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
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Jul 2024
Jan 2024
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Vogtle-3 shuts down for valve issue
One of the new Vogtle units in Georgia was shut down unexpectedly on Monday last week for a valve issue that has since been investigated and repaired. According to multiple local news outlets, Georgia Power reported on July 17 that Unit 3 was back in service.
Southern Company spokesperson Jacob Hawkins confirmed that Vogtle-3 went off line at 9:25 p.m. local time on July 8 “due to lowering water levels in the steam generators caused by a valve issue on one of the three main feedwater pumps.”
Glenn T. Gobbel, Ruth M. Reeves (Vanderbilt Univ), Shawn St. Germain (INL), Mark Pierson, Nathan Lau (Virginia Tech)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1558-1567
Comprehending and assessing the vast amount of information within technical specifications, procedure manuals, and work orders associated with nuclear power plants is challenging. The demands associated with this task are particularly evident during power plant outages, which create a pressing need for quickly and effectively identifying the right information at the right time for making the right decision. Text mining methods that use natural language processing (NLP) approaches to automatically extract and store document information might assist managers of power plant outages by reducing the cognitive load. NLP can parse unstructured text in documents and convert it into structured form for storage of conceptual information and relationships. We are exploring the feasibility of using NLP for helping in outage management. As a proof-of-principle, we are designing an NLP tool to identify constraints in the configuration of components during the procedure used to test a low-pressure safety injection (LPSI) pump. The NLP tool is extracting action verbs that represent instructions for changing the state of power plant components. The extracted information will form the analytical backend for determining whether proposed changes in configuration lead to constraint violations, which will be displayed via a graphical user interface.