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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
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Salvatore Massaiu, Alexandra Fernandes (IFE), invited
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 122-131
The increasing digitalization of nuclear power plants’ main control rooms questions the validity of Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) estimates for tasks that were formerly performed by acquiring information on analog panels. This paper presents a re-analysis of two experiments conducted at the Halden Reactor Project that employed the micro-task method for comparing different types of digital and analogue displays. The experiments were conducted with licensed operators at a U.S. power plant training simulator and at the HAMMLAB research simulator in Norway. In the re-analysis the tasks are classified according to two HRA reference sources for human error probabilities, THERP and KAERIs’ HuREX, in order to assess (a) the operators’ reliability on identification tasks, and (b) the impact of the HSI type (digital displays vs. analogue panels). The results show that error-rates for decontextualized micro-tasks are much higher than HRA estimates for the corresponding tasks in average industrial conditions. The advantage of the analog panels over the digital displays was small and not statistically significant, despite the experimental set-up that benefitted the familiar panels. Error rate differences between task types are larger than the differences attributable to the HSI type. Finally, the observed error rates relative differences across tasks are fairly consistent with THERP reference values but not with KAERIs. The results stress the importance of task modelling above HSI concerns, and the risk of overestimating the reliability of apparently easy tasks.