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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
Vogtle-3 shuts down for valve issue
One of the new Vogtle units in Georgia was shut down unexpectedly on Monday last week for a valve issue that has since been investigated and repaired. According to multiple local news outlets, Georgia Power reported on July 17 that Unit 3 was back in service.
Southern Company spokesperson Jacob Hawkins confirmed that Vogtle-3 went off line at 9:25 p.m. local time on July 8 “due to lowering water levels in the steam generators caused by a valve issue on one of the three main feedwater pumps.”
Luciano Burgazzi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 3 | September 2009 | Pages 339-347
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9074
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper focuses on the assessment of the hazards and safety critical areas and equipment related to the integral circulation experiments to be conducted on a molten lead-bismuth-eutectic-alloy facility, the CIRCulation Experiment (CIRCE) facility in Brasimone, Italy, for heavy-liquid-metal technology development. A well-structured failure mode and effect analysis procedure, customary in risk assessment studies, has been adopted to address the task, in order to obtain a complete picture of all the failure modes pertaining to the system, to determine its effects on the system and to classify them according to their severity.The analysis identified a major hazard relative to the facility in the experimental configuration to be the risk related to the water-lead-bismuth reaction, although with a very low probability, with the potential for steam explosion within the main vessel. This conclusion necessitates additional research on the concerned phenomena, both at the experimental and analytical levels, the results of which should help analysts quantify the risk and designers take the necessary provisions to cope with this risk.The analysis provides a set of accident initiators, that is, events postulated to initiate an accident situation, together with the total frequency and the list of component failures that could induce it. For any of them a deterministic analysis is suggested in order to verify the plant behavior with respect to accident transients, in terms of the parameters that can have an impact on accident analysis and modeling.