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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
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Latest News
First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
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.
