ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
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
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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February 2025
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Latest News
“Summer time” again? Santee Cooper thinks so
South Carolina public utility Santee Cooper and its partner South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) called a halt to the Summer-2 and -3 AP1000 construction project in July 2017, citing costly delays and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse. The well-chronicled legal fallout included indictments and settlements, and ultimately left Santee Cooper with the ownership of nonnuclear assets at the construction site in Jenkinsville, S.C.
Michael Thompson (Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville), Benjamin Jordan (Centrus Energy), Jamie Coble (Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1267-1274
Greater situational awareness of plant conditions is necessary to move the current fleet of nuclear power facilities away from costly periodic maintenance activities. Sensed data provide the indicators of plant and equipment condition; however, these instrumentation and transmitters are themselves subject to aging and degradation over time. Online monitoring methods have long been proposed to assess the calibration status of sensors based on the data collected during normal plant operation. Auto-associative kernel regression models (AAKR) are commonly applied to predict the “expected” sensor value, and statistical hypothesis tests or thresholding algorithms are used to determine if the measured value agrees with the expectation. AAKR models work well for stationary operation of systems, but these models may not be as well suited for systems that undergo normal operational transients, as we expect to see in small modular reactors, advanced reactors, and many fuel cycle facilities. This paper presents an alternative approach to detection and diagnostics of sensor degradation and anomalies based on generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) in computational linear algebra. The proposed method is demonstrated on experimental data collected on a two loop forced-flow water loop, but the approach is expected to be more generally applicable to a variety of nuclear facilities and to equipment and components beyond sensor suites.