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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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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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.
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.