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Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
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Latest News
BWXT announces nuclear manufacturing plant expansion
BWX Technologies announced today plans to expand and add advanced manufacturing equipment to its manufacturing plant in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada.
A $36.3 million USD ($50M CAD) expansion will increase the plant’s size by 25 percent—to 280,000 square feet—and another $21.7 million USD ($30M CAD) will be spent on new equipment to increase and accelerate its output of large nuclear components. The investment will increase capacity and create more than 200 long-term jobs for skilled workers, engineers, and support staff, according to the company.
Thuy Dung Vu, Dookie Kim, Sung Gook Cho
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 1 | April 2013 | Pages 75-83
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control/Miscellaneous | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15828
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The application of base isolation to nuclear systems has been limited to date for some important reasons, including the deprivation of sufficient data for the long-term operation of such isolation devices and the lack of specific standards. Moreover, it is difficult to provide seismic protection in the vertical direction and to qualify the large-scale isolators up to experimentally large deformations in real dynamic conditions. The effect of aging on isolators is therefore one of the issues to be considered for the safety and reliability of base-isolated nuclear power plants (NPPs). Accounting for the variations of the post-aging parameters of the isolators on the structural performance of the plant, this study proposes a simplified and efficient method to update the analytical model of base-isolated structures based on mean-iterative neural networks (MINNs). A bilinear model with a zero length element was built to represent the characteristics of lead-rubber bearings for their numerical analysis. Analytical model updating by MINNs has been successfully performed, and the observed results are found to be in good agreement with those obtained from experiments. Additionally, it is observed that the stiffening or hardening with time in the shear properties of isolation devices affects the seismic performance of the base-isolated structure. Seismic design over the service life span of NPP structures should take these aging effects of the isolators into account.