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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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Latest News
ARG-US Remote Monitoring Systems: Use Cases and Applications in Nuclear Facilities and During Transportation
As highlighted in the Spring 2024 issue of Radwaste Solutions, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are developing and deploying ARG-US—meaning “Watchful Guardian”—remote monitoring systems technologies to enhance the safety, security, and safeguards (3S) of packages of nuclear and other radioactive material during storage, transportation, and disposal.
Priscila Palma Sanchez, Adimir dos Santos
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 5 | May 2021 | Pages 555-562
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1854541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to ensure safety in a nuclear power plant, operation and protection systems must take into account safety parameters, whether to guide operators or to trip the reactor in emergency cases. Especially in a boron-free small modular reactor (SMR) where reactivity and power are controlled exclusively by rod banks, the power distribution is mostly influenced by its movements affecting the power peaking factor (PPF), which is an important parameter to be considered. The PPF relates the maximum local linear power density to the average power density in a fuel rod indicating a high neutron flux that can cause fuel rod damage. In this technical note, 2117 samples from simulations of an idealized boron-free SMR controlled exclusively by rod banks were used to generate a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model capable of estimating the PPF as a function of control rod bank positions. Such model could be used to predict the maximum PPF in the reactor core by carrying out simple calculation. Residing in a SVM parameter grid search and a 10-cross-validation process in the training set to reach an optimized and robust model, the results have shown a root-mean-squared error of about 0.1% consistent for both training and testing sets.