ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
August 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Chris Wagner: The role of Eden Radioisotopes in the future of nuclear medicine
Chris Wagner has more than 40 years of experience in nuclear medicine, beginning as a clinical practitioner before moving into leadership roles at companies like Mallinckrodt (now Curium) and Nordion. His knowledge of both the clinical and the manufacturing sides of nuclear medicine laid the groundwork for helping to found Eden Radioisotopes, a start-up venture that intends to make diagnostic and therapeutic raw material medical isotopes like molybdenum-99 and lutetium-177.
Salvatore Massaiu, Alexandra Fernandes (IFE), invited
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 122-131
The increasing digitalization of nuclear power plants’ main control rooms questions the validity of Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) estimates for tasks that were formerly performed by acquiring information on analog panels. This paper presents a re-analysis of two experiments conducted at the Halden Reactor Project that employed the micro-task method for comparing different types of digital and analogue displays. The experiments were conducted with licensed operators at a U.S. power plant training simulator and at the HAMMLAB research simulator in Norway. In the re-analysis the tasks are classified according to two HRA reference sources for human error probabilities, THERP and KAERIs’ HuREX, in order to assess (a) the operators’ reliability on identification tasks, and (b) the impact of the HSI type (digital displays vs. analogue panels). The results show that error-rates for decontextualized micro-tasks are much higher than HRA estimates for the corresponding tasks in average industrial conditions. The advantage of the analog panels over the digital displays was small and not statistically significant, despite the experimental set-up that benefitted the familiar panels. Error rate differences between task types are larger than the differences attributable to the HSI type. Finally, the observed error rates relative differences across tasks are fairly consistent with THERP reference values but not with KAERIs. The results stress the importance of task modelling above HSI concerns, and the risk of overestimating the reliability of apparently easy tasks.