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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Empowering the next generation: ANS’s newest book focuses on careers in nuclear energy
A new career guide for the nuclear energy industry is now available: The Nuclear Empowered Workforce by Earnestine Johnson. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience across 16 nuclear facilities, Johnson offers a practical, insightful look into some of the many career paths available in commercial nuclear power. To mark the release, Johnson sat down with Nuclear News for a wide-ranging conversation about her career, her motivation for writing the book, and her advice for the next generation of nuclear professionals.
When Johnson began her career at engineering services company Stone & Webster, she entered a field still reeling from the effects of the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, nearly 15 years earlier. Her hiring cohort was the first group of new engineering graduates the company had brought on since TMI, a reflection of the industry-wide pause in nuclear construction. Her first long-term assignment—at the Millstone site in Waterford, Conn., helping resolve design issues stemming from TMI—marked the beginning of a long and varied career that spanned positions across the country.
Yunfei Zhao (Ohio State), Linan Huang (New York Univ), Carol S. Smidts (Ohio State), Quanyan Zhu (New York Univ)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 399-410
As digital systems are being more widely employed in nuclear power plants, the potential for serious consequences caused by cyber-attacks on the plants has drawn increasing attention to cyber-security issues in the nuclear industry. Current practices focus on strategies for preventing cyber-attacks, while little research has been done on how to respond to cyber-attacks when they are detected. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic approach for responding to cyber-attacks on nuclear power plants. The interaction between the defender and the attacker is modeled as a two-player, nonzero-sum, stochastic game, which generalizes both Markov decision processes (MDP) and repeated games. We propose an approach for identifying system states and state transitions, and apply probabilistic risk assessment to obtain credible transition probabilities between system states under the action pair of defender and attacker. The Nash Equilibrium of the game provides the valid prediction of both players’ actions because no single player can benefit from unilaterally deviating from the equilibrium policy if the other player adheres to his/hers, hence it provides the best response of the defender to cyber-attacks. Dynamic programming represents the long-term cumulative utility in a recursive form and we form an equivalent nonlinear program to derive the equilibrium. As a case study, the proposed approach is applied to a simplified benchmark digital feedwater control system. The modeling of the system is presented, and discussions on both the equilibrium policy and state values obtained are provided.