This paper attempts to analyse quantitatively the growth and development of uranium recovery from secondary sources in terms of publication output as reflected in the International Nuclear Information System (INIS) database. During 1972-2011, a total of 4520 papers were published on uranium extraction from various secondary sources: phosphoric acid accounted for 2840 publications (62.83%), sea water 751 publications (16.62%), coal 479 publications (10.6%), monazite 245 publications (5.42%) and granite 205 publications (4.54%). Among the countries contributing to uranium recovery from secondary sources research, India topped the list with 695 publications (15.38%), followed by USA with 548 publications (12.12%), Japan with 457 publications (10.11%), China with 291 publications (6.44%) and Germany with 275 publications (6.08%). The highest number of publications (193) was in 1984. The average number of publications published per year was 113. The journals most preferred by scientists for publication of papers were Radiokhimiya with 118 publications (2.61%), Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry with 82 publications (1.81%) and Radiochimica Acta with 60 publications (1.33%).
In this paper a prototype for the TRIGA Research Reactor Decision Support System is proposed. Its framework is realised on the basis of three models: the Universal Management Paradigm, the Information-Preference-Knowledge Model from the TOGA meta-theory, and the Finite State Machine Model. Such an application uses data from the instrumentation and control system and according to the human factor state recognises the type of operative situation and suggests to the operator a decision action as an output. The tool can be used for helping the operator in accident conditions. Here, for illustrative purposes only, an accidental variation of the control rod position has been simulated and results from the proposed tool are analysed.
In this paper, string-based algorithm and the analogy of the total number of deviations that exist between two matrices are utilised for ontology matching. The type of matching and the distance between them are derived from the rank of the matrix. This process is useful for an agent program to extract the knowledge from the application domain and to evaluate the result of matching to decide whether to include or exclude the ontology. As a case study to demonstrate the developed algorithm, the Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) is taken for analysis by representing its components like the steam generator system and the control rod drive mechanism in formats like Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL).
This paper attempts to highlight quantitatively and qualitatively the growth and development of world literature on materials chemistry in terms of journal papers and citations as per Scopus database. A total of 67,375 papers and 493,098 citations received to these papers were downloaded from Scopus database for the period 2008-2012. The objective of the study was to perform a scientometric analysis of all materials chemistry research papers in the world. The parameters studied include year-wise growth of papers and citations, continent-wise distribution of papers and citations, country-wise distribution of papers, publication efficiency index and activity index, institute-wise distribution of papers and highly preferred journals.
The aim of this paper is to enhance the understanding of the importance of communication among project members/partners in the planning phase of multi-organisational international interdisciplinary projects from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It also aims to show the important role the project leader has in coordinating and stimulating the communication among different stakeholders in such projects. This is a qualitative research paper based on the analysis of interviews conducted with representatives of organisations of the three European projects which are related to nuclear energy. The conclusion of this study is that communication during the planning phase of multi-organisational interdisciplinary projects is key to their success. If a person wants to be successful as a project leader of multi-organisational interdisciplinary projects, then he/she should pay particular attention to the importance of project communication management in the project planning phase.
Organisations lose knowledge. Considering knowledge as a valuable asset, attention must be paid to the risk of losing it. The contribution of this paper is to propose a model - the Knowledge Critical Grid (KCG) - that aims at assessing the risk of knowledge loss. Applied within the Belgian TSO, this model focuses on community-of-practices and network issues. Grounded on five knowledge issues, the KCG intends to assess the knowledge volatility and vulnerability levels of an organisation and define the best relevant knowledge management actions.
Nuclear decommissioning design and operational knowledge may remain relevant over many decades. Designing sustainable operations today requires meaningful simulation of future events, which in turn relies on the accurate representation of all relevant current knowledge. In decommissioning, human agents may be as important for maintaining operational safety as technical systems, so simulations must represent not just technical but tacit knowledge (embedded in practice) and the contextual and perceptual aspects of knowledge – i.e. how the meaning of data changes with the circumstances and viewpoint of stakeholders. We propose that this detail may be captured by ontological knowledge systems, which are augmenting traditional archives, databases or operational flowcharts in other highly interlinked, multidisciplinary, dynamic and highly specialised fields. Using the example of waste transport modelling, this study discusses how a coherent ontology unifying knowledge, physics and simulations could facilitate the design, assessment and communication of sustainable decommissioning.
