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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Xiaoxu Diao, Yunfei Zhao, Mike Pietrykowski, Zhuoer Wang, Shannon Bragg-Sitton, Carol Smidts
Nuclear Technology | Volume 202 | Number 2 | May-June 2018 | Pages 106-123
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1426963
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper studies the propagation and effects of faults in critical components that pertain to the secondary loop of a nuclear power plant found in nuclear hybrid energy systems (NHESs). This information is used to design an online monitoring (OLM) system that is capable of detecting and analyzing faults that are likely to occur during NHES operation. In this research, the causes, features, and effects of possible faults are investigated by simulating the propagation of faults in the secondary loop of a nuclear power plant. The simulation is conducted using Integrated System Failure Analysis (ISFA), a promising method analyzing hardware and software faults during the conceptual design phase. First, the models of system components required by ISFA are constructed. Then, fault propagation analysis is implemented, which is conducted under the bounds set by acceptance criteria derived for the design of an OLM system. The result of the fault simulation is utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of signals for fault detection and diagnosis and to propose an optimization plan for the OLM system. Finally, several experiments are designed and conducted using a hardware-in-the-loop system to verify the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method.