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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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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Smarter waste strategies: Helping deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear
At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
G. W. Morton, B. D. Shumaker, D. E. McCarter, S. D. Caylor, P. D. Brukiewa (AMS)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 829-838
Obsolescence, aging, reliability, and performance issues are driving nuclear facilities to replace conventional analog Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems with digital technologies. In addition, the designs of the next generation of nuclear reactors, including Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), will incorporate digital I&C for most, if not all, of their safety and non-safety related functions. As part of a research and development (R&D) effort under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Analysis and Measurement Services Corporation (AMS) developed a platform to provide automated testing of digital I&C systems and create a standard method of evaluation for reliability assessments. This hands-on R&D effort has produced a Software Reliability Tester (SRT), which is a set of software tools designed to automate the testing of digital I&C systems to measure and quantify how well the system performs under normal operating conditions and in the presence of faults. Furthermore, the SRT provides the foundation for a practical tool to automate verification and validation (V&V) activities and reduce the amount of testing time of digital I&C systems. When combined with its capabilities of integrating both reliability and fault tolerance quantification, the SRT can be used to ensure that digital I&C implementations are both safe and cost-effective for the nuclear industry. This paper describes the application of the SRT with fault injection to automate V&V activities for a new Digital Rod Position Indication (DRPI) coil diagnostic system. The DRPI coil diagnostic system is a digital system that monitors the DRPI coil voltages of typical DRPI systems in nuclear power plants to detect and diagnose faults. For this application, the SRT was configured to exercise the inputs of the DRPI coil diagnostic system during rod movement while exposing the system to electromagnetic interference (EMI) at various amplitudes and frequencies. These test cases were applied by the SRT hardware as voltage inputs to the DRPI coil diagnostic system and the outputs were compared to expected values generated by a model of the DRPI coil diagnostic system. Included in the paper is a description of the overall design of the SRT including the hardware and software architectures. As described in the paper, V&V using the SRT demonstrates the benefits of automated testing and fault tolerance qualification to provide a quantitative assessment of reliability and cost effective implementation of digital I&C in existing and next generation nuclear power plants.
