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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.
Geoffrey S. Gray, P. Madhan Kumar, Scott J. Ormiston
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 10 | October 2025 | Pages 2372-2385
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2365486
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Aerosol transport and deposition are important processes in modeling of accident scenarios for a small modular reactor. An aerosol drift-flux model is attractive because it is computationally less expensive than Lagrangian particle tracking. It must be determined, however, how well it performs when implemented in a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. This work presents results of modeling aerosol transport and deposition using a full Eulerian three-dimensional drift-flux model implemented in the commercial CFD code STAR-CCM+. The forces due to gravity and thermophoresis are included in the present drift-flux model along with Brownian motion and turbulent diffusion. The forces are added as a source term to a passive scalar transport equation. In addition, a drift velocity representing the forces is used in a built-in electrochemical species transport equation. The results of these two approaches are compared. An appropriate deposition velocity is used to calculate the aerosol concentration deposited on surfaces. The semiempirical relation proposed by Lai and Nazaroff (2000) is used to compute the deposition velocity due to gravitational settling, and the present results are compared with the experimental and numerical data obtained from the work of Chen et al. (2006). It was found that the concentration profile obtained from the present drift-flux model showed reasonable agreement with the literature data. A thermophoresis model showed good agreement when compared with the analytical solution of Nazaroff and Cass (1987). In addition to the particle concentration results, this work presents details of the drift-flux model implementation and the bulk flows. These extra details will enable comparisons by others developing similar models.