[en] ENUSA is fuel supplier to the Spanish power plants. Its engineering group within the nuclear fuel division is responsible for reload core design and licensing, fuel assembly design and fabrication follow-up among other activities. The group has designed all the reloads for the Spanish NPPs since 1987, and the reload cores have been licensed by the regulatory authorities according to the results there obtained

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[en] Asea-Atom BWRs, with their wide operating regimes, can be uprated at very low cost. Already TVO I and II at Olkiluoto in Finland are operating at 108 per cent of contractual design power and Oskarshamn 2 in Sweden at 106 per cent. Core and fuel assembly design modifications can increase reactor power, but turbine capacity limits the uprating to 106 to 110 per cent depending on specific plant design. (author)

[en] Utilities are increasingly realizing the importance of having a full in-house capability in the field of in-core fuel management. This requires competent staff as well as accurate, reliable and easy-to-use computer codes. The development of advanced computer codes is thus an important task for the utilities and the supporting industry. (author)

[en] At their worst, fires at the rural-urban or wildland-urban interface cause tragic loss of human lives and homes, but mitigating these fire effects through management elicits many social and scientific challenges. This paper addresses four interconnected management challenges posed by socially disastrous landscape fires. The issues concern various assets (particularly houses, human life and biodiversity), fuel treatments, and fire and human behaviours. The topics considered are: 'asset protection zones'; 'defensible space' and urban fire spread in relation to house ignition and loss; 'stay-or-go' policy and the prediction of time available for safe egress and the possible conflict between the creation of defensible space and wildland management objectives. The first scientific challenge is to model the effective width of an asset protection zone of an urban area. The second is to consider the effect of vegetation around a house, potentially defensible space, on fire arrival at the structure. The third scientific challenge is to present stakeholders with accurate information on rates of spread, and where the fire front is located, so as to allow them to plan safe egress or preparation time in their particular circumstances. The fourth scientific challenge is to be able to predict the effects of fires on wildland species composition. Associated with each scientific challenge is a social challenge: for the first two scientific challenges the social challenge is to co-ordinate fuel management within and between the urban and rural or wildland sides of the interface. For the third scientific challenge, the social challenge is to be aware of, and appropriately use, fire danger information so that the potential for safe egress from a home can be estimated most accurately. Finally, the fourth social challenge is to for local residents of wildland-urban interfaces with an interest in biodiversity conservation to understand the effects of fire regimes on biodiversity, thereby assisting hard-pressed wildland managers to make informed choices.

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[en] Quality improvement as a management task. General industrial experience has shown that the operators in situ, that is at the machine or computer, are responsible at most for about 20% of quality defects. The overwhelming part of such defects is caused by the preceding chain links planning - development - design - construction - conception of production machinery or computers - and thus essentially by management decisions. The necessary change in the consciousness of managers and staff is not easy to achieve. The KWU-B-Q action aims at attaining that change of consciousness in the area of the nuclear fuel cycle. (orig./DG)

No abstract available