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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
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Thomas A. Ulrich, Ronald L. Boring (INL), Roger Lew (Univ of Idaho)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1179-1188
To both maintain safety of nuclear plants and bolster economic competitiveness, it is crucial to understand how to optimize the control and monitoring tasks that nuclear operators perform in the main control room. The concept of a computerized operator support system (COSS) that monitors the plant, performs prognostic analysis to detect anomalies, and then alerts the operator to those anomalies, is one approach that provides promise for bolstering performance and ultimately allowing the operator to keep the plant running for maximum efficiency. The COSS concept leverages a number of technologies to realize these potential performance benefits including computer-based procedures (CBPs), prognostic algorithms, and the displays to convey the system states. The displays for a COSS are the focus of this paper. A prototype tool for building overview screens was developed and evaluated to advance COSS capabilities beyond static displays. The tool is called the Graphical Augmentation Interface for Yoked Overviews (GAIYO, after the Japanese word for “overview”), and is built on the Advanced Nuclear Interface Modeling Environment (ANIME) framework. ANIME-GAIYO automatically generates overview screens that are linked to the CBP system, a type of task based display that tracks the current procedure step and aggregates the information from disparate board controls required for that procedure step into one convenient and easily monitored location. The CBP system dynamically updates the indicators presented for each step such that the operators can reliably reference it to quickly ascertain the plant status. It is purely informative and does not feature controls. Therefore, it represents a technology that could be more readily adopted than the full-fledged COSS concept, which would require a significant regulatory approval process. The evaluation is ongoing, but initial results suggest the tool is advantageous as an operator aid. In particular, the tool provides a strong benefit to allow operators to quickly identify the state of the plant for the current procedure step and then drill down into the control boards with good situation awareness to verify the state based on their initial estimate. Ultimately, this tool provides additional evidence for pursuing the COSS concept and realizing the benefits of a system on operator performance.
