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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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U.S. nuclear supply chain: Ready for liftoff
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month, September 8–11, the American Nuclear Society is teaming up with the Nuclear Energy Institute to host our first-ever Nuclear Energy Conference and Expo—NECX for short—in Atlanta. This new meeting combines ANS’s Utility Working Conference and NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly to form what NEI CEO Maria Korsnick and I hope will be the premier nuclear industry gathering in America.
We did this because after more than four decades of relative stagnation, the U.S. nuclear supply chain is finally entering a new era of dynamic growth. This resurgence is being driven by several powerful and increasingly durable forces: the explosive demand for electricity from artificial intelligence and data centers, an unprecedented wave of public and private acceptance of—and investment in—advanced nuclear technologies, and a strong market signal for reliable, on-demand power. Add the recent Trump administration executive orders on nuclear into the mix, and you have all the makings of an accelerant-rich business environment primed for rapid expansion.
Kwang-Il Ahn, Young-Ho Jin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 116 | Number 2 | November 1996 | Pages 146-159
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35296
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a probabilistic safety assessment for nuclear power plants, an important issue is the treatment and quantification of the uncertainties involved in each step of the system safety or accident analysis. There are two main types of uncertainties that should be explicitly considered in the analysis, i.e., parameter uncertainties contained in the model describing the behavior of real systems or accidents, and modeling uncertainties due to the imperfect description of the model itself. The latter case indicates a representation of imprecision in the analyst’s knowledge about models or their predictions. Although the field of uncertainty analysis has progressed to the point that several studies have been carried out that maintain a distinction between parameter and model uncertainty, in recent times, the model uncertainty analysis has indeed been less complete than that of the former type. However, there are important advantages to explicit consideration of the modeling uncertainty in risk analysis. The most important advantage is that it mitigates the overconfidence that can occur when a single model is used to make predictions since uncertainty bounds tend to be more realistic when a range of plausible models is considered. The second advantage is that it facilitates scientific communication because scientifically defensible analyses that explicitly incorporate a range of models obviate the problem of arguing over whose model is correct. The third advantage is the enhancement of credibility in the predictions or final outcomes. For these reasons, the modeling uncertainty should be incorporated into the current context of uncertainty analysis. A formal approach on the expression of highly uncertain models and its assessment within a probabilistic framework are provided. The basic idea of the current procedure is that the quantification of modeling uncertainties can be made by combining all the uncertainties assigned to alternative models into a probability distribution (or a family of probability distributions) about a particular result of interest, conditional on all the modeling assumptions that have been made in the analysis.