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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
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.