• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제52권7호
• /
• pp.1436-1442
• /
• 2020

Nuclear infrastructure systems play an important role in national security. The functions and missions of nuclear infrastructure systems are vital to government, businesses, society and citizen's lives. It is crucial to design nuclear infrastructure for scalability, reliability and robustness. To do this, we can use machine learning, which is a state of the art technology used in various fields ranging from voice recognition, Internet of Things (IoT) device management and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose to design and develop a machine learning algorithm to perform predictive maintenance of nuclear infrastructure. Support vector machine and logistic regression algorithms will be used to perform the prediction. These machine learning techniques have been used to explore and compare rare events that could occur in nuclear infrastructure. As per our literature review, support vector machines provide better performance metrics. In this paper, we have performed parameter optimization for both algorithms mentioned. Existing research has been done in conditions with a great volume of data, but this paper presents a novel approach to correlate nuclear infrastructure data samples where the density of probability is very low. This paper also identifies the respective motivations and distinguishes between benefits and drawbacks of the selected machine learning algorithms.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제53권5호
• /
• pp.1705-1716
• /
• 2021

Bangladesh, as a newcomer country, is expecting to start her nuclear power journey by 2022. Due to evident reasons, newcomer nuclear countries face several key challenges concerning the development of national nuclear safety infrastructure. The paper investigates the status of the 7 key safety infrastructure issues out of the 19 and readiness of the supportive organizations, laboratories, and workforces following the International Atomic energy Agency's status evaluation guide at milestone 3 and foreign countries' practice. Much progress has been achieved at phase 3 regarding the establishments of a few Acts, a regulator, and an operator. However, comprehensive regulatory frameworks, skilled workforces, establishments of a few supportive organizations, and laboratories for managing environmental radioactivity, radiological accidents, and radioactive wastes are yet to ready. Several suggestions are made for establishing and expediting radiation monitoring laboratories, a radiological emergency management center, a radioactive waste management company, and technical support organizations for the safety infrastructure. To avoid perceived risks, policymakers and competent authorities need to emphasize creating an optimized safety infrastructure before commissioning and operating the 1^st nuclear power plant safely, securely, and cost-sustainably.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제51권6호
• /
• pp.1540-1553
• /
• 2019

A nuclear power plant (NPP) is a highly complex system-of-systems as manifested through its internal systems interdependence. The negative impact of such interdependence was demonstrated through the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. As such, there is a critical need for new strategies to overcome the limitations of current risk assessment techniques (e.g. the use of static event and fault tree schemes), particularly through simulation of the nonlinear dynamic feedback mechanisms between the different NPP systems/components. As the first and key step towards developing an integrated NPP dynamic probabilistic risk assessment platform that can account for such feedback mechanisms, the current study adopts a system dynamics simulation approach to model the thermal dynamic processes in: the reactor core; the secondary coolant system; and the pressurized water reactor. The reactor core and secondary coolant system parameters used to develop system dynamics models are based on those of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. These three system dynamics models are subsequently validated, using results from published work, under different system perturbations including the change in reactivity, the steam valve coefficient, the primary coolant flow, and others. Moving forward, the developed system dynamics models can be integrated with other interacting processes within a NPP to form the basis of a dynamic system-level (systemic) risk assessment tool.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제56권4호
• /
• pp.1267-1276
• /
• 2024

The emerging technologies at the industrial level have deployed rapidly within the energy transition process innovations. The nuclear industry incorporates several technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Digital Twins, High-Performance-Computing (HPC) and Quantum Computing (QC), among others. Factors identifications are explained to set up a regulatory framework in the digitalization era, providing new capabilities paths for nuclear technologies in the forthcoming years. The Analytical Network Process (ANP) integrates the quantitative-qualitative decision-making analysis to assess the implementation of different aspects in the digital transformation for the New-Energy Transition Era (NETE) with a Nuclear Power Infrastructure Development (NPID).

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제48권4호
• /
• pp.965-974
• /
• 2016

The article describes the results of experiments conducted on pigs to determine the effect of plutonium, which is the most radiotoxic and highly active element in the range of mixed fuel $(U_{0.8}Pu_{0.2})O_2$ fission products, on living organisms. The results will allow empirical prediction of the emergency plutonium radiation dose for various organs and tissues of humans in case of an accident in a reactor running on mixed fuel $(U_{0.8}Pu_{0.2})O_2$.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제56권3호
• /
• pp.855-865
• /
• 2024

