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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Remembering ANS member Gil Brown
Brown
The nuclear community is mourning the loss of Gilbert Brown, who passed away on July 11 at the age of 77 following a battle with cancer.
Brown, an American Nuclear Society Fellow and an ANS member for nearly 50 years, joined the faculty at Lowell Technological Institute—now the University of Massachusetts–Lowell—in 1973 and remained there for the rest of his career. He eventually became director of the UMass Lowell nuclear engineering program. After his retirement, he remained an emeritus professor at the university.
Sukesh Aghara, chair of the Nuclear Engineering Department Heads Organization, noted in an email to NEDHO members and others that “Gil was a relentless advocate for nuclear energy and a deeply respected member of our professional community. He was also a kind and generous friend—and one of the reasons I ended up at UMass Lowell. He served the university with great dedication. . . . Within NEDHO, Gil was a steady presence and served for many years as our treasurer. His contributions to nuclear engineering education and to this community will be dearly missed.”
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.
