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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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NN Asks: What did you learn from ANS’s Nuclear 101?
Mike Harkin
When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.
The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.
We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.
Pedro Trueba-Alonso, Cristina Corrales-Quirós, Julio Méndez-Salguero (Tecnatom S.A.)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1755-1768
The design and construction new Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) as well as their modifications need to address Human Factors Engineering (HFE) considerations, coming as a requirement from nuclear regulatory bodies. For new plants in the United States (US), HFE considerations must be addressed as part of Chapter 18 of any plant Safety Analysis Report, following guidance coming from regulatory guide RG 1.206, NUREG-0800 and NUREG-0711 [Ref. 1], the latter with the deepest level of detail for each of the activities described The afore mentioned HFE regulations have been developed for application in the US plants, but many other nuclear regulatory bodies in the world endorse these US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulations, as for now they provide the most detailed guidance in this field, compared to other Nuclear Standards associated to HFE. Element 10 of NUREG-0711 [Ref. 1], addresses the HFE Verification and Validation (V&V) activities with the objective to comprehensively determine that the HFE design conforms to HFE design principles and that it enables plant personnel to successfully perform their tasks for assuring plant safety and operational goals. One of the main activities of this Element is Integrated System Validation, for determining if an integrated system’s design (i.e., hardware, software, and personnel elements) meet plant operation objectives, performance requirements, supporting safe plant operation. This paper shows the experience and lessons learned by Tecnatom in the development of new NPP control rooms and design modifications in existing control rooms, always in relation to HFE, and focusing in multistage Validation approaches. In Tecnatom’s experience, the use of multistage validations is the most effective way to ensure that the final product meets the HFE requirements. The paper will include examples and lessons learned in new design and modification projects completed by Tecnatom. The paper ends summarizing: 1. The benefits obtained from the executions of a multistage validation approach. 2. The need to develop guidance related to this approach. The description of benefits and needs has always the objective of facilitate future execution of projects in new builds or design modifications, where HFE can contribute to obtain the best results, products and designs, from a technical and economical viewpoint.