Commercial deployment of nuclear microreactors presents an opportunity for the industry to rethink its approach to manufacturing, siting, operation and maintenance, and fuel cycle management as certain principles used in grid-scale nuclear projects are not applicable to a decentralized microreactor economy. The success of this nascent industry is dependent on its ability to reduce infrastructure, logistical, regulatory and lifecycle costs. A utility-like 'Central Facility' that consolidates the services required and responsibilities borne by vendors into one or a few centralized locations will be necessary to support the deployment of a fleet of microreactors. This paper discusses the requirements for a Central Facility, its implications on the cost structures of owners and suppliers of microreactors, and the impact of the facility for the broader microreactor industry. In addition, this paper discusses the pre-requisites for eligibility as well as the opportunities for a Central Facility host site. While there are many suitable locations for such a capability across the U.S., this paper considers a facility co-located with the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant and Savannah River Sites to illustrate how a Central Facility can leverage the existing infrastructure and stimulate a local ecosystem.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• 제10권2호
• /
• pp.857-880
• /
• 2016

Due to an increasing number of cyberattacks globally, cybersecurity has become a crucial part of national security in many countries. In particular, the Digital Pearl Harbor has become a real and aggressive security threat, and is considered to be a global issue that can introduce instability to the dynamics of international security. Against this context, the cyberattacks that targeted nuclear power plants (NPPs) in the Republic of Korea triggered concerns regarding the potential effects of cyber terror on critical infrastructure protection (CIP), making it a new security threat to society. Thus, in an attempt to establish measures that strengthen CIP from a cybersecurity perspective, we perform a case study on the cyber-terror attacks that targeted the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd. In order to fully appreciate the actual effects of cyber threats on critical infrastructure (CI), and to determine the challenges faced when responding to these threats, we examine factual relationships between the cyberattacks and their responses, and we perform analyses of the characteristics of the cyberattack under consideration. Moreover, we examine the significance of the event considering international norms, while applying the Tallinn Manual. Based on our analyses, we discuss implications for the cybersecurity of CI in South Korea, after which we propose a framework for strengthening cybersecurity in order to protect CI. Then, we discuss the direction of national policies.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제56권3호
• /
• pp.966-972
• /
• 2024

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) announced at COP27 it would reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2031. As a Nuclear, Energy and Environment, and National Homeland Security laboratory, the predominant solution to closing the clean energy gap will include nuclear as a safe, clean, reliable and affordable electricity source with the additional benefit of producing heat and hydrogen to fuel INL's large transportation fleet. INL's collaboration first vs. competition is essential to the program's success. The focused actions in INL's Nuclear Roadmap include: Infrastructure, Licensing/Regulatory, Financial, Time to Market, Fuel Cycle and Public Confidence/Communications. The roadmap also includes nuclear technology innovations and creative partnerships with utility providers, regulators, businesses, community members, and Indigenous Peoples to accelerate deployment of advanced reactors. Through development of the Net-Zero Nuclear Roadmap, INL will offer a model to provide safe and secure energy for the nation and the world by: (1) establishing the necessary infrastructure on its 890-square mile site to support demonstration, (2) showing proven pathways through the licensing and regulation process, (3) partnering with utilities to ensure commercial application, and (4) collaborating with industry to site new technologies.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제46권5호
• /
• pp.667-674
• /
• 2014

One of the largest problems for tokamak devices such as Kazakhstan Tokamak for Material Testing (KTM) is the operation scenarios' development and execution. Operation scenarios may be varied often, so a convenient hardware and software solution is required for scenario management and execution. Dozens of diagnostic and control subsystems with numerous configuration settings may be used in an experiment, so it is required to automate the subsystem configuration process to coordinate changes of the related settings and to prevent errors. Most of the diagnostic and control subsystems software at KTM was unified using an extra software layer, describing the hardware abstraction interface. The experiment sequence was described using a command language. The whole infrastructure was brought together by a universal communication protocol supporting various media, including Ethernet and serial links. The operation sequence execution infrastructure was used at KTM to carry out plasma experiments.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제54권1호
• /
• pp.374-385
• /
• 2022

In order to investigate the application of 3D base-seismic isolation system in nuclear power plants (NPPs), comprehensive analysis of constitution and design theory for 3-dimensional combined isolation bearing (3D-CIB) was presented and derived. Four different vertical stiffness of 3D-CIB was designed to isolate the nuclear island (NI) building. This paper aimed at investigating the isolation effectiveness of 3D-CIB through modal analysis and dynamic time-history analysis. Numerical results in terms of dynamic response of 3D-CIB, relative displacement response, acceleration and floor response spectra (FRS) of the superstructure were compared to validate the reliability of 3D-CIB in mitigating seismic response. The results showed that 3D-CIB can significantly attenuate the horizontal acceleration response, and a fair amount of the vertical acceleration response reduction of the upper structure was still observed. 3D-CIB plays a significant role in reducing the horizontal and vertical FRS, the vertical FRS basically do not vary with the floor height. The smaller the vertical stiffness of 3D-CIB is, the better the vertical isolation effectiveness is, whereas, it will increase the displacement and the rocking effect of superstructure. Although the advantage of 3D-CIB is that the vertical stiffness can be flexibly adjusted, it should be designed by properly accounting for the balance between the isolation effectiveness and displacement control including rocking effect. The results of this study can provide the technical basis and guidance for the application of 3D-CIB to engineering structure.