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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.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
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Latest News
NRC Hanson's renomination clears Senate committee
Hanson
The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 18–1 yesterday to advance the renomination of Christopher T. Hanson as a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Hanson has been a commissioner since 2020, and was named chair by President Biden in January 2021. The full U.S. Senate will consider Hanson’s nomination later this month.
Voices of support: “Chair Hanson is a dedicated public [servant] who has thoughtfully and . . . skillfully led the [NRC] during his tenure as its chair. Throughout his time on the[NRC], he has demonstrated his commitment to ensuring the safety and the security of our nation’s use of nuclear energy,” said EPW committee chair Tom Carper (D., Del.) before the vote.
Peiwei Sun, Jin Jiang, Kai Wang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 185 | Number 3 | March 2014 | Pages 239-258
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-130
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Canadian supercritical water-cooled reactor (SCWR) can be modeled as a multiple-input multiple-output system. It has a high power-to-flow ratio, strong cross coupling, and a high degree of nonlinearity in its dynamic characteristics. Because of the existence of strong cross coupling among system inputs and outputs, it is difficult for a traditional control system design methodology to produce a satisfactory control system. In this paper, the direct Nyquist array method is used first to decouple the system into a diagonally dominant form via a precompensator. After decoupling the system successfully, three single-input single-output dynamic compensators are synthesized in the frequency domain. By using the precompensator, the temperature variation because of disturbances at the reactor power and pressure is significantly reduced. The control system can effectively maintain the overall system stability and regulate the plant around a specified operating condition. To deal with the nonlinearities, a control strategy based on gain scheduling is adopted. Different sets of controllers are used for the plant at different load conditions. The proposed control strategies have been evaluated under various operating scenarios. The robustness of the controller with respect to operating condition changes is also investigated. It is shown that the decoupling control can effectively reduce the cross coupling inherent in the Canadian SCWR, and gain scheduling control can successfully achieve satisfactory performance for different operating conditions.