ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
August 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The RAIN scale: A good intention that falls short
Radiation protection specialists agree that clear communication of radiation risks remains a vexing challenge that cannot be solved solely by finding new ways to convey technical information.
Earlier this year, an article in Nuclear News described a new radiation risk communication tool, known as the Radiation Index, or, RAIN (“Let it RAIN: A new approach to radiation communication,” NN, Jan. 2025, p. 36). The authors of the article created the RAIN scale to improve radiation risk communication to the general public who are not well-versed in important aspects of radiation exposures, including radiation dose quantities, units, and values; associated health consequences; and the benefits derived from radiation exposures.
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.