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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Luciano Burgazzi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 173 | Number 2 | February 2011 | Pages 153-161
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11544
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes a modeling and analysis approach for reliability prediction based on degradation modeling, considering multiple degradation measures and with respect to the thermal-hydraulic passive systems.Previous research on the topic has drawn attention to the susceptibility of passive systems to several modes of failure. In fact, it has been recognized that a system may have, in addition to component mechanism failures, multiple degradation paths, so it is necessary to simultaneously consider multiple degradation measures. Also, many research efforts on degradation analysis were initiated by making assumptions about the degradation mechanism. In reality, often there is very limited understanding about the concerned degradation mechanisms together with their interdependencies.In this paper, an analysis procedure is developed to address this aspect. Simulated data have been used to illustrate the applicability of this approach. Results on the application of the methods to a simplified model of the passive residual heat transport system in water-cooled reactors is presented. It was verified that when the multiple degradation measures in a system are correlated, an incorrect independence assumption may overestimate the system reliability.