An Approach to Using Non Safety-Assured Programmable Components in Modest Integrity Systems

Progress in Nuclear Power Technologies and Implications for ASEAN

The rapid increase in computer-related technologies puts greater demands on the software-controlled systems. These demands place the software in total control over safety-critical systems. A fault in such a Safety-Critical Computer Systems (SCCS) can result in catastrophic concerns such as loss of life, harm, or equipment damage. In order to detect and prevent such faults, some safety standards, safety analysis and fault-tolerant techniques have been developed. Still, it requires adequate methodologies and frameworks to complete verification of these SCCS. In this work, the software safety is considered into 3 parts: Safety Modeling, Safety Measurement and Safety Management, with assurance lying down to develop high quality software for SCCS. The proposed methodology is SM-Cube (Safety Modeling, Safety Measurement and Safety Management) which is the Safety-Critical Computer Systems concerned. SM-Cube provides a clarified differentiation for assessing and evaluating the safety embedded into the software. SM-Cube consists of required processes and operations for developing SCCS free of faults. This proposed SM-cube has been applied to safety-critical software based Railroad Crossing Control System (RCCS) which is a laboratory prototype. The outcomes of the prototype confirmed that all critical operations have been safe and risk free. The development of the software based on the proposed SM-cube for RCCS have shown a simplified and improved safety-critical operations of the overall system performance

Fissile material of the right quality can be used to cause a nuclear explosion; the first application of nuclear technology in the early 1940s was to produce atomic bombs; the first nuclear programmes in UK, USA, USSR and France were started for military purposes; a nuclear research programme could provide access to materials, equipment and technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons. Yet there is no inevitable tie between a civil nuclear power station and a weapons programme. It is possible — and many countries have taken this step — to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes and to renounce all intention to develop nuclear weapons.

Safety-Critical Systems (SCSs) often manage sensible data that must be trustworthy, especially in many cases in which different actors participate whose interests may not coincide. Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has emerged to ensure the trustfulness of data. The nuclear industry incorporates many SCSs where blockchain can be applied. This paper focuses on the use of blockchain for the inspection of steam generators of a nuclear power plant. This is a critical process where different actors participate: plant property, external companies in charge of the inspection itself and different administrations. It typically consists of a number of processes that explore the state of different components of the plant in order to find any kind of failure or defect and it generates a great amount of data that must be verifiable and trustworthy. A distributed blockchain-based system is presented where all the nodes share the information and it cannot be altered. As a novelty, automatic inspection algorithms are stored in the blockchain itself by means of smart contracts. The benefits of blockchain are studied for the nuclear industry in general and for the inspection process in particular. In order to explore the possible drawbacks of a blockchain-based system for data management, a simulator has been implemented to recreate the scenario of an inspection. The results obtained show that blockchain architectures are a good alternative to traditional information repositories for nuclear power plant inspections.

Smart devices have been developed and widely used recently, so they have been applied in the industrial field. If mobile technology is applied to the CAD field, users will be able to obtain many advantages such as high mobility and ease of collaboration. To develop a feature-based CAD system that can be made available on smart devices, we suggested a system using multi-touch inputs in 2012; this was a stand-alone system available without a network. However, the system could not create complex shapes by itself because of the absence of a modeling kernel for the mobile platform and the low computing power of smart devices. To solve this problem of shape creation, this study proposes a client-server system for CAD systems on smart devices. When modeling commands are created from drag-type buttons, at each step, the analyzed modeling commands are sent to the server, the server creates the model and sends it to the smart device, and the smart device visualizes the modeling result. This system can make more complex models than those possible with the existing system. This study compares the developed system with the existing system in order to verify the usability of the new CAD system on smart devices; further, this study suggests how to extend this system to collaborative systems. This CAD system for smart devices can increase the mobility and cooperative nature of CAD systems.

