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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
Lee T. Maccarone, Daniel G. Cole (Univ of Pittsburgh)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 387-398
Cyber-physical systems consist of interconnected physical processes and computational re- sources. Because the physical world is connected to the cyber world, cyber-attacks can result in damage to the physical system. If an attacker could access control inputs and mask measure- ments, a cyber-attack could damage the system while remaining undetected by plant operators or control systems. By masking certain sets of measurements, an attacker may cause a portion of the state space to become unobservable, meaning that it is impossible to reconstruct those states. This is called an observability attack. A sequential game-theoretic approach is presented to analyze observability attacks. The sequential game consists of alternating defense and attack stages. In each defense stage, the de- fender's strategy set consists of reinforcing all possible combinations of system measurements. In each attack stage, the attacker's strategy set has two components: a reconnaissance component and a measurement-masking component. The attacker's and defender's payo s are quanti ed at the end of each defense-attack sequence using the responses of the observable and unobservable states. The observability attack game is analyzed for two defense-attack rounds for a nuclear balance of plant system. A mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium is identi ed.