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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!
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DOE-NE’s newest fuel consortium includes defense from antitrust laws
The Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy is setting up a nuclear fuel Defense Production Act Consortium that will seek voluntary agreements with interested companies “to increase fuel availability, provide more access to reliable power, and end America’s reliance on foreign sources of enriched uranium and critical materials needed to power the nation’s nuclear renaissance.” According to an August 22 DOE press release, the plan invokes the Defense Production Act (DPA) to give consortium members “defense from antitrust laws when certain criteria are met” and “allow industry consultation to develop plans of action.” DOE-NE is looking for interested companies to join the consortium ahead of its first meeting, scheduled for October 14.
Anton Andrashov (RadICS LLC), Ievgenii Bakhmach, Kostyantyn Leontiiev (Radiy Research & Production Corp), Vyacheslav Kharchenko, Eugene Babeshko, Andriy Kovalenko (Center for Safety Infrastructure-Oriented Research and Analysis)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 174-182
Common cause failures (CCFs) could be a serious threat to reliability of safety-related systems used at nuclear power plants (NPPs). Modern national and international normative documents require implementation and demonstration of measures to overcome CCFs. For example, BTP 7-19 states that diversity or testability is sufficient to eliminate consideration of software based or software logic based CCF. Diversity is the general approach based on differences in equipment, development and verification technologies, implemented functions, etc. Testability could be defined as implementing software in a way that decreases effort needed to validate the system. Practical issues related to diversity and testability include implementation, assessment, and demonstration of conformance to requirements. In this paper, we share experience gained during the design of the RadICS Platform. We discuss the following defensive measures protecting against CCFs implemented in RadICS: - Software Development Process Quality; - Hardware Independence Principles; - Platform Diversity and Platform based I&C system diversity; - Defense-in-Depth. We describe assessment approach including NUREG/CR-7007 technique and tool to calculate diversity metrics and make decisions to adequacy of the diversity strategy. We present a case study for a developed and implemented NPP I&C system.