A proposal to reduce DOE's advanced civilian reactor research and expand military work worries nuclear industry. The Reagan Administration has emphasized high-risk, long term research over applied research and demonstrations on the grounds that industry should be responsible for technology development. The proposed fiscal year 1987 budget for civilian reactor research is $222.5 million, a deep cut below this year's budget of $319.7 million. Funding for advanced reactor research and development alone shows a 61.5% reduction to $49.5 million. With this grim budget outlook, funding restorations may have to be gotten from other nuclear research programs.

With the popularization of mobile smart devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets), the number of mobile game players increases significantly. This makes mobile gaming industry rise and take up a large piece of global game market. Different from the traditional players playing games on their personal computers with wired local area network or Wi-Fi access, mobile game players nowadays play online games on their smart devices that communicate to cloud servers via wireless cellular networks. Therefore, the monetary cost for game content downloading and updating via cellular networks may increase the burden of gamers. Meanwhile, an unpredictable latency may be introduced by communication links of wireless cellular networks. This may negatively affect player's gaming experience. In fact, we can predict the next movement of the player in the game and preload the maps that have high probability to go. Meanwhile, if any of these maps have been downloaded and cached by other players nearby, with the Device-to-Device (D2D) communication networks, people may preload these maps freely. In this paper, we focus on the problem that how to select maps to preload from either game server or neighborhood with the consideration of limited storage space on smart devices. We first formulate an optimization problem. Since the formulated problem is NP-hard, we decouple the problem into two subproblems and solve them iteratively to get a suboptimal solution. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly increase the utility received by mobile players.

Assessment of physician’s knowledge, perception and willingness of telemedicine in Riyadh region, Saudi Arabia

Knowledge management is an area, which has received special attention in the nuclear industry especially in nuclear operating organizations but as well in organizations engaged in regulatory, research, and development activities. International organizations such as IAEA, NEA, and WANO have provided guidance and support to countries and organizations to implement knowledge management programs in nuclear activities. Asia is a region with sustained development and growth in implementing nuclear power programs. The rapid expansion of nuclear power programs in China, India, and Korea has demonstrated that skilled and experienced personnel may be in demand, especially when export of nuclear technology goes to new countries. Consequently, these countries experience substantial shortage of the skilled workforce. Other countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, who are considering nuclear power as an option for their national energy mix, need to develop solid national expertise to implement a successful nuclear power projects. At the same time, Japan will need special efforts to preserve its wide nuclear expertise in the times of a temporary stagnation in the nuclear industry. This chapter is an attempt to describe current and emerging trends in nuclear knowledge management, relevant to nuclear power in general, and focused on some examples and references, in particular, from Asian region.

Smart home technology is gaining popularity among end-users, as it allows them to remotely control a variety of devices in their homes. Such systems have obvious benefits in terms of automation, but at the same time pose significant threats to home owners if the underlying communications are not secure. To this end, we introduce a novel security protocol that simplifies the pairwise authentication and key exchange among smart home devices. The protocol leverages identity-based cryptography (IBC), thus relaxing the requirement for storing and managing public key certificates. Furthermore, to mitigate the risks associated with centralized key generation in IBC, we opt to generate the private keys in a distributed manner, involving all smart devices. We implemented our protocol on Raspberry Pi 3 devices and demonstrate its efficiency in terms of both computational and communication cost.

Copper pillar WLCSP device embedded in large PCB module with passive devices to create one hybrid package are growing widely in smart communication and mobile electronic devices. The crucial challenges in electrical testing and failure analysis on it are to remove the embedded copper pillar CSP device from the module without inducing mechanical defects, and solder ball placement on the CSP for ATE testing. This paper discusses the sample preparation process step-by-step, which includes de-soldering of external components from the PCB, top side up and down parallel polishing to remove copper pillars, chemical etching the PCB module, solder ball placement on CSP devices and the soldering process on a plain coupon board. The established process enables electrical testing, evaluations and failure analysis performed on a demounted CSP device. A simulation of an electrical testing and failure analysis will also be highlighted in this paper.

