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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Raj Kamal Kaur, Lalit Kumar Singh, Babita Pandey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 3 | March 2017 | Pages 296-307
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2016.1273702
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Digital computers have been chosen in the implementation of safety critical systems in newly constructed nuclear facilities. These safety critical systems are designed to operate in a secure manner so that their failure should not prompt any serious damage or catastrophic effects. Due to the security significance of critical systems, there is a need to ensure the secrecy of systems at an early stage. Existing work focused on evaluating security by considering at the requirement phase only integrity, confidentiality, access control, and availability attributes. However, many essential critical attributes have not been taken into consideration, like deadlock, liveness, etc. To improve the security of software systems, this paper introduces a threat-driven modeling framework. It predicts security threats, it figures out which threats require mitigation and how to alleviate these threats, and it incorporates the essential missing attributes. We specify the functionality of the system with a Petri net, and we analyze the behavioral and structural properties of the system and threat mitigation. Aspect-oriented stochastic Petri nets are used as a formal amplified model. The technique has been validated on 11 safety critical systems of a nuclear power plant and it is shown for one case study in this paper.