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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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!
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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Jason Kirschenbaum, Paolo Bucci, Michael Stovsky, Diego Mandelli, Tunc Aldemir, Michael Yau, Sergio Guarro, Eylem Ekici, Steven A. Arndt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 53-95
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4062
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There is an accelerating trend to upgrade and replace nuclear power plant analog instrumentation and control systems with digital systems. While various methodologies are available for the reliability modeling of these systems for plant probabilistic risk assessments, there is no benchmark system that can be used as the basis for methodology comparison. A system representative of the steam generator feedwater control systems in pressurized water reactors is proposed for such a comparison. Dynamic reliability modeling of the benchmark system for an example initiating event is illustrated using the Markov/cell-to-cell mapping technique and dynamic flowgraph methodologies.
