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As anyone even vaguely aware of current technology can tell you, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have made exceptional breakthroughs in recent years. Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) emerged circa 2022 dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative tools for images emerged at about the same time.
The concept of a Key Information File developed in the framework of the RK and M international initiative has been tested against the case of the Manche surface repository. Work is still in progress. The aim is to issue a final version before end of year 2018, with the file for the decennial safety assessment update. The KIF will be part of the regulatory required Summary Memory File. Testing the KIF brought several lessons, on the elaboration process of such document, on the adaptation of the KIF concept to a surface repository, on the necessary evolution of the document over time. The Manche repository is the first repository operated by Andra, and the one at its most advanced stage. Therefore, it is de facto a pilot for similar issues encountered on other Andra's repositories. The difficulties encountered, the errors made and analyzed are the basis for improved provisions in other cases. It has been the case for the repository design, when the second surface repository was implemented in the Aube district. It is now the case for the cover design, for monitoring and for memory provisions. (authors)
LANL is changing rapidly and requires a leadership development program in order to support the growing and changing workforce. Provide analysis and recommendations for a leadership development program for engineering services within ALDFO: 1) Attrition and churn are up; 2) Younger workforce--loss of organizational knowledge; 3) LANL is geographically isolated; 4) Leadership training is infrequent and one-size-fits-all.
Policymakers worldwide are currently discussing whether to include home energy management (HEM) products in their portfolio of technologies to reduce carbon emissions and improve grid reliability. However, very little data is available about these products. Here we present the results of an extensive review including 308 HEM products available on the US market in 2015–2016. We gathered these data from publicly available sources such as vendor websites, online marketplaces and other vendor documents. A coding guide was developed iteratively during the data collection and utilized to classify the devices. Each product was coded based on 96 distinct attributes, grouped into 11 categories: Identifying information, Product components, Hardware, Communication, Software, Information - feedback, Information - feedforward, Control, Utility interaction, Additional benefits and Usability. The codes describe product features and functionalities, user interaction and interoperability with other devices. A mix of binary attributes and more descriptive codes allow to sort and group data without losing important qualitative information. The information is stored in a large spreadsheet included with this article, along with an explanatory coding guide. This dataset is analyzed and described in a research article entitled “Categories and functionality of smart home technology for energy management” (Ford et al., 2017) [1].
The objective of the Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) Analytical Methods program element is to sustain state-of-the-art radiation transport modeling capabilities and the expertise necessary to develop, maintain, and disseminate the analytical tools and data libraries in a manner that is responsive to the needs of those responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining criticality safety. To this end, the objective of the AMPX Development and Maintenance Subtask is to ensure that the AMPX cross-section processing system is available to prepare cross-section and covariance libraries that are needed by SCALE and other radiation transport packages to support criticality safety analyses of systems with fissionable material. Moreover, the task ensures that the cross-section processing software is current and up-to-date with the Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF/B) formats and procedures for disseminating evaluated cross-section data provided through new measurement and evaluation work efforts. The AMPX subtask provides for the production of data libraries needed for criticality safety analyses. As such, the task provides the “bridge” between the nuclear data evaluations and the radiation transport software. In the absence of the AMPX cross-section processing task, the ability to maintain and update the SCALE nuclear data libraries (cross-section and covariance data) would be hindered. Therefore, the AMPX Development and Maintenance Subtask ensures that SCALE is up-to-date with the latest cross-section data for supporting criticality safety analyses. This letter report provides a summary of the FY 2015 AMPX development and maintenance activities that have been performed in support of the NCSP. Specifically, the report summarizes the AMPX code system updates and modernization accomplishments that have been made to the software package. Also, the report documents the cross-section library updates that have been made for the SCALE radiation transport package. In addition, the report documents testing activities that have been performed to process available cross-section and covariance data files to ensure the latest ENDF/B data files can be processed properly. This report satisfies the following reporting milestone in the NCSP FY16-20 Five Year Plan: Document AMPX modernization and technical support for SCALE continuous energy (CE), multigroup (MG), and covariance libraries and report status annually to the NCSP Manager (AM3: Q2)
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL or the Laboratory) is committed to an environmental management strategy aimed at reducing the Laboratory's environmental impacts, while still maintaining or increasing operating efficiencies. This training is designed to help you understand the critical importance of environmental management to the continuing success of the Laboratory and your personal role in this essential endeavor.
