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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.
Nikolai B. Mikheev, Sergei A. Kulyukhin, Alla N. Kamenskaya, Igor’ A. Rumer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 114 | Number 1 | April 1996 | Pages 77-83
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35224
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Increasing the safety of nuclear power plants is a problem of the utmost importance in the nuclear energy industry. Particular attention is given to severe accidents at nuclear reactors. Although the probability of these accidents is low (<10−5), their consequences are the most disastrous. Severe accidents result in the release of tens of thousands of curies of radioactive products into the area under the containment. Modern protective systems for the localization of radioactive aerosols and volatile radionuclides are based mainly on the filtration of gas flow, using various solid and liquid sorbents. The main principle of these filters is based on the precipitation of suspended particles on any surface (grids, liquid drops, or film, fiber, and electrode surfaces). In these processes, physical phenomena such as gravitation, inertia, diffusion, electricity, magnetism, and supersonics are used. A disadvantage of the available systems is that they may not trap radioaerosols present in the vapor-gas mixture in the form of finely dispersed (much smaller than 0.1 µm) hydrophobic particles. A new concept of protection from radioaerosols and volatile radionuclides has been suggested. A basically new method of the localization of radioactive aerosols and volatile radionuclides is based on the physicochemical process occurring in the gas phase. The proposed concept of protection from radioaerosols and volatile fission products uses unconventional approaches based not on the filtration of vapor-gas flow but on the extraction of radioaerosols and radioiodine from them by the formation of mixed micelles with manufactured hydrophilic aerosols, such as MoO3 and NH4CI-(NH4)2SO3, and the cocrystallization of ionic iodine with them. The new concept may be used for protection from radioaerosols at various types of nuclear reactors.