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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The current status of heat pipe R&D
Idaho National Laboratory under the Department of Energy–sponsored Microreactor Program recently conducted a comprehensive phenomena identification and ranking table (PIRT) exercise aimed at advancing heat pipe technology for microreactor applications.
Vinay Kumar, Lalit Singh, A. K. Tripathi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 20-28
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-89
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Any risk in safety-critical or control applications may lead to catastrophic disaster; hence, safety is a primary concern for such applications. The impact of risk varies from minor inconvenience and cost to personal injury, significant economic loss, and death. Therefore, a safety assessment process should be an inherent part of the system development process to make a system safe or to ensure that the effects from failures are minimized. This paper deals with a new probabilistic approach to quantify the safety of safety-critical systems (SCSs) and control systems based on probabilistic safety assessment to deal with the shortcomings of the existing techniques. The methodology has been tested on 29 operational data sets to validate its effectiveness. This paper demonstrates the methodology on the digital feedwater controller system of a nuclear power plant. The results indicate that the method can identify possible hazards and quantify such hazards of a SCS.