On the basis of Web of Science database, through scientometrics, quantitative and qualitative research was conducted on carbon nanotubes literature produced globally. A total of 64,376 publications and 1,770,339 citations were received to these publications during 1992–2012. It was found that the number of published articles was higher in Peoples Republic of China, USA, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, England, India, etc. The highest number of publications 10,375 (16.12%) was published in 2012. The highest number of citations 165,515 (9.35%) was received in 2005. The highest average citations per publication 498.25 was in 1992. The highest growth rate (387.50%) was observed in 1993. Overall Collaboration Coefficient (CR) was very high.
Contributions in academia especially science and technology are important indicators to gauge the progress and participation of women. The objective of the study was to evaluate the contribution of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), India, women scientists. This study analyses 5290 publications in journals for the period 2006–2010. Out these, 1455 (27.50%) publications had at least one author as a BARC woman scientist. Average contributing women authors were 36% out of 5762 both BARC men and women contributing authors. Highest numbers of publications were from Physical Sciences (28.52%), followed by Chemical Sciences (27.7%), Biological Sciences (19.04%), Materials Science (13.06%), Environmental Sciences (7.08%) and Engineering & Technology (4.6%). Collaborative analysis indicated 69.67% intra-BARC, 17.68% national and 12.65% international collaboration. Based on critical analysis it was found that there were 634 women scientists, which is 16% of the total number of scientists and they contribute about 36% of technical journal publications.
This paper aims at exploring how young adults in Sweden perceive the risk of nuclear power on human health. Purposive sampling technique was applied to recruit study subjects who were individually interviewed. Manifest and latent content analysis of the interview narratives were applied. All the informants perceive nuclear power as a source of risk but they differed in their assessment of risk from nuclear power. The Swedish nuclear governance authorities need to intensify their efforts in building trust with young adults by providing more credible information and by facilitating as well as initiating open discussions about the risks of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). This may reduce the fear from the NPPs and thus the risk of potentially related health problems.
This paper describes the author’s experiences in applying some key systems cybernetics ideas and methodologies to resolve difficult and complex issues in a typical technically based organisational context, which in these cases were in the nuclear industry. As such, they could be considered to be relevant examples for moving from well-established theoretical and academic developments to practical applications. The example applications described herein are the type of programmes which can be utilised to resolve contentious problems or issues, optimise human and organisational performance as well as reduce human errors during any of the myriad of goal-based activities being carried out in any kind of industrial or organisational context. The author also characterises the results and conclusions from these experiences and programmes carried out during his lengthy career in the nuclear industry, including key ‘lessons learned’. In addition, a generalised framework of systemic principles and techniques is provided which he found to be most applicable in his organisational context and could be utilised in any organisational context.
Multidisciplinary complexity and special characteristics of nuclear energy management lead to varied public perception of associated risks. Arguments on how nuclear power plants might contribute to sustainability or threaten it are discussed. Energy produced from nuclear power reactors may contribute to the economic development of the country they are built in by providing electricity with lower prices than that of most other types of energy production sources. However, the construction costs of nuclear power plants are very expensive and their building is usually subsidised by national governments. Moreover, radiation from nuclear power plants might be a potential threat to human health, the environment, and security. Nuclear waste and the uncertainties in best practices for the safe management of nuclear power plants are probably the most severe problems that future generations will have to face unless international cooperation for systematic sustainable solutions are found.
This paper identifies the research paradigms in the area of radioactive waste management based on the technical reports retrieved from the International Nuclear Information System (INIS) from 1970 to 2012. The aim is to determine the volume of research output, the countries involved in the research; collaboration network has been studied at the micro level (individuals) and the macro level (countries). Bibliometric and social network analyses were employed to achieve the results.
This study aims to analyse the conference proceedings – DAE Solid State Physics Symposium, an annual conference held since 1984 and sponsored by the Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences, Department of Atomic Energy, India. The factors studied are: the diversified venue and its impact on the number of conference presentations, the number of presentations in the fourteen subjects forming the domain of ‘Solid State Physics’ and the dynamic nature of these subjects; the authorship pattern during the period of study; the intra and inter regional authorship and collaboration pattern. The prominent international as well as national collaborating countries and institutes have been identified. The study revealed that major contributions were made by Indian universities and colleges.
