Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1988.

Investigations into past accidents at nuclear power generating facilities such as that of Three Mile Island have identified human factors as one of the foremost critical aspects in plant safety. Errors resulting from limitations in human information processing are of particular concern for human-machine interfaces (HMI) in plant control rooms. This project examines the application of Ecological Interface Design (EID) in HMI information displays and the effects on operator situation awareness (SA) for turbine secondary systems based on the Swedish Forsmark 3 boiling-water reactor nuclear power plant. A work domain analysis was performed on the turbine secondary systems yielding part-whole decomposition and abstraction hierarchy models. Information display requirements were subsequently extracted from the models. The resulting EID information displays were implemented in a full-scope simulator and evaluated with six licensed operating crews from the Forsmark 3 plant. Three measures were used to examine SA: self-rated bias, Halden Open Probe Elicitation (HOPE), and Situation Awareness Control Room Inventory (SACRI). The data analysis revealed that operators achieved moderate to good SA; operators unfamiliar with EID information displays were able to develop and maintain comparable levels of SA to operators using traditional forms of single sensor-single indicator (SS-SI) information displays. With sufficient training and experience, operator SA is expected to benefit from the knowledge-based visual elements in the EID information displays. This project was researched in conjunction with the Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) in Halden, Norway.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1958.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1991.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1988. / Also available in print.

The Chernobyl disaster is still considered to be one of the biggest catastrophic accidents in the history of nuclear energetics. After the explosion of the nuclear reactor, abundance of radioactive substance escaped to the atmosphere and in the shape of the radioactive cloud affected even the area of the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Political parties and state authorities reacted on this situation by setting up the state committee, which under political pressure intentionally concealed the information about the risks and consequences of the disaster for the Czechoslovak population. The collapse of the regime not only revealed the crisis of the mistrust to the official sources of information, but also improved the effort of getting information from unofficial and, according to regime, illegal sources. The Chernobyl disaster also caused the mistrust to nuclear energetics. Therefore construction and initiation of the Temelín nuclear power station elicited the interest to the information about The Chernobyl disaster. I have decided to authenticate in my thesis, how well the residents of the Czech Republic are familiar with the Chernobyl disaster and how objective their knowledge about the radiological risks arising from the Chernobyl disaster at present are. I found out the state of the foreknowledge of the residents of the Czech Republic about the radiological risks arising from the Chernobyl disaster by means of questionnaires, where 200 respondents were interviewed. For more detailed research, I divided the residents of the Czech Republic into two groups. The first one consisted of the inhabitants that live in the zone of the disaster preparedness of the Temelín nuclear power station and comprise one half of respondents. The second group consisted of the inhabitants that live of the zone of the disaster preparedness. I drew up questions in the questionnaire in order to include the given problems completely ? from the knowledge about the risks arising from the disaster and emission of the radioactive substances to their consequences for human?s health and the way of reduction their impacts on the population of the Czech Republic. I evaluated the answers from the respondents to the single answers and drew up the tables. I accomplished them by the percentage evaluation of the right and wrong answers, computation of total mean of the achieved points and the total percentage success rate. The evaluation of the knowledge of the respondents of the Czech Republic was accomplished on the basis of the value of total mean of the achieved points and percentage success rate. I did a statistical evaluation by testing normality using ?2 Pearson's chi-squared test. The mutual comparison of the knowledge I did by testing by means of the two-sample t-test on the basis of the guess of the empirical parameters from each group. On the basis of this evaluation of the results of the questionnaire I can declare that the knowledge of the residents of the Czech Republic about the radiological risks arising from the Chernobyl disaster are at a very good level. The results also proved that inhabitants of the zone of the disaster preparedness of the Temelín nuclear power station have greater knowledge about the radiological risks arising from the Chernobyl disaster than the rest of the Czech Republic. It can be observed in the conclusion that all predetermined aims were successfully achieved and the results of the questionnaire also proved the assigned hypothesis.

The main topic of the thesis is protection of the population in the emergency planning zone of Jaslovské Bohunice Nuclear Power Plant, and dealing with evacuation in case of an emergency situation associated with the release of radioactive substances. Particular way of evacuation of people as one of the most important protective measures to ensure public protection was analyzed. The thesis particularly focuses on the correct procedures in case of evacuation and the competence of persons involved in the protective measures. It deals with the basic criteria that are applied in the protection of the population from the impact of ionizing radiation around the nuclear power plant. Improvements for protection and awareness of population living in the emergency planning area are proposed. According to Nuclear Legislation a license holder is responsible for taking action to eliminate the occurrence of an emergency as well as taking action to prevent occurrence of an emergency related to technological devices that work with hazardous substance, process, use, transport, store it or manipulate with it. At the same time they are responsible for protecting their employees and persons taken into their care. Measures by permit holder to operate a nuclear facility and protect their own employees or persons taken into care represent the first stage in the structure of emergency preparedness. The public protection plan involves measures to protect the population in the area of release of radioactive substances into the environment. The part of the plan shall be a mutual interaction between the internal emergency plans of the holder of the permit to operate. The work is based on existing legislation and scientific publications of the scope of the research. The protection plan of the population is seen as the basic document for planning measures to handling with the consequences of radiation incidents or accidents and elimination of their consequences on the emergency planning zone. The theoretical part is based on the analysis of current legislation related to the issue, where the membership of the Slovak Republic in the European Union undertakes the country to fulfil its duties, obligations and responsibilities under the legislation of the European Commission. All these directives are transposed in the Atomic Act and create conditions for the exchange of information in the event of an accident of a nuclear device in the Slovak Republic. Basic concepts are defined, and the thesis deals with important safety measures when dealing with an emergency, related to a radiation accident at a nuclear power plant. The principles of appropriate behaviour of the population in the event of such an occurrence are emphasised. Exploratory method of asking underlying the proposed methodology was used to compile the thesis. Based on the analysis of results of the questionnaire, areas for improvement were proposed. From the collected data possible systemic measures related to evacuation with respect to application in real life were assessed.

