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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Dong Hoon Kim, Gwang Seop Son, Choul Woong Son, Dong Young Lee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 189 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 87-102
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-142
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the architecture of the reactor protection system (RPS) in a nuclear integrated safety system (NISS) and describes the evaluation and analysis of reliability for NISS-RPS using the Markov model. NISS-RPS has four-channel redundancy like existing digital RPSs. However, a channel is configured based on triple modular redundancy and can be reconfigured on detecting faults. To analyze and evaluate the reliability of NISS-RPS, the Markov model for NISS-RPS and RPSs that are in operation or under construction in Korea were developed. Their reliability was evaluated and analyzed using the models. From the reliability analyses for NISS-RPS, it was observed that the failure rate of each module in NISS-RPS should be <2 × 10−5/hour, and the mean time to failure (MTTF) is ∼20 000 hours, which is two times better than the MTTF requirement of 10 000 hours. The MTTF average increase rate, which depends on the fault coverage factor (FCF) increment, ΔMTTF/ΔFCF, is 1850 hours/0.1. The results of comparison with other RPSs show that the reliability of NISS-RPS is at least 1.5 times better than that of the other three types of RPS architecture, and the MTTF is at least 14 months longer than that of the other types.
