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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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The journey of the U.S. fuel cycle
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
While most big journeys begin with a clear objective, they rarely start with an exact knowledge of the route. When commissioning the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson didn’t provide specific “turn right at the big mountain” directions to the Corps of Discovery. He gave goal-oriented instructions: explore the Missouri River, find its source, search for a transcontinental water route to the Pacific, and build scientific and cultural knowledge along the way.
Jefferson left it up to Lewis and Clark to turn his broad, geopolitically motivated guidance into gritty reality.
Similarly, U.S. nuclear policy has begun a journey toward closing the U.S. nuclear fuel cycle. There is a clear signal of support for recycling from the Trump administration, along with growing bipartisan excitement in Congress. Yet the precise path remains unclear.
Jun Kawai, Yuto Horiuchi (NSR)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 499-506
As severity of accidents increases in beyond-design basis events (B-DBEs) conditions, ambiguity of situations increases among operators and interactions between plant systems/components and operators become more complicated. Three issues were recognized and a framework composed of three corresponding methods was introduced to address the issues on applying Human Factors Engineering (HFE) review for B-DBE conditions. The enhancing framework was applied to a scenario, Total loss of Feed Water with Misleading Indicator, as a trial. The result of the trial showed that the enhancing framework could be applied as far as task analysis was feasible for B-DBE conditions with relevant human reliability analysis method.
