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Meeting 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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The U.S. Million Person Study of Low-Dose-Rate Health Effects
There is a critical knowledge gap regarding the health consequences of exposure to radiation received gradually over time. While there is a plethora of studies on the risks of adverse outcomes from both acute and high-dose exposures, including the landmark study of atomic bomb survivors, these are not characteristic of the chronic exposure to low-dose radiation encountered in occupational and public settings. In addition, smaller cohorts have limited numbers leading to reduced statistical power.
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.
