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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
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.