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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.
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.