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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver 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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May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Arnaud Duthou, Aurélien Mattei, Alain Boue (Rolls-Royce Civil Nuclear)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1568-1580
The ability of microprocessor-based I&C safety platforms to process a large amount of complex parameters as well as the difficulty to maintain older analog equipment led to the gradual replacement of the hardwired technologies installed long ago. However, their complexity and cost, combined with new safety requirements, has generated a renewed interest for the Hardwired technologies that are usually simpler and cheaper to qualify. As Hardwired systems still have limited data processing, they usually cannot be used efficiently for the complete protection system of complex reactors or architectures. They however are ideal for other functions such as diverse actuation systems, priority logic, post-accident systems or even main protection systems for simple architectures such as research reactors’. Nevertheless, most existing “non-programmed” technologies have not evolved much since their creation several decades ago and therefore suffer from obsolescence issues and capability limitations. Thus the creation of a truly modern, performant and purely hardwired technology (i.e. not based on FPGA) represents a progress in the catalogue of next generation technologies available for 1E/Cat A. safety I&C. The development of a modern I&C platform is always a challenge as the requirements are continuously evolving toward more stringent standards, especially for safety classified I&C systems. In order to meet all these requirements, the platform shall provide state of the art electronic features and its design criteria shall include flexibility, scalability and space optimization as well as integrated communication. Consequently, the creation of a next generation safety I&C platform based on purely hardwired technology represents a significant challenge and this paper will present the method used by Rolls-Royce to achieve a successful result for its new Hardline platform.