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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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NN Asks: What did you learn from ANS’s Nuclear 101?
Mike Harkin
When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.
The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.
We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.
B. D. Shumaker, H. M. Hashemian (AMS)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 941-946
Online monitoring (OLM) technologies have been developed and validated for a variety of applications in nuclear power plants including optimizing maintenance of instrumentation and controls (I&C) systems, detection of process anomalies such as blockages, leaks, voids, flow anomalies, excessive vibration, overheating, and equipment or process deviations from normal behavior. For example, the Sizewell B nuclear power plant (NPP), a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor (PWR) in the United Kingdom (U.K.), implemented OLM for transmitter calibration verification and has been using it effectively for over a decade. With the help of OLM technologies, today Sizewell B is calibrating only those transmitters that are found by OLM to drift beyond acceptable limits plus one transmitter from each redundant set to account for any systematic drift. Since the late 1990’s, several industry organizations, academic institutions, national laboratories, vendors, and others have worked on the application of OLM technologies to extend transmitter calibration intervals in NPPs in the U.S. In fact, in 2000, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a Safety Evaluation Report (SER) authorizing the use of OLM for transmitter calibration extensions subject to 14 stipulations. However, since that time, no U.S. utility has implemented OLM for transmitter calibration interval extension presumably because the industry found a few of the NRC’s stipulations in the SER to be too restrictive and cost prohibitive to resolve. Today, it has been over 18 years from when the NRC issued the SER and much has happened since then including: 1) successful OLM implementation at Sizewell B with approval of U.K. regulators, 2) OLM implementation at over ten U.S. PWRs on a demonstration basis, 3) continued research by the nuclear industry and academia to address essentially all technical questions and regulatory concerns, 4) Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) work showing the very low risk of extending transmitter calibration intervals, and 5) additional operating experiences (OEs) demonstrating that the current generation of nuclear grade pressure, level, and flow transmitters do not normally drift enough to need a calibration at each refueling outage. These developments have provided sufficient evidence to propel OLM for ready implementation in nuclear power plants and have provided answers to many of the 14 NRC stipulations in the SER. As such, OLM is ready for implementation in U.S. nuclear power plants provided that the NRC can be convinced of its validity, reliability, and safety. This paper provides details of a project conducted by the authors under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to work with the NRC to document the technical foundation and address the regulatory issues for implementation of OLM to extend the calibration intervals of pressure, level, and flow transmitters in NPPs. The product of this project will be a report to be used by the nuclear industry for guidance on OLM implementation that can satisfy the NRC. As importantly, the product of this work will provide the NRC with the information and data that it needs to review plant applications for OLM implementations.
