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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.
Robert Spears, Swetha Veeraraghavan, Justin Coleman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1205-1218
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1584492
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Seismic analyses of nuclear facilities require the use of validated numerical models that can realistically reproduce the response of soils during earthquakes. The nested surface nonlinear, hysteretic soil constitutive model is one of the soil constitutive models that is widely used because of (1) its lower number of free parameters compared to other nonlinear soil constitutive models and (2) the ease of calibrating these parameters using the commonly available soil data, i.e., G/Gmax and damping curves, as a function of shear strain. This material model is available in the commercial finite element software packages LS-DYNA and Abaqus as well as in the open source finite element tool Mastodon. The purpose of this study is to estimate the parameters required for this material model from the soil data available for the Lotung site and to demonstrate that this nonlinear soil constitutive model used in a time domain, finite element analysis can reasonably reproduce the actual measured soil motions recorded at Lotung during the LSST07 event on May 20, 1986. Results are presented from all the three software packages mentioned above using the same material model.