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Diversification and the common ground
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that we would see so many long-standing barriers to new nuclear development falling like dominoes? Public opinion, policy, regulatory reform, finance and investment, design maturity, nuclear fuel enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity have all advanced with remarkable speed in the United States.
Conventional wisdom holds that the most effective way to scale up the nuclear supply chain is to do so strategically, matching investments to the needs of reactor developers.
Alan Hesu, Sungmin Kim, Fan Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 8 | August 2025 | Pages 1292-1309
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2239635
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current preventative maintenance paradigms in nuclear power plants carry several costly risks and challenges associated with component downtime and the need for human data collection. Preventative maintenance may be enabled by an online monitoring system that accurately assesses component condition and identifies potential faults. We present an approach for autonomous online monitoring and multiagent planning for robotic data collection. Under the occurrence of a fault, we utilize a machine learning model to form an initial guess of its nature, which we then refine by selectively measuring certain variables to gain additional information via a situation-aware variable selection model. To generate a multi-robot plan to conduct these measurements, we develop a preference-based planning framework within a linear temporal logic–based planning approach that prioritizes collecting data from the most important features. Finally, we demonstrate our approach on a case study using a simulated nuclear power plant circulating water system, showing fault diagnostic performance as well as simulated robot data collection.