In April of 2020, Sandia National Laboratories had an urgent need to identify and manage the data that could be used to create mobile applications, models, reports, and visualizations to assist management in safely bringing the workforce onsite during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple divisions volunteered to design and build software solutions; meanwhile, requests for new data sources, including duplicate requests, were inundating Information Technology (IT) and data owners. The Enterprise Data Governance Team was assigned to resolve obtaining and accessing new sources of data in an accelerated timeframe. Through successful collaboration with multiple stakeholders and domain owners across Sandia, the Enterprise Data Governance Team rapidly developed a centralized data strategy and solution for use in safeguarding the Sandia workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. This foundation enabled teams to successfully develop solutions, including reports for executives and management as well as the data for modeling and scientific analysis.
This paper describes a project's design and implementation for streamlining mission management with knowledge capture processes across multiple organizations of a NASA directorate. Thc project's focus is on standardizing processes and reports; enabling secure information access and case of maintenance; automating and tracking appropriate workflow rules through process mapping; and infusing new technologies. This paper will describe a small team's experiences using XML technologies through an enhanced vendor suite of applications integrated on Windows-based platforms called the Wallops Integrated Scheduling and Document Management System (WISDMS). This paper describes our results using this system in a variety of endeavors, including providing range project scheduling and resource management for a Range and Mission Management Office; implementing an automated Customer Feedback system for a directorate; streamlining mission status reporting across a directorate; and initiating a document management, configuration management and portal access system for a Range Safety Office's programs. The end result is a reduction of the knowledge gap through better integration and distribution of information, improved process performance, automated metric gathering, and quicker identification of problem areas and issues. However, the real proof of the pudding comes through overcoming the user's reluctance to replace familiar, seasoned processes with new technology ingredients blended with automated procedures in an untested recipe. This paper shares some of the team's observations that led to better implementation techniques, as well as an IS0 9001 Best Practices citation. This project has provided a unique opportunity to advance NASA's competency in new technologies, as well as to strategically implement them within an organizational structure, while wetting the appetite for continued improvements in mission management.
Data are crucial to the scientific discoveries enabled by experiments performed at the APS. Presently the APS generates approximately 10 PB of raw experimental data per year from its sixty-six operating beamlines that house over 100 unique instruments. This data is generated as a part of over 6,000 annual experiments performed by over 5,500 facility users each year. Similar to other synchrotrons, the amount of data generated at the APS continues to quickly increase due to beamline advances, such as new measurement techniques, technological advances in detectors, high-throughput instrumentation, multi-modal instruments that can acquire several measurements in a single experiment, and advanced data processing algorithms. This trend is expected to continue in the future. The revolutionized high-energy synchrotron facility proposed in the APS-U project will increase brightness and coherence, leading to further increases in data rates. Successful management of data is of vital importance to the current and future scientific productivity of the APS.
This document provides a specification of Fenix, a software library compatible with the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to support fault recovery without application shutdown. The library consists of two modules. The first, termed process recovery , restores an application to a consistent state after it has suffered a loss of one or more MPI processes (ranks). The second specifies functions the user can invoke to store application data in Fenix managed redundant storage, and to retrieve it from that storage after process recovery.
On November 19, 2014, the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) was charged with reviewing the Department of Energy’s conceptual design for the Exascale Computing Initiative (ECI). In particular, this included assessing whether there are significant gaps in the ECI plan or areas that need to be given priority or extra management attention. Given the breadth and depth of previous reviews of the technical challenges inherent in exascale system design and deployment, the subcommittee focused its assessment on organizational and management issues, considering technical issues only as they informed organizational or management priorities and structures. This report presents the observations and recommendations of the subcommittee.
