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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
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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Latest News
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Min Chull Kim, Inn Seock Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 166 | Number 3 | June 2009 | Pages 283-294
Technical Paper | 2007 Space Nuclear Conference / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-39
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) provides a decision-analysis framework to model unstructured problems in almost every kind of discipline, whether social science, aerospace engineering, or nuclear reactor safety analysis. As common-cause failure (CCF) has been a major element of incidents and accidents in terrestrial nuclear power reactors because of high redundancy built into the systems and susceptibility of these redundant systems to CCF mechanisms, ad hoc approaches used to be taken to address vulnerabilities to CCF by designers or operating staff of the plants. We show in this paper how the AHP in conjunction with goal-tree success-tree (GTST) methodology can be used to identify an optimal CCF-defense strategy under various constraints (e.g., the largest safety impact, the smallest cost, and the least operator burden). This work demonstrates applicability and effectiveness of the AHP decision-analysis technique in CCF-defense assessment with a novel introduction of the GTST methodology as a tool to construct a hierarchical decision tree for the AHP. The combined approach based on AHP and GTST methodologies can be used not only for CCF-defense assessment but also for any other multicriteria decision analysis requiring priority setting.