Severe Accident Management Guidelines (SAMG) have been developed to support a nuclear power plant (NPP) in case of a severe accident, i.e. an (unlikely) accident where the core and/or the fuel in the ...Spent Fuel Pool (SFP) have been damaged and there is risk for radioactive releases. Various approaches exist, such as the SAMG developed by the PWR and BWR Owners Groups (PWROG, BWROG), by Electricité de France (EdF) for its fleet of plants, the Candu Owners Group (COG) and by several individual NPPs. Often, the developers of SAMG develop a generic type of SAMG, applicable for a certain type of NPP, and leave it to the individual plants to adapt these to their configuration and Emergency Response Organisation (ERO). That means, that quite some burden remains for the individual plants to finally implement the SAMG. This implementation includes not only technical items, such as defining proper strategies, but also many organisational issues, as handling a severe accident needs an effective ERO, in which the SAMG must be well embedded.
Various plants have been reviewed, both the ways they have constructed their plant-specific SAMG, implemented them in their ERO and tested the performance in drills and exercises. Most recently, a review of SAMG at Swedish plants has been performed, after which it was decided to pull the various experiences together and summarize them in one compendium. Some of these also include aspects of the development of the generic SAMG.
The result is a number of recommendations (∼30), both on the technical field as well as regarding the ERO. We could also define a number of good practices that deserve wider attention.
A few words have been devoted to international support for a stricken plant (Epilogue).
La prise en charge de la pancréatite aiguë est maintenant assez codifiée, avec des recommandations précises élaborées par des groupes d’experts. Ces recommandations traitent notamment du bilan ...initial minimal, des scores de gravités reconnus, de la prise en charge médicale initiale avec l’hyperhydratation, l’anticoagulation préventive, la réalimentation précoce, des délais d’imagerie et de la gestion des complications. Nous avons essayé dans ce travail, de regrouper les différentes recommandations, articles et études traitant de ce sujet, en nous fondant plus particulièrement sur les recommandations européennes, afin de guider la prise en charge de la pancréatite aiguë en pratique courante.
The management of acute pancreatitis is now fairly codified, with specific recommendations developed by expert groups. These recommendations deal in particular with the minimum initial assessment, recognized severity scores, initial medical management with hyperhydration, preventive anticoagulation, early refeeding, delays in imaging and management of complications. In this work, we have tried to bring together the various recommendations, articles and studies dealing with this subject, based more particularly on European recommendations, in order to guide the management of acute pancreatitis in current practice.
•Review of the EUR, WENRA, and IAEA definitions and requirements of the DEC-A analysis;•Review of the current level of knowledge and modeling capabilities for DEC-A relevant phenomena;•Review of good ...practices for DEC-A analysis in OECD/NEA member countries and partners.
Since 2012, many NEA member countries have implemented deterministic safety analyses for operating nuclear power plants under design extension conditions without significant fuel degradation or core melt (DEC-A). However, variations persist among these countries in defining DEC-A scenarios and acceptance criteria, validation and application of computer codes, development and application of deterministic safety analysis methods. Furthermore, there is a dearth of shared international experience and methodologies among various stakeholders, including regulatory authorities, technical safety or support organizations, utilities, engineering and consulting companies. To address these gaps, the OECD/NEA initiated a project in 2021, titled “Good Practices for Analyses of Design Extension Conditions without Significant Fuel Degradation for Operating Nuclear Power Plants” (or “DEC-A”), under the auspices of the Working Group on Accident Management and Analysis (WGAMA) and the Working Group on Fuel Safety (WGFS). The DEC-A project aims to review and summarize the current requirements, knowledge status, and best practices in NEA member countries. This paper outlines the objectives and scope of the OECD/NEA DEC-A project, and presents the findings from the review and discussions for each task.
IoT technologies are becoming pervasive in public and private sectors and represent presently an integral part of our daily life. The advantages offered by these technologies are frequently coupled ...with serious security issues that are often not properly overseen or even ignored. The IoT threat landscape is extremely wide and complex and involves a wide variety of hardware and software technologies. In this framework, the security of application layer protocols is of paramount importance since these protocols are at the basis of the communications among applications and services running on different IoT devices and on cloud/edge infrastructures. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of application layer protocol security by presenting the main challenges and findings. More specifically, the paper focuses on the most popular protocols devised in IoT environments for messaging/data sharing and for service discovery. The main threats of these protocols as well as the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) for their products and services are analyzed and discussed in detail. Good practices and measures that can be adopted to mitigate threats and attacks are also investigated. Our findings indicate that ensuring security at the application layer is very challenging. IoT devices are exposed to numerous security risks due to lack of appropriate security services in the protocols as well as to vulnerabilities or incorrect configuration of the products and services being deployed. Moreover, the constrained capabilities of these devices affect the types of security services that can be implemented.