Throughout the history of Sandia National Laboratories, both federal and corporate records have been stored in 12 structures in remote areas of the lab, none of which are compliant storage facilities under federal regulations. Upon inspection by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), findings were levied against Sandia along with recommendations on correcting the issues. The RM Department anticipated over 38,000 boxes of legacy records in Sandia’s current holdings. The current storage areas present an abundance of unknown issues and risks associated with the move project. Along with the large amount of records, and media types, this project faces issues with over 50 years of ever changing filing systems and human error pertaining to data entry, boxes being processed and destroyed. This document presents the final data and results pertaining to the Recorded Information Management Department corrective actions in a well laid out project plan that accommodated safety, security, environmental concerns and of course the records.
US President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13642-Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government - on May, 9 2013, mandating, wherever legally permissible and possible, that US Government information be made open to the public.[1] This edict accelerated the construction of and framework for data repositories, and data citation principles and practices, such as data.gov. As a corollary, researchers across the country's national laboratories found themselves creating data management plans, applying data set metadata standards, and ensuring the long-term access of data for federally funded scientific research.
The U.S. Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) has conducted two-week Nuclear Criticality Safety (NCS) Practitioner courses since 2011 to support the training and qualification of new NCS staff. The course was developed in accordance with the American National Standard Institute/American Nuclear Society (ANSI/ANS) standard for NCS training and qualifications (ANSI/ANS-8.26-2007). In 2013, an NCS Manager’s course was developed for process supervisors, managers, regulators, and other professionals with NCS-related responsibilities. This course was revised in 2019 for Criticality Safety Officers (CSOs) based on an NCSP Criticality Safety Support Group tasking (2018-01). This course was piloted at the Nevada Field Office and the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC) in June 2021. These courses consist of the following training components: classroom education, facility training, and hands-on subcritical and critical experiments training. The two-week Practitioner course offers a week of classroom training, with practical workshops and exercises focused on teaching students how to perform an NCS evaluation. The second week of training involves hands-on critical and subcritical experiments and measurements. The first week is offered in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the DOE Nevada Field Office or the National Atomic Testing Museum. Depending on the student’s clearance level, the second week is offered at Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) (uncleared and L-cleared students) or at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (Q-cleared students). The one-week Manager’s course is offered at SNL or NCERC, depending on clearance or interest, and includes classroom and hands- on critical and subcritical experiments and measurements. This paper provides an overview and status report for the DOE/NNSA NCSP training courses in NCS and to provide information about future course offerings. This paper discusses the challenges associated with executing the training courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2-week Practitioner and 1-week manager courses are currently offered twice per year and adjustments are made based upon demand.
One of the most important remaining challenges associated with expanded implementation of burnup credit in the United States is the validation of depletion and criticality calculations used in the safety evaluation—in particular, the availability and use of applicable measured data to support validation, especially for fission products (FPs). Applicants and regulatory reviewers have been constrained by both a scarcity of data and a lack of clear technical basis or approach for use of the data. In this study, this paper describes a validation approach for commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) criticality safety (k eff ) evaluations based on best-available data and methods and applies the approach for representative SNF storage and transport configurations/conditions to demonstrate its usage and applicability, as well as to provide reference bias results. The criticality validation approach utilizes not only available laboratory critical experiment (LCE) data from the International Handbook of Evaluated Criticality Safety Benchmark Experiments and the French Haut Taux de Combustion program to support validation of the principal actinides but also calculated sensitivities, nuclear data uncertainties, and limited available FP LCE data to predict and verify individual biases for relevant minor actinides and FPs. The results demonstrate that (a) sufficient critical experiment data exist to adequately validate k eff calculations via conventional validation approaches for the primary actinides, (b) sensitivity-based critical experiment selection is more appropriate for generating accurate application model bias and uncertainty, and (c) calculated sensitivities and nuclear data uncertainties can be used for generating conservative estimates of bias for minor actinides and FPs. Results based on the SCALE 6.1 and the ENDF/B-VII.0 cross-section libraries indicate that a conservative estimate of the bias for the minor actinides and FPs is 1.5% of their worth within the application model. Finally, this paper provides a detailed description of the approach and its technical bases, describes the application of the approach for representative pressurized water reactor and boiling water reactor safety analysis models, and provides reference bias results based on the prerelease SCALE 6.1 code package and ENDF/B-VII nuclear cross-section data.
