ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2025
Nuclear Technology
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Latest News
“Summer time” again? Santee Cooper thinks so
South Carolina public utility Santee Cooper and its partner South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) called a halt to the Summer-2 and -3 AP1000 construction project in July 2017, citing costly delays and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse. The well-chronicled legal fallout included indictments and settlements, and ultimately left Santee Cooper with the ownership of nonnuclear assets at the construction site in Jenkinsville, S.C.
Hyeonmin Kim, Seo-Ryong Koo, Geon-Pil Choi, Jung Taek Kim (KAERI)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 563-572
There are five operating modes of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs): refueling, startup, low power, normal power, and shutdown. In these operating modes, the startup and the shutdown operating modes of NPPs are completely manually operated. From the Operational Performance Information System (OPIS) for NPPs, which is the overall database for controlling safety performance, human error under startup and shutdown was found to be 9% during last 20 years in South Korea. For reducing the operator’s load from the startup and shutdown operations of existing NPPs, it is necessary to develop an operator support system based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recently, AI technology has facilitated a breakthrough by accumulating data, advanced algorithms, and growing computing power. Among these factors, the key technology of the breakthrough is deep learning that leads current AI technology. In many technical fields, the development of automation and autonomous systems has been studied by using deep learning. Therefore, in this study, an automation system for the startup and shutdown in NPPs develop using deep learning. The automation system is based on an expert system due to characteristics of the startup and shutdown operating modes, and a variety of operating controls depending on each operator are simulated by deep learning. A feasibility study is conducted by using the Compact Nuclear Simulator (CNS) that is a simulator based on Westinghouse 3-loop NPPs. The target scenario for the feasibility study is bubble creation in a pressurizer under startup. In addition, a selected deep-learning algorithm is a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), which is a robust method for time series analysis.