For safety critical complex systems, reliability and risk analysis are important design steps. Implementing these analyses early in the design stage can reduce costs associated with redesign and provide important information on design viability. In the past several years, various research methods have been presented in the design community to move reliability analysis into the early conceptual design stages. These methods all use a functional representation as the basis for reliability analysis. This paper asserts that, in non-nominal system states, the functional representation limits the scope of failure analysis. Specifically, when failures are modeled to propagate along energy, material, and signal (EMS) flows, a nominal-state functional model is insufficient for modeling all types of failures. To capture possible failure propagation paths, a function-based reliability method must consider all potential flows, and not be limited to the function structure of the nominal state. In this light, this paper introduces the Flow State Logic (FSL) method as a means for reasoning on the state of EMS flows that allows the assessment of failure propagation over potential flows that were not considered in a functional representation of a “nominally functioning” design. A liquid fueled rocket engine serves as a case study to illustrate the benefits of the methodology.

In 2023, a 54,000 m 3 large rock section failed catastrophically from the unstable rock slope Stampa (Western Norway). The failure occurred in a multistage process with two major failure events on July 1 st and 3 rd . In this study, we present a detailed analysis of the pre-failure displacement patterns, the failure mechanisms, and failure events. After exponential acceleration, the base (12,200 m 3 ) of the rock section failed, leading to a further destabilization of the remaining rock column (41,800 m 3 ), which failed 2 days later. The monitoring data includes in situ displacement sensors, a robotic total station, and close range and remote sensing data spanning over 14 years. The rock section showed seasonal displacement patterns clearly influenced by meteorological factors: (1) late spring (May–July) accelerations, controlled by positive temperatures, thawing ground, and meltwater infiltration, followed by (2) summer stabilizations characterized by low displacement, and (3) autumn (October–November) accelerations driven by precipitation events over a longer period, followed by (4) winter stabilizations approaching zero displacement. The deformation rates increased from 0.06 m a −1 in 1991–2019 more than a tenfold to 0.78 m a −1 in 2022 and indicate progressive damage and weakening of the rock section, which increased its sensitivity to rainfall and infiltration. Our findings highlight the importance of long-term, high-resolution monitoring using different, independent sensors, alongside detailed failure analyses, in understanding the evolution of unstable rock slopes. This study contributes to the understanding of progressive medium-scale rock slope failures, aiding in the prediction and mitigation of potential failures.

Personal digital assistant (PDA) applications to improve the effectiveness and reliability in geotechnical investigations have been developed. Because of PDA's legerity and mobility, it is an excellent choice for use with a simple global position system (GPS) in geotechnical field work, such as site reconnaissance, subsurface investigation, surface investigation, safety evaluation, testing, and instrumentation. Using PDAs in geotechnical engineering can save traditional field paper forms, avoid repeated record input, reduce the risk of wrong data interpretation, and shorten the time and space “barrier” between the office and the field. After the field data are collected on the PDA, they can be transferred to a desktop personal computer (PC) for further processing and reporting. The desktop PC is designated to handle more complicated analyses and visual presentations. Specialized functions of applications to operate PDA and GPS, as well as for the desktop PC, were developed according to the characteristics of the geotechnical tasks. The concept and framework were applied for three geotechnical assistant systems: drilling investigation assistant system, surface geologic investigation assistant system, and slope safety evaluation assistant system. In addition, an example illustrates the application of GPS, PDA, and geographic information systems for debris flow reconnaissance. Using PDAs improves the effectiveness and reliability of geotechnical investigations and is promising for further development.

Ontario Hydro has had experience in designing and qualifying safety critical software used in the reactor shutdown systems of its nuclear generating stations. During software design, an analysis of system level hazards and potential hardware failure effects provide input to determining what safeguards will be needed. One form of safeguard, called software self checks, continually monitor the health of the computer on line. The design of self checks usually is a trade off between the amount of computing resources required, the software complexity, and the level of safeguarding provided. As part of the software verification activity, a software hazards analysis is performed, which identifies any failure modes that could lead to the software causing an unsafe state, and which recommends changes to mitigate that potential. These recommendations may involve a re-structuring of the software to be more resistant to failure, or the introduction of other safeguarding measures. This paper discusses how Ontario Hydro has implemented these aspects of software design and verification into safety critical software used in reactor shutdown systems. >