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2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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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Modernizing I&C for operations and maintenance, one phase at a time
The two reactors at Dominion Energy’s Surry plant are among the oldest in the U.S. nuclear fleet. Yet when the plant celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, staff could raise a toast to the future. Surry was one of the first plants to file a subsequent license renewal (SLR) application, and in May 2021, it became official: the plant was licensed to operate for a full 80 years, extending its reactors’ lifespans into 2052 and 2053.
Paul R. Miles, Jared A. Cook, Zoey V. Angers, Christopher J. Swenson, Brian C. Kiedrowski, John Mattingly, Ralph C. Smith
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 37-53
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1738796
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent research has focused on the development of surrogate models for radiation source localization in a simulated urban domain. We employ the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) code to provide high-fidelity simulations of radiation transport within an urban domain. The model is constructed to employ a source location () as input and return the estimated count rate for a set of specified detector locations. Because MCNP simulations are computationally expensive, we develop efficient and accurate surrogate models of the detector responses. We construct surrogate models using Gaussian processes and neural networks that we train and verify using the MCNP simulations. The trained surrogate models provide an efficient framework for Bayesian inference and experimental design. We employ Delayed Rejection Adaptive Metropolis (DRAM), a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, to infer the location and intensity of an unknown source. The DRAM results yield a posterior probability distribution for the source’s location conditioned on the observed detector count rates. The posterior distribution exhibits regions of high and low probability within the simulated environment identifying potential source locations. In this manner, we can quantify the source location to within at least one of these regions of high probability in the considered cases. Employing these methods, we are able to reduce the space of potential source locations by at least 60%.