UNF-ST&DARDS unified database and the automatic document generator

Josh Peterson, Bret Van Den Akker, Riley Cumberland, Paul Miller, Kaushik Banerjee

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

The U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy is sponsoring development of a database to store information related to spent nuclear fuel (SNF) in support of its Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition efforts. This database, referred to as the Unified Database (UDB), is part of a larger engineering analysis tool, the Used Nuclear Fuel Storage, Transportation & Disposal Analysis Resource and Data System (UNF-ST&DARDS). The UDB provides a comprehensive, controlled source of SNF information, including dry cask attributes, assembly data, economic attributes, transportation infrastructure attributes, potential future facility attributes, and federal government radioactive waste attributes. There are a number of existing and envisioned data reports that can be expected to use data stored within the UDB; however, previously, there was not a streamlined method to couple the database to such data reports. Therefore, to streamline the creation of these reports, two methods were developed to generate documents from information in the database automatically. The first method used Java and LaTeX for automatically generating the report, and the second method used the Python programming language along with Sphinx, a Python documentation generator. There are some advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but both methods produced equally high-quality, automatically generated reports that were directly coupled to the database. This paper describes data currently available in the UDB; explains the two different methods for automatically generating reports from these data; and shows examples of inline text, figures, and tables automatically generated using both approaches.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)310-319
Number of pages10
JournalNuclear Technology
Volume199
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2017

Funding

This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with DOE.

FundersFunder number
U.S. Department of Energy

    Keywords

    • Spent Nuclear fuel
    • UDB
    • UNF-ST&DARDS

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'UNF-ST&DARDS unified database and the automatic document generator'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this