Threatens Patient Care I n what members of the nuclear medicine community referred to as a ‘‘devastating’’ and ‘‘catastrophic’’ series of events, the Canadian supplier of more than 50% of the world’s marketed radioisotopes shut down its reactor in late November. The result was an immediate shortage of 99mTc generators that forced a scramble for alternative suppliers and drastic reductions in th...

The deployment of advanced reactors of the type proposed for Generation IV will require a new strategy for licensing and demonstration. One of the requirements for NRC certification is that for technologies, for which there is not a regulatory history or an experience base, demonstration plants are a requirement. The current regulatory process as codified 10 CFR Parts 50, 51 and 52 has to be me...

Supercritical water oxidation has attracted attention of many researchers ever since the ideahas emerged about three decades ago as a promising technique in the waste managementindustry. Providing more details about the behavior of a supercritical water oxidation systemunder various operating conditions and extending available data can greatly assist more accurateand reliable design of such sys...

Software safety [1] is an important issue for embedded real-time control systems such as those found in nuclear power plants. When verifying safety-critical software, formal methods [2] play critical roles in demonstrating compliance to regulatory requirements. The Korea Nuclear Instrumentation & Control System R&D Center (KNICS) [3] project used the NuSCR [4] formal specification language and ...

Probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) is the most effective and efficient tool for safety and risk management in nuclear power plants (NPP). PSA studies not only evaluate risk/safety of systems but also their results are very useful in safe, economical and effective design and operation of NPPs. The latter application is popularly known as ‘‘Risk-Informed Decision Making’’. Evaluation of techni...

As programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are often used to implement safety–critical embedded software, safety demonstration of PLC code is needed. In this paper, we propose a fault tree analysis technique on Function Block Diagrams (FBDs) which is one of the most widely used PLC programming languages. FBD is currently being used to develop Reactor Protection System (RPS) for a nuclear power pl...

Monju is Japan's prototype fast breeder reactor :280 MWe (714MWt), fueled with mixed oxides of plutonium and uranium, cooled by liquid sodium. Construction was started in 1985 and initial criticality was attained in April 1994 On 8th December 1995, sodium leakage from a secondary circuit occurred in a piping room of the reactor auxiliary building. The secondary sodium leaked through a temperatu...