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A trip abroad
Hash Hashemian president@ans.org
In my August column in Nuclear News, I reflected on the importance of ANS’s annual conferences for bringing together our nuclear community at the national level. In September, after speaking at Tennessee’s Nuclear Opportunities Workshop, I focused my NN column that month on the value of state-level conferences.
Also in September, alongside ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy, I shifted my focus to another key front in nuclear collaboration, the international stage, by attending the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The timing of the IAEA’s General Conference could not have been better; it took place the same week the U.S. and U.K. kicked off a new wave of transatlantic partnerships in the nuclear sector between both government and industry. This fortuitous overlapping gave us a timely and concrete reminder of international collaboration’s unparalleled benefits.
The General Conference was an expectedly busy event. To cover as much ground as possible, Piercy and I took turns attending either the U.S. delegation meetings with other countries or the General Assembly of the IAEA, where the American Nuclear Society has a seat among other critical nongovernmental organizations.
We listened to presentations by several of the 180 IAEA member states, including, of course, the United States. Aside from ANS, the U.S. presence at the conference included U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, NRC Chair David Wright, and DOE Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.
U.S. representation was further bolstered by an industry delegation that included 65 participants from 32 companies, many of whom used the opportunity to report progress on their plans for the international expansion of their nuclear fleets. Meetings of that industry delegation were coordinated by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Aside from the main conference, Piercy and I also attended the embedded meetings of the International Nuclear Society Council. INSC exists to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration between 18 different member nuclear societies from around the world.
The INSC meetings within the General Conference brought together the presidents and senior members of those societies to give presentations and explore new opportunities. I made a presentation on the state of nuclear in North America, covering the latest developments and deployments in the U.S. and Canada.
This presentation emphasized the new nuclear lift in the U.S. that is being heavily supported by the Trump administration. I recapped the four executive orders issued by President Trump in May, the recent momentum at the DOE, and how these changes are capitalizing on a broader groundswell in both industry development and public support.
I also pointed out the success of our neighbor Canada in progressing on the first water-cooled small modular reactor in North America using BWRX-300 technology, which was supplied by an American firm and international partners—a perfect symbol of the value of global nuclear collaboration.
In all, I have now represented ANS at the state, national, and international levels, gaining useful insight into the work that needs to be done at each. From this vantage point, it’s clear to me that the path forward from the country to the globe is to, above all else, keep working together and supporting each other to bring about the next age of nuclear.
Arvind Sundaram, Hany S. Abdel-Khalik, Mohammad G. Abdo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages 37-52
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2102848
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Business analytics augmented by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) have revolutionized the role of data in the modern world. In recent years, businesses have incorporated data into their decision-making process for better prediction, risk assessment, content creation, etc. While such businesses often seek to leverage the full use of their data through third-party AI/ML services, they are often hampered by the risks of data leaks, reverse engineering, stolen technology, etc., that often have disastrous consequences for businesses and their stakeholders alike. This is especially relevant to the nuclear industry where proprietors are reluctant to share nuclear data for fear of misuse despite their willingness to integrate the additional insight provided by AI/ML applications and remain competitive. Thus, there arises a need for data masking prior to its transmission that obfuscates proprietary information while preserving the information relevant for AI/ML applications. In order to meet the needs of industrial data that are significantly different from those of data warehouses, previous work proposed an efficient time and space-scalable data masking paradigm known as the deceptive infusion of data (DIOD) methodology. The present work expands upon this work by leveraging existing reverse-engineering capabilities to facilitate the decomposition of industrial data into its proprietary and AI/ML-relevant parts, referred to as fundamental and inference metadata, respectively. Both sets of metadata are further obfuscated in accordance with the DIOD methodology to create the DIOD rendition of the industrial data, which is rendered immune to reverse engineering by discarding proprietary information and preserving only AI/ML–relevant information. Additionally, constraints of the original DIOD paper are relaxed using mutual information by configuring the methodology to the target AI/ML application to unlock the full potential of the DIOD methodology. Since the present work focuses on the nuclear industry, data from a nuclear reactor is transformed into that from a nonlinear spring-mass system with different levels of data masking as required by the generic system and the target AI/ML application.