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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Jeeyea Ahn, Junyong Bae, Seung Jun Lee (UNIST)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 115-121
The most significant factor in nuclear power plant operations is safety. A lot of people in the nuclear industry have continued their unremitting efforts. After Three Miles Island accident, human factors came out into the open that it greatly contributes to the course of the accident of nuclear power plants. Thus, a lot of efforts have been made to reduce the human factor error. As nuclear power plant design developed, a new type of digitalized main control rooms has appeared, the conventional paper-based procedures have been left behind as backup. In advanced main control rooms (MCRs), computerized procedure system (CPS) is used to support human operators. Applying computer-based procedures in the main control room allows to reduce mental workload, enhance situation awareness, and produce lower errors of omission than paper-based procedure. However, current CPS does not yet utilize artificial intelligence technology. In order to reduce human errors, the framework which detects unsafe acts of human operators is suggested. The unsafe acts (UAs) detecting system implements Coloured Petri Nets, and deep neural networks to determine if an operating action is an error. The system uses two steps of filters to discover the effect of an operating action on the plant integrity.