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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.
Junyong Bae, Jeeyea Ahn, Seung Jun Lee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 951-961
Technical Paper – Special section on the 2019 ANS Student Conference | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1693215
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Human operators always have the possibility to commit human errors, and in safety-critical infrastructures such as a nuclear power plant, human error could cause serious consequences. Since nuclear plant operations involve highly complex and mentally taxing activities, especially in emergency situations, it is important to detect human errors to maintain plant safety. This work proposes a method to predict the future trends of important plant parameters to determine whether a performed action is an error or not. To achieve this prediction, a recursive strategy is adopted that employs an artificial neural network as its prediction model. Two artificial neural networks were selected and compared: multilayer perceptron and long short-term memory (LSTM). Model training was accomplished using emergency operation data from a nuclear power plant simulator. From the comparison results, it was observed that the future trends of plant parameters were quite accurately predicted through the LSTM model. It is expected that the plant parameter prediction function proposed in this work can give useful information for detecting and recovering human errors.