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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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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.
C. Kovesdi, J. Clark (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1631-1643
In the United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Plant Modernization pathway, the role of human factors engineering (HFE) continues to have an integral role in ensuring new advanced digital technologies that are part of the overall plant modernization strategy support optimized human-system performance and do not introduce new human failure modes. Regulatory guidance highlights human-system performance is a complex and multifaceted construct that requires a hierarchical set of measures including aspects of workload, situation awareness (SA), and task performance. Since workload, SA, and task difficulty are not directly observable, an accepted practice is to use subjective measures such as survey instrumentations. However, the time allotted for survey administration and post-scenario discussion during HFE activities can be significantly limited depending on operator availability and/or simulator availability. This paper explores the psychometrics of common survey instruments that measure workload, SA, and perceived task difficulty in nuclear power plant operator-in-the-loop studies with a goal of informing development of a consolidated survey instrument to reduce administration time. A set of exploratory analyses uncovered two principal components from the individual items combined from these surveys. A prototype survey instrument was thus developed as an early concept to illustrate how these two principals components could be expanded into a survey tool with fewer questions. A detailed discussion of the exploratory analyses and new prototype survey are discussed in this paper.