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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Josh Peterson, Bret van den Akker, Riley Cumberland, Paul Miller, Kaushik Banerjee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 199 | Number 3 | September 2017 | Pages 310-319
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1318595
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy is sponsoring development of a database to store information related to spent nuclear fuel (SNF) in support of its Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition efforts. This database, referred to as the Unified Database (UDB), is part of a larger engineering analysis tool, the Used Nuclear Fuel Storage, Transportation & Disposal Analysis Resource and Data System (UNF-ST&DARDS). The UDB provides a comprehensive, controlled source of SNF information, including dry cask attributes, assembly data, economic attributes, transportation infrastructure attributes, potential future facility attributes, and federal government radioactive waste attributes. There are a number of existing and envisioned data reports that can be expected to use data stored within the UDB; however, previously, there was not a streamlined method to couple the database to such data reports. Therefore, to streamline the creation of these reports, two methods were developed to generate documents from information in the database automatically. The first method used Java and LaTeX for automatically generating the report, and the second method used the Python programming language along with Sphinx, a Python documentation generator. There are some advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but both methods produced equally high-quality, automatically generated reports that were directly coupled to the database. This paper describes data currently available in the UDB; explains the two different methods for automatically generating reports from these data; and shows examples of inline text, figures, and tables automatically generated using both approaches.