Fukushima nuclear power plant accident has become a hot topic in debates among professional communities. It also caused knowledge searching and knowledge sharing among social groups. However, there is a lack of empirical studies investigating nuclear power-related knowledge flow in social communities. This paper examines nuclear power-related knowledge flow by focusing on the case of college students in South Korea. The research investigates the following objectives: the types of knowledge shared, the mechanism of knowledge flow, effectiveness of knowledge flow, and the factors influencing the knowledge flow. The results show that different types of nuclear energy-related knowledge were shared; mass media play an important role in knowledge flow; trust relationship, personal interests and cultural factors influence the effectiveness of knowledge flow.
Regarding Fukushima accident, it would be true that the relevant information has not been provided well enough for the affected people in and over Japan, for instance, as often being mixed, confused, too difficult to access or disappearing through the internet or websites. In this regard, it is necessary be to terminologically develop ways to access such affected information, like a taxonomy, composed of semantically controlled terms on the related events forming lineage-like hierarchical structures. To come up with a potential taxonomy to preserve and disseminate the affected information, this paper describes a preliminary view on the terminological aspects and availability of IAEA/INIS for the information implemented by JAEA Library. It is necessary to make new aspects and terms derived from the affected information, such as ‘beyond design basis’, more detailed, scrutinised and involved in the schemes, terminological aspects and IAEA/INIS, in order to improve the taxonomic potential.
Instrumentation and control systems are the nervous system of a nuclear power plant. They monitor all aspects of the plant’s health and help respond with the care and adjustments needed. Progress in electronics and information technology has created incentives to replace traditional analogue instrumentation and control ‘I&C’ systems in nuclear power plants with digital I&C systems. Digital I&C systems have posed new challenges for the industry and regulators, who have had to build up the methods, data and experience to assure themselves that the new systems meet all reliability and performance requirements. The research described in this article does not provide guidance on how to determine the need for diversity in a safety system to mitigate the consequences of potential instrumentation and control failures. Succinctly, the purpose of the research described in this present paper was to identify and compare the developed diversity of the architecture instrumentation and control in two different kinds of plants.
This paper attempts to highlight quantitatively and qualitatively the growth and development of world literature on molten salts in terms of publication output as per INIS database (1972–2011). The objective of the study was to perform a scientometric analysis of all research publications on molten salts in the world. The parameters studied include year-wise growth of publications, country-wise distribution of publications, activity index of top countries, highly productive institutes, language-wise distribution of publications, distribution of publications as per document type, highly preferred journals and identification of highly cited publications on molten salts.
Planning is always a problem in government organisations whose mission involves the development of Research and Development (R&D) activities. The current issue of the Nuclear and Energy Research Institute (IPEN), the Brazilian largest nuclear and energy research and technology institute, is to plan the reconciling of long-term ramifications of a large project funded by the Union’s budget with the R&D agenda that is funded by science and technology funding agencies. In the mid-2010, the top management of IPEN approved the implementation of a participatory planning effort involving its internal research community. Based on an information framework derived from a technique known as technology roadmapping, a four step planning process was developed: survey, synthesis, evaluation and decision. Selected results generated in the survey step and discussed during the evaluation step are presented. Conclusions of this experience as well as the questionnaire designed to collect the data are presented at the end of this paper.
In this paper, we present a text mining approach for the semiautomatic extraction of taxonomy of concepts for nuclear knowledge and evaluate the achievable results. Taxonomies are a fundamental part of any knowledge management strategy or framework. We propose a method for hierarchical document clustering based on the notion of frequent concept sets. Most clustering algorithms treat documents as a bag of words and bypass the important relationships between words, such as synonyms. In this method, we consider the semantic relationship between words and use a domain thesaurus (ETDE/INIS) to identify concepts. To validate the method, we conducted a case study in which we implemented a prototype, generating a taxonomy for nuclear knowledge with the goal of conceptually mapping the scientific production of the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN).
