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The human factor in licensing and operating the next generation of nuclear plants
As human factors specialists working at the intersection of human performance and nuclear operations, we are witnessing one of the nuclear sector’s most significant transitions in decades. The emergence of small modular reactors, microreactors, and other advanced designs is reshaping the industry’s landscape. Digital instrumentation and controls, passive safety systems, and increased automation are creating opportunities for greater safety margins and more flexible operation. These same features also fundamentally redefine what it means to “operate” a nuclear plant. Interactions among human roles, automation, and passive systems shape how people maintain awareness, exercise judgment, and intervene when necessary. These developments affect both operational realities and the regulatory foundations on which nuclear safety is built.
Hyung-Seok Lee, Won Sik Yang, Man Gyun Na, Hangbok Choi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 1 | April 2000 | Pages 1-8
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3072
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reconstruction method has been developed for recovering pin powers from Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactor core calculations performed with a coarse-mesh finite difference diffusion approximation and single-assembly lattice calculations. The homogeneous intranodal distributions of group fluxes are efficiently computed using polynomial shapes constrained to satisfy the nodal information approximated from the node-average fluxes. The group fluxes of individual fuel pins in a heterogeneous fuel bundle are determined using these homogeneous intranodal flux distributions and the form functions obtained from the single-assembly lattice calculations. The pin powers are obtained using these pin fluxes and the pin power cross sections generated by the single-assembly lattice calculation. The accuracy of the reconstruction schemes has been estimated by performing benchmark calculations for partial core representation of a natural uranium CANDU reactor. The results indicate that the reconstruction schemes are quite accurate, yielding maximum pin power errors of less than ~3%. The main contribution to the reconstruction error is made by the errors in the node-average fluxes obtained from the coarse-mesh finite difference diffusion calculation; the errors due to the reconstruction schemes are <1%.