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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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ANS and the U.K.’s NI announce reciprocal membership agreement
With President Trump on a state visit to the U.K., in part to sign a landmark new agreement on U.S.-U.K. nuclear collaboration, a flurry of transatlantic partnerships and deals bridging the countries’ nuclear sectors have been announced.
The American Nuclear Society is taking an active role in this bridge-building by forming a reciprocal membership agreement with the U.K.’s Nuclear Institute.
Ibrahim Jarrah, Rizwan uddin (Univ of Illinois)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 503-512
The spent fuel dry cask should remain subcritical under normal, abnormal, and accident conditions. The cask becomes susceptible to criticality if it is misloaded with assemblies that do not conform with the Certificate of Compliance (CoC). To avoid this scenario, the cask loading process involves several verification steps to make sure that all of the loaded assemblies satisfy the CoC requirements. However, most of loading and verification steps are carried out by humans with finite probabilities for errors, which need to be quantified. In this paper, the probability of misloading a cask with light water reactor (PWR and BWR) fuel is quantified using the event tree method. Probability distribution functions for all of the human errors are obtained using the SPAR-H human reliability analysis method. The Fussell-Vesely (FV) importance measure is performed to determine the tasks that contribute the most to the having a misloaded cask. The probability of misload is found to be 5.56E-06 for cask loaded with the PWR and 2.95E-05 for the cask loaded with the BWR fuel. Both of these are considered to be small.