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Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
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.
