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Conference 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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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Workshop
Thursday, April 8, 2021|11:45AM–1:00PM EDT
Session Chair:
Mihai A. Diaconeasa
Alternate Chair:
Arjun Earthperson (NC State Univ.)
Session Organizer:
Edward Chen (NC State Univ.)
Track Organizer:
Session Producers:
Alp Tezbasaran (NCSU)
How safe is safe enough? Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), also called Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA), has been very effective in supporting better decisions on how to manage safety by making the risks involved, the contributors, and the options for controlling the risk transparent; and, quantifying the uncertainties, the primary contributor to rare event risk. Moreover, a new generation of methodologies, often referred to as Dynamic PRA (DPRA) or simulation-based PRA, is starting to receive attention for nuclear reactor PRA. These methodologies explicitly account for the time element in the probabilistic system evolution, quantify the effects of phenomenological variability and uncertainties, and are driven by plant analysis tools (e.g., RELAP, MAAP5) to model possible dependencies among failure events that may arise from hardware/software/human interactions. They have shown great promise in reducing user-to-user analysis variability, modeling passive safety systems, aging effects, and human performance. This workshop will cover the principles of PRA, hands-on examples, as well as brief reviews of recent developments in simulation-based PRA methodologies.
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