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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Fan Li, Belle R. Upadhyaya
Nuclear Technology | Volume 173 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 17-25
Technical Paper | NPIC&HMIT Special / Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11480
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fault diagnosis is an important area in the nuclear industry for effective and continuous operation of power plants. All the approaches for fault diagnosis depend critically on the sensors that measure important process variables in the system. The locations of these sensors determine the effectiveness of the diagnostic methods. However, the emphasis of most fault diagnosis approaches is primarily on procedures to perform fault detection and isolation (FDI) given a set of sensors. Little attention has been given to the actual allocation of sensors for achieving efficient FDI performance. A graph-based approach, the directed graph (DG), is proposed in this paper as a solution for the optimization of sensor locations for efficient fault identification. The application of the DG modeling in deciding the locations of sensors based on the concepts of observability and fault resolution is introduced. A reliability maximization-based optimization framework for sensor placement from a fault diagnosis perspective is described. The helical coil steam generator unit of the International Reactor Innovative and Secure system is outlined to underscore the utility of the algorithms for large systems.