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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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NN Asks: What did you learn from ANS’s Nuclear 101?
Mike Harkin
When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.
The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.
We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.
Junyung Kim, Inseop Jeon, Sanghun Lee, Hyun Gook Kang (RPI)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 10-23
It has been a challenge in dynamic probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) world that a large number of scenarios from one initiating event with time-related scenario evolutions give complexness on an understanding of the transient/accident scenarios. The understanding of risk which enhances the safety of the entire system requires not only the full understandings of scenario evolutions but also the key characteristics of the events: Both success events and failed events. Since the time evolution is now in consideration of the plant risk assessment, a lot of difficulties such as organizing such large amounts of information and interpreting its physical meaning should be properly resolved. Clustering analysis, one of the unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques, has been discussed in years to group scenarios with similar characteristics and to identify key patterns of each group so that an analyst can understand entire scenario behaviors by groups. Here we propose a novel methodology of identifying key patterns of scenarios in an accident case of a nuclear power plant system with dynamic reliability analysis. In clustering analysis four items need to be considered: 1Clustering algorithm, 2distance matrix, 3variables in clustering algorithm, and 4cluster validity evaluation. In this paper, partition around medoids (PAM) clustering algorithm with global alignment (GA) kernel distance is utilized. GA kernel, which is considered suitable for clustering time series data, is to assess the similarity between time series data by casting the dynamic time warping (DTW) distances and similarities as positive definite kernels. In order to find variables which will be embedded in the clustering algorithm, multilevel flow model (MFM) methodology is leveraged. For a case study, dynamic PRA tool, MOSAIQUE (Module for SAmpling Input and QUantifying Estimator) coupled with a RELAP-5 generates 2,500 scenarios of SBLOCA. Advanced power reactor 1400 MWe (APR- 1400) is used as a reference plant model. The proposed classification and identification approach has grouped the 8000 scenarios with only 77 clusters and the result can show key patterns shown in core damaged and safe cases which static PRA may not present.