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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!
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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.
Joseph Cochran, Subhash C. Sarin, Nathan Lau, (Virginia Tech)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1672-1690
A Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) outage is a planned period of time during which the plant does not produce energy and undergoes offline refueling and maintenance. For a commercial power plant, an outage window could last up to two months during which thousands of activities are performed. These activities are related by precedence thereby constituting an activity network. A team of planners/schedulers develops an outage schedule at least a year in advance of the execution of an outage. A significant loss of revenue incurs for every extra outage day beyond the planned period. The four scheduling problems that are typically faced in outage scheduling and planning include: (1) selection of outage window for a collection of NPPs, (2) generation of a feasible initial outage schedule, (3) updating the outage schedule when unplanned activities arise, and (4) measuring the risk of a given outage schedule. In this paper, we present approaches for each of these problems as well as highlight the areas for potential future research. Outage activity networks with both deterministic and stochastic durations are considered.