ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
April 2026
Latest News
DOE secretary and New York congressman call for reopening of Indian Point
Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) at the site of the closed Indian Point nuclear power plant on Friday, March 6, as Lawler called for the reopening of the facility. He emphasized that the shutdown of the plant in 2021 has led to higher electricity costs for the people of New York state and increased strain on the state’s electric grid.
Thomas A. Ulrich, Ronald L. Boring (INL), Roger Lew (Univ of Idaho)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1179-1188
To both maintain safety of nuclear plants and bolster economic competitiveness, it is crucial to understand how to optimize the control and monitoring tasks that nuclear operators perform in the main control room. The concept of a computerized operator support system (COSS) that monitors the plant, performs prognostic analysis to detect anomalies, and then alerts the operator to those anomalies, is one approach that provides promise for bolstering performance and ultimately allowing the operator to keep the plant running for maximum efficiency. The COSS concept leverages a number of technologies to realize these potential performance benefits including computer-based procedures (CBPs), prognostic algorithms, and the displays to convey the system states. The displays for a COSS are the focus of this paper. A prototype tool for building overview screens was developed and evaluated to advance COSS capabilities beyond static displays. The tool is called the Graphical Augmentation Interface for Yoked Overviews (GAIYO, after the Japanese word for “overview”), and is built on the Advanced Nuclear Interface Modeling Environment (ANIME) framework. ANIME-GAIYO automatically generates overview screens that are linked to the CBP system, a type of task based display that tracks the current procedure step and aggregates the information from disparate board controls required for that procedure step into one convenient and easily monitored location. The CBP system dynamically updates the indicators presented for each step such that the operators can reliably reference it to quickly ascertain the plant status. It is purely informative and does not feature controls. Therefore, it represents a technology that could be more readily adopted than the full-fledged COSS concept, which would require a significant regulatory approval process. The evaluation is ongoing, but initial results suggest the tool is advantageous as an operator aid. In particular, the tool provides a strong benefit to allow operators to quickly identify the state of the plant for the current procedure step and then drill down into the control boards with good situation awareness to verify the state based on their initial estimate. Ultimately, this tool provides additional evidence for pursuing the COSS concept and realizing the benefits of a system on operator performance.