ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Jan 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2026
Nuclear Technology
January 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
Jeff Place on INPO’s strategy for industry growth
As executive vice president for industry strategy at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, Jeff Place leads INPO’s industry-facing work, engaging directly with chief nuclear officers.
Moosung Jae, Antony D. Milici, William E. Kastenberg, George E. Apostolakis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 104 | Number 1 | October 1993 | Pages 13-36
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34867
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A framework for assessing severe accident management strategies is presented using a new analytical tool, namely, influence diagrams. This framework includes multiple and sequential decisions, sensitivity analysis, and uncertainty propagation, and is applied to a proposed set of strategies for a pressurized water reactor station blackout sequence. The influence diagram associated with these strategies is constructed and evaluated. Each decision variable, represented by a node in the influence diagram, has an uncertainty distribution associated with it. Using the mean value of these distributions, a best estimate assessment is performed, and each strategy is ranked with respect to the conditional frequency of early containment failure (ECF). For the preferred alternative, the sensitivity of the results to values of the input variables is investigated. The sensitivity of the ranking itself is then considered. The distributions of the uncertain variables are also propagated through the influence diagram to rank the alternatives with respect to the uncertainty associated with the calculated conditional frequency of ECF. Finally, the sensitivity of the variance of the output distribution, given the preferred decision alternative, to the uncertainty of the input variables is investigated.