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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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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Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
Qingmin Zhang, Zhigang Hu, Bangjie Deng, Mengxuan Xu, Yuhang Guo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 3 | June 2017 | Pages 293-302
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1273619
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The self-powered neutron detector (SPND) is popularly used as an in-core neutron flux monitor in reactors due to its simple structure, self-powered feature. However, its response delay needs compensation to obtain the actual real-time neutron flux for reactor control and protection. In this paper, a simple iterative method for compensating SPND response delay is proposed as well as noise filtering. Two favorable noise filtering methods were compared, and then, the moving average filter was chosen. The governing differential equations were established according to decay mechanism, and then, iterative compensation relations for delay compensation were established by discretization with simplicity and flexibility. The test result shows that the compensated response delay for a prompt jump of neutron flux is only 0.9 s, indicating its effectiveness. Furthermore, the dependence on initial conditions and sampling time interval was also studied, indicating that two initial condition determination modes for two typical detector start-up situations can be chosen correspondingly for delay minimization and critical sampling with a time interval of about 0.7 s, which shows consistency with the Von Neumann stability analysis. Finally, our method has been compared with the Z-transform method and verified with measured current, which showed its better performance.