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Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Latest News
First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
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.