A message from Stacy McLaughlin, Division Leader: I am excited to introduce the second 2020 issue of Actinide Materials Processing and Power Division’s newsletter, with a focus on “excellence in Plutonium missions.” AMPP Division not only supports the 2020 Laboratory Agenda item 1, Excellence in Nuclear Security, but additionally directly supports Laboratory Agenda item 2, Excellence in Mission- Focused Science Technology & Engineering, focusing on sustaining and enhancing LANL’s science base. This issue highlights the diverse efforts of personnel in AMPP Division to enhance science, technology, and engineering (ST&E) at the Laboratory. As we reflect on work at the Laboratory, mostly from our homes due to COVID-19, it is gratifying to see the important, diverse contributions to ST&E across AMPP Division.
The contractor requirements document for DOE O 226.1B, Implementation of Department of Energy Oversight Policy, requires DOE/NNSA contractors to establish an assurance system that includes, among other things, “Rigorous, risk-informed, and credible self-assessment and feedback and improvement activities. Assessment programs must be risk-informed, formally described and documented, and appropriately cover potentially high consequence activities” and “Contains an issues management process that is capable of categorizing the significance of findings based on risk and priority and other appropriate factors….” However, the term “risk-informed” is not defined in this or any other DOE order, and no formal guidance on how to integrate the two concepts currently exists. The Risk Management Guide for Defense Programs released by NA-18, Office of Systems Engineering and Integration (SE&I), states it is “a framework and general guidance to program office personnel on the effective management of program risks and issues”, however it then defines issues as “events with 100% likelihood of affecting program objectives” and states “unless specified otherwise, the term “risk” will also serve to represent issues for the remainder of this plan,” severally limiting its ability to provide adequate guidance on this topic. Outside of DOE scope, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (U.S. NRC) imposes similar requirements. ASME NQA-1-2015 Requirement 16 states “Conditions adverse to quality shall be identified promptly and corrected as soon as practicable. In the case of a significant condition adverse to quality, the cause of the condition shall be determined, and corrective action taken to preclude recurrence. The identification, cause, and corrective action for significant conditions adverse to quality shall be documented and reported to appropriate levels of management. Completion of corrective actions shall be verified”. The purpose of this document is to provide a best-in-class framework for an integrated risk and issues management process. This process would provide a robust feedback loop between risk management and issues management to: Enhance risk identification and characterization, use risk handling principles to improve corrective action planning, and ensure regulatory compliance.
The intent of this paper is to illuminate the reasons behind the culture of standards involvement by the criticality safety community in the NCSD (Nuclear Criticality Safety Division), and specifically highlight those NCSD activities that build/support this culture. Many NCSD members are currently active in ANSI/ANS-8 and other standards and have been for the last half century. This paper was inspired by a request from ANS's Professional Divisions Committee concerning how the professional divisions could 'increase support to Standards development as Subject Matter Experts'. The healthy level of involvement (i.e., culture) by the NCSD membership in standards was noted. A history of the ANSI/ANS-8 series standards is provided, with roots going back to 1955. The need became apparent during a cluster of nuclear criticality accidents that occurred between 1958-1962. The first NCS related standard was the American Standard N6.1-1964, the parent of ANSI/ANS-8.1, which was prepared in 1958 and adopted in 1964. Thus, the involvement in standards by the NCS community goes back more than 50 years. The NCSD continues to help foster a culture of standards use and development. However, the support provided by the NCSD is frequently not recognized, and standards activities are often viewed as separate from the NCSD. This paper highlights the interaction between the NCSD and the ANSI/ANS-8 standards activities as well as the benefit of this support. (authors)