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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.
Jayan K. George, Jagdeep B. Doshi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 108 | Number 3 | December 1994 | Pages 338-349
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35016
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pressure disturbance propagation through a weakly compressible medium, bound by rigid structure as well as material interfaces, has an important bearing on the safety analysis of liquid-metal-cooled fast breeder reactors. The analyses have been carried out using numerical algorithms based on Eulerian, Lagrangian, or mixed formulations. Even though the results obtained from these schemes compared well with the benchmark experimental results, certain drawbacks, such as less accurate treatment of material interfaces in the Eulerian schemes and mesh distortion in the La-grangian schemes, and so forth, remain. These drawbacks may be overcome by using a method of characteristics in two dimensions known as the near-characteristic method to solve the problem. The region of interest is discretized into Eulerian grids, and the flow parameters are obtained from the compatibility equations corresponding to the near characteristics generated from the grid points. The material interfaces are tracked explicitly, using the near-characteristic scheme. The scheme is used to analyze a typical core disruptive accident problem, and the results are compared with experimental results as well as those ob. tained using two other numerical schemes. Good agreement is observed among the results; indeed, the one-dimensional problem of exploding wire phenomena and the two-dimensional problem of core disruptive accident analysis validate the effectiveness of the scheme. The future extension of the present scheme will include fluid structure interaction and complex internal structures.