, Gregory Kyriakos Delipei, Jason Hou
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 3 | March 2025 | Pages 358-387
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2372515
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Advanced reactor designers are looking to maximize the system capacity factor to make advanced reactors more economically competitive and meet the projected energy demand. To achieve this goal, we propose a Dynamic Operation and Maintenance Optimization (DyOMO) framework to perform system-level predictive maintenance (PdM) using a dynamic Bayesian network and component-specific PdM using deep neural networks. At the system level, DyOMO detects the presence of anomalous phenomena, determines the most influential degradation mode, and estimates the remaining useful life (RUL) distribution for the system. At the component level, DyOMO summarizes the health state of key system components, determines the presence of an anomaly using a feedforward neural network, and predicts component RUL using a Bayesian neural network. To evaluate the overall performance of DyOMO, normal operations of a Pebble-Bed High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (PB-HTGR) were simulated with realistic component degradation for the steam turbine and steam generator. Across the 20 independent reactor life simulations, it was found that maintenance was always performed before any safety limits were violated and before a component failed. Specifically, the system-level PdM suggested maintenance on the steam generator once the steam pressure approached its safety limit, and the component-specific PdM suggested maintenance on the steam turbine once the turbine blade hardness degraded. The results indicate that through the continuous monitoring of the system and individual components, the DyOMO framework improves safety and increases the availability of the reactor when compared to traditional maintenance philosophies.