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Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Sang Hun Lee, Hyun Gook Kang (RPI), Seung Jun Lee (UNIST), Sung Min Shin (KAERI), Eunchan Lee (Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd.)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 803-812
An issue on incorporating the software reliability within the NPP PRA model has been emerged in the licensing processes of digitalized NPPs. Since software failure induces CCFs of the processor modules, the reliability of the software used in NPP safety-critical I&C systems must be quantified and verified with proper test cases and environment. In order to prove the software to be error-free or have very low failure probability, an exhaustive testing of software is required. In this study, a software testing method based on the MCS-based exhaustive test case generation scheme combined with the simulation-based test-bed is proposed. The software test-bed was developed by emulating the microprocessor architecture of PLC used in NPP safety-critical applications and capturing its behavior at each machine instruction. For the test case generation, the software logic model was developed from the formal definition of FBD/LD and the sets of MCSs which represent the necessary and sufficient conditions for the software variables’ states to produce safety software output were generated. The MCSs were then converted into the test sets which are used as inputs to test-bed to verify that the test cases produce correct output after software execution. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with the safety-critical trip logic software of IDiPS-RPS, a fully digitalized reactor protection system. The method provides a systematic way to conduct software exhaustive testing while effectively reducing the software testing effort by emulating PLC behavior in machine-level compared to existing software testing methods.