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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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CFS working with NVIDIA, Siemens on SPARC digital twin
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a fusion firm headquartered in Devens, Mass., is collaborating with California-based computing infrastructure company NVIDIA and Germany-based technology conglomerate Siemens to develop a digital twin of its SPARC fusion machine. The cooperative work among the companies will focus on applying artificial intelligence and data- and project-management tools as the SPARC digital twin is developed.
G. Apostolakis, T. L. Chu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | August 1980 | Pages 5-15
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A17065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The reliability analysis of the engineered safety systems of nuclear power plants requires the calculation of the pointwise and average unavailabilities of redundant systems under periodic test and maintenance. The complexity of the calculations usually requires simulation for realistic results. However, simple analytical expressions showing the significant contributions to the unavailability provide insights concerning the relative importance of the potential failure modes of the systems, such as hardware failures, demand-type failures, human errors, and various types of dependent (common cause) failures. These expressions can be used for a quick calculation of the unavailability as well as the propagation of uncertainties by analytical methods, e.g., the method of moments.