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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
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Latest News
Vogtle-3 shuts down for valve issue
One of the new Vogtle units in Georgia was shut down unexpectedly on Monday last week for a valve issue that has since been investigated and repaired. According to multiple local news outlets, Georgia Power reported on July 17 that Unit 3 was back in service.
Southern Company spokesperson Jacob Hawkins confirmed that Vogtle-3 went off line at 9:25 p.m. local time on July 8 “due to lowering water levels in the steam generators caused by a valve issue on one of the three main feedwater pumps.”
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.