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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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
El Salvador: Looking to nuclear
In 2022, El Salvador’s leadership decided to expand its modest, mostly hydro- and geothermal-based electricity system, which is supported by expensive imported natural gas and diesel generation. They chose to use advanced nuclear reactors, preferably fueled by thorium-based fuels, to power their civilian efforts. The choice of thorium was made to inform the world that the reactor program was for civilian purposes only, and so they chose a fuel that was plentiful, easy to source and work with, and not a proliferation risk.
Pegah Farshadmanesh, Tatsuya Sakurahara, Seyed Reihani, Ernie Kee, Zahra Mohaghegh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 3 | March 2019 | Pages 442-463
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1494439
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A major challenge facing the nuclear energy industry is to remain competitive under current market conditions. Utility operators are searching for innovative methods to reduce nuclear power plant (NPP) operation and maintenance costs while complying with safety and reliability requirements. To support these goals, the authors suggest a streamlined approach that implements a conservative risk-informed method to reduce the costs of satisfying emergent regulatory requirements. As a streamlined approach, the Risk-informed Over Deterministic (RoverD) method was developed by some of the authors of the current paper to resolve the concerns associated with Generic Safety Issue 191 (GSI-191). The RoverD method is designed around U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Regulatory Guide 1.174 (RG 1.174), which defines “risk-informed” regulation as comprising a blend of risk-based and deterministically based elements. This paper offers the Safety Hazard Analysis for earthquaKE (SHAKE)–RoverD (SHAKE-RoverD) methodology, an extension of the original RoverD methodology developed for GSI-191, to evaluate the impact of an increased seismic hazard on the performance of NPP protective systems. SHAKE-RoverD aims to reduce the cost required for developing, validating, and documenting detailed fragility curves in seismic probabilistic risk assessment by using deterministic fragility curves. The SHAKE-RoverD methodology assesses whether an increase in a seismic hazard would result in an unacceptable increase in NPP risk. If the conservative estimate of plant risk, computed by the streamlined approach, satisfies the regulatory acceptance criteria (e.g., Regulatory Guide 1.174), the plant likely would not need to make a design change (as long as defense in depth and adequate safety margin are satisfied); therefore, the use of streamlined methodology could lead to significant cost savings for the utility operator. Future work will advance SHAKE-RoverD and analyze risk management strategies based on this method.