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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.”
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.