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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.
Jinhui Liu, Fangyu Gu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 140 | Number 2 | November 2002 | Pages 164-168
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3330
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a new mass and energy estimating method for loose parts (LPs) combining the Karhunen-Loève (K-L) transform and neural network theories in the frequency domain. The detection of LPs was performed using simulated acoustic sensors mounted on the wall of a simulator of a reactor vessel. The impact events were simulated by simple pendulums. The data sampled in the time domain was changed to power spectral densities in the frequency domain using the fast Fourier transform. Then, the K-L transform was used to compress the original information. The final feature space's dimensions can be much less than the original ones. And, the original information remains as much as possible. The experiment showed that the impact characteristics of the LPs could be exactly depicted in the compressed feature space. The calculated mass values were approximately equal to the actual ones.