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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Remembering ANS member Gil Brown
Brown
The nuclear community is mourning the loss of Gilbert Brown, who passed away on July 11 at the age of 77 following a battle with cancer.
Brown, an American Nuclear Society Fellow and an ANS member for nearly 50 years, joined the faculty at Lowell Technological Institute—now the University of Massachusetts–Lowell—in 1973 and remained there for the rest of his career. He eventually became director of the UMass Lowell nuclear engineering program. After his retirement, he remained an emeritus professor at the university.
Sukesh Aghara, chair of the Nuclear Engineering Department Heads Organization, noted in an email to NEDHO members and others that “Gil was a relentless advocate for nuclear energy and a deeply respected member of our professional community. He was also a kind and generous friend—and one of the reasons I ended up at UMass Lowell. He served the university with great dedication. . . . Within NEDHO, Gil was a steady presence and served for many years as our treasurer. His contributions to nuclear engineering education and to this community will be dearly missed.”
Thomas R. Wellock
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1394-1409
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1826273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper examines the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) pursuit of social science research that could inform the oversight of nuclear power plant management. Perhaps no nuclear regulator has been as supportive of research on the intersection of organizational factors and reactor safety or as cautious in applying those findings to its regulations.
This dissonance was rooted in the NRC’s long-held conviction that it should regulate power plants not people, which conflicted with its regulatory experience after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident (TMI). Intrusive oversight of a licensee’s “business,” it was believed, would destroy its sense of ownership for safety. TMI challenged that understanding of the NRC’s role, and a series of mishaps at other plants compelled the agency to cross the line between regulation and management. The NRC’s relationship with industry became highly adversarial, and the agency turned to social scientists to help establish an objective basis to judge a licensee’s organizational culture. Behavioral experts joined plant oversight review teams and received generous funding to quantify the contribution of organizational factors to accident risk. Scores of scholars at national laboratories and a dozen universities contributed, but the NRC abandoned the research in the mid-1990s in the face of inconclusive research and industry resistance.
In need of a less controversial oversight program, the NRC abandoned direct assessment of plant management for a more quantitative approach that relied on plant performance indicators. When the 2002 Davis-Besse vessel head erosion event came perilously close to a significant loss-of-coolant accident, it raised questions about the appropriate role for the NRC in assessing a licensee’s safety culture. The NRC revised its oversight program to incorporate qualitative insights from its earlier research while still acknowledging the line between regulation and management. The NRC learned that while there were substantial cultural and technical obstacles to integrating safety culture insights with established management and regulatory practices, it was necessary to overcome them. The agency found stability in its contentious oversight program only when it made appropriate room for safety culture expertise.