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Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
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.
