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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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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.
Y. A. Chao, P. Huang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 103 | Number 4 | December 1989 | Pages 415-419
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE89-A23693
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A superfast, multidimensional, and compact pressurized water reactor nodal code, SUPERNOVA (SPNOVA), which is much faster than conventional nodal codes and is very accurate, has been developed at Westinghouse Electric Corporation. A kinetics version of this code, SPNOVA-K, is now developed for applications to three-dimensional core kinetics analysis. The theory involved in the kinetics generalization of SPNOVA is discussed and the performance of SPNOVA-K is described. SPNOVA-K adopts the stiffness confinement method of time variable discretization. This method can provide a very stable solution against the size of the discrete time step, allowing much larger step sizes to be used.