ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2026
Nuclear Technology
March 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Yeni Li, Arvind Sundaram, Hany S. Abdel-Khalik, Paul W. Talbot
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 5 | May 2022 | Pages 544-567
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1997041
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As industries take advantage of the widely adopted digitalization of industrial control systems, concerns are heightened about their potential vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. False data injection attack is one of the most realistic threats because the attack could be as simple as performing a reply attack allowing attackers to circumvent conventional anomaly detection methods. This attack scenario is real for critical systems, e.g., nuclear reactors, chemical plants, etc., because physics-based simulators for a wide range of critical systems can be found in the open market providing the means to generate physics-conforming attack. The state-of-the-art monitoring techniques have proven effective in detecting sudden variations from established recurring patterns, derived by model-based or data-driven techniques, considered to represent normal behavior. This paper further develops a new method designed to detect subtle variations expected with stealthy attacks that rely on intimate knowledge of the system. The method employs physics modeling and feature engineering to design mathematical features that can detect subtle deviations from normal process variation. This work extends the method to real-time analysis and employs a new denoising filter to ensure resiliency to noise, i.e., ability to distinguish subtle variations from normal process noise. The method applicability is exemplified using a hypothesized triangle attack, recently demonstrated to be extremely effective in bypassing detection by conventional monitoring techniques, applied to a representative nuclear reactor system model using the RELAP5 computer code.