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Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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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Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Dai Xinyu, Yang Ming, Wang Jipu, Li Wei, Xu Zhihui
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 730-744
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2155023
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Human error is still one of the main factors threatening the safe operation of nuclear power plants. In view of the deviation of operators’ actions from operating procedures and the impact of implementation of operating procedures on safety functions, this paper proposes the Operating Procedures Supervision System (OPSS). The OPSS monitors operators’ performance deviating from operating procedures, determines the operation state of a nuclear power plant according to realization of the three key safety functions of the plant (reactivity control, radioactivity containment, and residual heat removal), and evaluates the impact of the implementation of operating procedures on the safety state. Although the OPSS supports both off-line and online applications, this paper presents only an example of off-line evaluation to illustrate the method. On this basis, the paper proposes a risk matrix to comprehensively weigh operator action deviation and the impact of operator actions on plant safety functions, which can more finely perceive the changes of system safety status and of operator performance.