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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
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.