The main goal of this Thesis was to measure tritium activity in the Vltava River and in the vicinity of Temelín Nuclear Power Plant (hereinafter referred to as JETE) with the following objectives: Possibility to use the outlet of waste water damping unit (hereinafter referred to as VTOOV) as a control alerting system for nonstandard events in JETE, furthermore, monitoring of possible correlations between volume activity of tritium measured in VTOOV and activity above the limit value of the first quality class in selected sections of the Vltava River as well as comparison of the measured values with the results of other authors, and, finally, assessment of the relevance of the water quality estimated by the volume activity of tritium to the water quality according to other ingredients, i.e., stable isotopes of some metals and risk elements as well as general physical and chemical indicators. Theoretical part of the Thesis deals with radioactivity in general, activity of tritium, with regard to operation of nuclear plants, over the world and, especially, in the Czech Republic. The actual work consisted of collection of samples at predetermined places, preparation of these samples for measurement and measurement of tritium activity using scintillation spectrometer with liquid scintillator. Furthermore, basic chemical and physical properties of water, concentration of selected elements and also some anions were determined. The collected data were used for classification of waters from individual collection places into quality classes according to ČSN 75 7221. In all analyzed cases no activities were found which exceeded the limit values of liquid outlets from Temelín Nuclear Power Plant, given by regulations issued on waters by the District Health Office in Ceske Budejovice according to §8 of Act No. 138/73 Coll., in compliance with SÚJB requirements. This Thesis could be beneficial for possible utilization of VTOOV as a control alerting system for nonstandard events in JETE and also for assessment of impact of wastewaters from JETE on waters of the Vltava River.

Ce travail de thèse est motivée par la possibilité de surveiller l'état des composants de systèmes d'énergie pour leur utilisation prolongée et sécuritaire, conformément à la pratique correcte de fonctionnement et des politiques adéquates de maintenance. La motivation est de développer des méthodes basées sur la régression à vecteurs de support pour la prédiction de données de séries chronologiques dans des conditions environnementales et opérationnelles stationnaire/ non-stationnaire. Les simples modèles et les ensembles de modèles à base de SVR sont développés pour attaquer la prédiction basée sur des petits et des grands ensembles de données. Des stratégies sont proposées pour la mise à jour de façon adaptative les simples modèles et les ensembles de modèles à base de SVR au cas du changement de la distribution générant les données. Les comparaisons avec d'autres méthodes d'apprentissage en ligne sont fournies en référence à des données de séries chronologiques d'un composant critique dans les centrales nucléaires fournis par Electricité de France (EDF). Les résultats montrent que les approches proposées permettent d'atteindre des résultats de prédiction comparables compte tenu de l'erreur quadratique moyenne et erreur relative, en beaucoup moins de temps de calcul. Par ailleurs, en analysant le sens géométrique de la méthode de la sélection de vecteurs caractéristiques(FVS) proposé dans la littérature, une nouvelle méthode géométriquement interprétable, nommé Reduced RankKernel Ridge Regression-II (RRKRR-II), est proposée pour décrire les relations linéaires entre un valeur prédite et les valeurs prédites des vecteurs caractéristiques sélectionné par FVS. Les comparaisons avec plusieurs méthodes sur un certain nombre de données publics prouvent la bonne précision de la prédiction et le réglage facile des hyperparamètres de RRKRR-II. / This Ph. D. work is motivated by the possibility of monitoring the conditions of components of energy systems for their extended and safe use, under proper practice of operation and adequate policies of maintenance. The aim is to develop a Support Vector Regression (SVR)-based framework for predicting time series data under stationary/nonstationary environmental and operational conditions. Single SVR and SVR-based ensemble approaches are developed to tackle the prediction problem based on both small and large datasets. Strategies are proposed for adaptively updating the single SVR and SVR-based ensemble models in the existence of pattern drifts. Comparisons with other online learning approaches for kernel-based modelling are provided with reference to time series data from a critical component in Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) provided by Electricité de France (EDF). The results show that the proposed approaches achieve comparable prediction results, considering the Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Relative Error (MRE), in much less computation time. Furthermore, by analyzing the geometrical meaning of the Feature Vector Selection (FVS) method proposed in the literature, a novel geometrically interpretable kernel method, named Reduced Rank Kernel Ridge Regression-II (RRKRR-II), is proposed to describe the linear relations between a predicted value and the predicted values of the Feature Vectors (FVs) selected by FVS. Comparisons with several kernel methods on a number of public datasets prove the good prediction accuracy and the easy-of-tuning of the hyperparameters of RRKRR-II.

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