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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.
Mark Burzynski (NewClear Day, Inc.)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 653-663
The recent trend for nuclear safety-related instrumentation and control (I&C) applications is that field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology is being used more frequently. Software verification and validation (V&V) activities are used to provide objective evidence that the software and its associated products and processes conform to requirements (e.g., for correctness, completeness, consistency, and accuracy). Standards are used to provide accepted practices and conventions for software V&V activities. Regulators rely on industry standards to support their review of digital I&C systems used for safety-related applications. A key challenge for the review of FPGA-based I&C systems in the United States is the use of IEEE Std 1012-2004 to develop the appropriate software V&V plan. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) endorses IEEE Std 1012-2004 as an acceptable approach for meeting the agency’s regulatory requirements on the V&V of safety system software. The software-centric nature of IEEE Std 1012 is a limitation on its effectiveness in establishing a common framework for V&V processes, activities, and tasks in support of FPGA-based development processes. The use of IEEE Std 1012 to define the V&V requirements for FPGA-based I&C applications will always require the standard requirements to be tailored and adapted to the FPGA technology. The required adaptations limit the usefulness of the standard to support efficient reviews of safety-related I&C applications by the NRC, since adaptations made for each project must be reviewed for technical adequacy. The paper makes recommendations to on the use of IEEE Std 1012 with FPGA technology and to improve the regulatory framework for FPGA-based projects based on a case study involving a digital I&C platform developed using IEC standards.