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Division Spotlight
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.
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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February 2025
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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.
Sang Hun Lee, Hyun Gook Kang (RPI), Seung Jun Lee (UNIST), Sung Min Shin (KAERI), Eunchan Lee (Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd.)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 803-812
An issue on incorporating the software reliability within the NPP PRA model has been emerged in the licensing processes of digitalized NPPs. Since software failure induces CCFs of the processor modules, the reliability of the software used in NPP safety-critical I&C systems must be quantified and verified with proper test cases and environment. In order to prove the software to be error-free or have very low failure probability, an exhaustive testing of software is required. In this study, a software testing method based on the MCS-based exhaustive test case generation scheme combined with the simulation-based test-bed is proposed. The software test-bed was developed by emulating the microprocessor architecture of PLC used in NPP safety-critical applications and capturing its behavior at each machine instruction. For the test case generation, the software logic model was developed from the formal definition of FBD/LD and the sets of MCSs which represent the necessary and sufficient conditions for the software variables’ states to produce safety software output were generated. The MCSs were then converted into the test sets which are used as inputs to test-bed to verify that the test cases produce correct output after software execution. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with the safety-critical trip logic software of IDiPS-RPS, a fully digitalized reactor protection system. The method provides a systematic way to conduct software exhaustive testing while effectively reducing the software testing effort by emulating PLC behavior in machine-level compared to existing software testing methods.