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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.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
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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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
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.