The aim of this perspective article is to rethink how anthropology can be involved in interdisciplinary research on climate and environmental change, considering wide-spread obstacles for successful ...collaboration and recommending best practices. Anthropologists complement ”big data“ with “thick data“, which must not be overlooked if the global scientific goal is to have a sustainable and responsible local impact in communities facing environmental change. Anthropologists are used to working with uncertainty, qualified for shifting scales and perspectives, and, perhaps most importantly, pre-occupied with studying the human dimensions of environmental change. However, there are still many practical, ontological and epistemological challenges concerning interdisciplinary research with an environmental focus. After outlining the most recent developments and literature on interdisciplinary research, we share our experience with integrating diverse forms of environmental knowledge including local and indigenous knowledge. Using an inductive approach, we build on and illustrate our conclusions with ethnographic vignettes that stem from a variety of our interdisciplinary projects. Several key themes and suggestions emerge: a) establishment of a joint epistemological framework before the research phase; b) humility and respect for methodologies used by other disciplines, including time spent on studying these with colleagues of different disciplinary backgrounds; c) openness, creativity and flexibility to step out of one’s own disciplinary comfort zone; d) communication within the project team based on trust and without disciplinary hierarchies. Finally, we share some practical suggestions on how to set up interdisciplinary projects.
•Collaboratively rethink the role of anthropology in interdisciplinary research on climate and environmental change.•How to do it: challenges and best practices are discussed by means of ethnographic vignettes.•Apprehend quantitative and qualitative methods as complementary and consider their different temporal possibilities.•Treat different bodies of knowledge from the natural and social sciences and local ways of knowing on equal terms.•Collaborative attitudes include reflexivity, epistemic humility, resonance and trust in research teams.
Laterality indices (LIs) quantify the left-right asymmetry of brain and behavioural variables and provide a measure that is statistically convenient and seemingly easy to interpret. Substantial ...variability in how structural and functional asymmetries are recorded, calculated, and reported, however, suggest little agreement on the conditions required for its valid assessment. The present study aimed for consensus on general aspects in this context of laterality research, and more specifically within a particular method or technique (i.e., dichotic listening, visual half-field technique, performance asymmetries, preference bias reports, electrophysiological recording, functional MRI, structural MRI, and functional transcranial Doppler sonography). Experts in laterality research were invited to participate in an online Delphi survey to evaluate consensus and stimulate discussion. In Round 0, 106 experts generated 453 statements on what they considered good practice in their field of expertise. Statements were organised into a 295-statement survey that the experts then were asked, in Round 1, to independently assess for importance and support, which further reduced the survey to 241 statements that were presented again to the experts in Round 2. Based on the Round 2 input, we present a set of critically reviewed key recommendations to record, assess, and report laterality research for various methods.
Modeling Using Discrete Event Simulation Karnon, Jonathan; Stahl, James; Brennan, Alan ...
Medical decision making,
09/2012, Letnik:
32, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Discrete event simulation (DES) is a form of computer-based modeling that provides an intuitive and flexible approach to representing complex systems. It has been used in a wide range of health care ...applications. Most early applications involved analyses of systems with constrained resources, where the general aim was to improve the organization of delivered services. More recently, DES has increasingly been applied to evaluate specific technologies in the context of health technology assessment. The aim of this article is to provide consensus-based guidelines on the application of DES in a health care setting, covering the range of issues to which DES can be applied. The article works through the different stages of the modeling process: structural development, parameter estimation, model implementation, model analysis, and representation and reporting. For each stage, a brief description is provided, followed by consideration of issues that are of particular relevance to the application of DES in a health care setting. Each section contains a number of best practice recommendations that were iterated among the authors, as well as the wider modeling task force.
Indices of abundance based on fishery catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) are important components of many stock assessments, particularly when fishery-independent surveys are unavailable. Standardizing ...CPUE to develop indices that better reflect the relative abundance requires the analyst to make numerous decisions, which are influenced by factors that include the biology of the study species, the structure of the fishery of interest, the nature of the available data, and the objectives of the analysis such as how standardized data will be used in a subsequent assessment model. Alternative choices can substantially change the index, and hence stock assessment outcomes and management decisions. To guide decisions, we provide advice on good practices in 16 areas, focusing on decision points: fishery definitions, exploring and preparing data, misreporting, data aggregation, density and catchability covariates, environmental variables, combining CPUE and survey data, analysis tools, spatial considerations, setting up and predicting from the model, uncertainty estimation, error distributions, model diagnostics, model selection, multispecies targeting, and using CPUE in stock assessments. Often the most influential outcome of exploring and analysing catch and effort data is that analysts better understand the population and the fishery, thereby improving the stock assessment.
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