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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Aaron Derouin, Alice Salway
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 2 | February 2018 | Pages 165-173
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1413922
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, nuclear regulators around the world have required that power reactor licensees develop more extensive emergency mitigating responses and severe accident management provisions beyond the defense-in-depth measures for design-basis accidents previously in place. Workload assessments represent common validation techniques that are used to demonstrate that workers are able to perform tasks without unacceptable performance degradation. High workload is known to induce stress and fatigue and may severely diminish a worker’s capacity to perceive, recognize, and respond appropriately during emergency or unanticipated events, which may result in undesirable consequences. In estimating workload during emergency and severe accident scenarios, power reactor licensees tend to rely on subjective measures of workload, such as the NASA Task Load Index. Because of reported mismatches in the literature between subjective and physiologically derived estimates of workload, it is prudent to see what more can be done to improve the current state of practice in the context of emergency and severe accident conditions.
To improve confidence in workload estimates, it is advocated that the nuclear industry integrate physiologically based measures into current practices by making use of on-body or wearable physiological sensors. In this paper, an overview of three different approaches to the empirical measurement of workload is provided. The advantages of wearable physiological sensors are considered in the context of extreme environments and occupations, with tangible examples including heat stress and pupillometry. Suggestions for a consensus forum on workload are provided, and a research plan directed at improving the current practice of workload estimation is offered for consideration.