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.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
July 2025
Latest News
The U.S. Million Person Study of Low-Dose-Rate Health Effects
There is a critical knowledge gap regarding the health consequences of exposure to radiation received gradually over time. While there is a plethora of studies on the risks of adverse outcomes from both acute and high-dose exposures, including the landmark study of atomic bomb survivors, these are not characteristic of the chronic exposure to low-dose radiation encountered in occupational and public settings. In addition, smaller cohorts have limited numbers leading to reduced statistical power.
James A. Smith, Vivek Agarwal, Ahmad Al Rashdan (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1667-1671
Data analytics should be at the center of strategic maintenance decision making. The diversity and quality of data collected provides key intuition that drives effective decisions on complicated topics. Online condition monitoring is used to reduce time based preventive maintenance and to enable predictive maintenance. Effective interpretation of data leads to information that plant operators can turn into decisions and actions that improve operations and maintenance activities. Data analytics is the primary technique used to facilitate effective data interpretation that will generate revolutionary results. The starting point is the data. Patterns in the data are noted and observed. The patterns observed while the plant is operating under preset conditions define process states. These patterns are mathematically manipulated to highlight changes when process changes are detected. The methods that detect state changes usually rely on correlation algorithms. Statistics are used to determine if the changes in the patterns are real or caused by plant noise and uncertainty levels. Integrated tools are used to implement algorithms that form the data analytics process and automate the decision making. Operations research is necessary to understand the operational context of the data. Machine learning algorithms provide dynamic mathematical means that can understand the present state and predict the next state with a degree of certainty. It is this prediction and the associated prediction certainty that allows plant operators to make effective decisions. This paper will discuss the approach to build a roadmap that will migrate data analytic techniques into production facilities.