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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
Meeting Spotlight
Materials in Nuclear Energy Systems (MiNES 2023)
December 10–14, 2023
New Orleans, LA|New Orleans Marriott
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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Survey reveals support for, but misconceptions about, nuclear energy
Fifty-two percent of Americans either “strongly” or “somewhat” support nuclear energy as part of the United States’ energy mix, with the strongest support among Republicans (59 percent) and self-described independents (53 percent). Support among Democrats is 48 percent. Those are some of the results from the sixth annual American Climate Perspectives Survey conducted by ecoAmerica.
Roberto Ponciroli, Stefano Passerini, Richard B. Vilim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 199 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 16-34
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1326783
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Advanced reactors are often claimed to be passively safe against unprotected upset events. In common practice, these events are not considered in the context of the plant control system, i.e., the reactor is subjected to classes of unprotected upset events while the normally programmed response of the control system is assumed not to be present. However, this approach constitutes an oversimplification since, depending on the upset involving the control system, an actuator does not necessarily go in the same direction as needed for safety. In this work, dynamic simulations are performed to assess the degree to which the inherent self-regulating plant response is safe from active control system override. The simulations are meant to characterize the resilience of the plant to unprotected initiators. The initiators were represented and modeled as an actuator going to a hard limit. Consideration of failure is further limited to individual controllers as there is no cross-connect of signals between these controllers. The potential for passive safety override by the control system is then relegated to the single-input single-output controllers. The results show that when the plant control system is designed by taking into account and quantifying the impact of the plant control system on accidental scenarios there is very limited opportunity for the preprogrammed response of the control system to override passive safety protection in the event of an unprotected initiator.