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The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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2027 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
October 31–November 4, 2027
Washington, DC|The Westin Washington, DC Downtown
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Disney World should have gone nuclear
There is extra significance to the American Nuclear Society holding its annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, this past week. That’s because in 1967, the state of Florida passed a law allowing Disney World to build a nuclear power plant.
Hanna Koskinen, Jari Laarni, Marja Liinasuo (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland), Leena Salo (Fortum Power and Heat Oy)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 488-498
We present an application of Systems Usability Case (SUC) as an overall human factors validation approach in a nuclear power plant control room modernization project. SUC enables a requirement-based human factors evaluation of complex technical systems that may cover the entire verification and validation process. The SUC is based on the Safety Case approach and on the Systems Usability construct. One of the main aims of establishing a Safety Case is to bring to the front the arguments and evidence for safety in such a way that the reasoning supports the work of a regulator or licensing organization. In the end, the SUC enables evaluating the Systems Usability of a system and making a reasonable solid argument about the acceptance of the system for use. The question is how the conclusions are reached through a reasoning process, in which the arguments are made about the evidence to approve or reject the claim concerning the quality of the system. The paper presents an application of the SUC to real data from an integrated system validation of the modernized main control room of Loviisa nuclear power plant. The results of the validation are discussed from the point of view of how the SUC approach enabled forming a statement about the acceptance of the control room. Moreover, some examples are given to demonstrate the learnings (e.g., strengths and weaknesses) as well as the development needs of the SUC approach.