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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.
C. Kovesdi, J. Clark (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1631-1643
In the United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Plant Modernization pathway, the role of human factors engineering (HFE) continues to have an integral role in ensuring new advanced digital technologies that are part of the overall plant modernization strategy support optimized human-system performance and do not introduce new human failure modes. Regulatory guidance highlights human-system performance is a complex and multifaceted construct that requires a hierarchical set of measures including aspects of workload, situation awareness (SA), and task performance. Since workload, SA, and task difficulty are not directly observable, an accepted practice is to use subjective measures such as survey instrumentations. However, the time allotted for survey administration and post-scenario discussion during HFE activities can be significantly limited depending on operator availability and/or simulator availability. This paper explores the psychometrics of common survey instruments that measure workload, SA, and perceived task difficulty in nuclear power plant operator-in-the-loop studies with a goal of informing development of a consolidated survey instrument to reduce administration time. A set of exploratory analyses uncovered two principal components from the individual items combined from these surveys. A prototype survey instrument was thus developed as an early concept to illustrate how these two principals components could be expanded into a survey tool with fewer questions. A detailed discussion of the exploratory analyses and new prototype survey are discussed in this paper.