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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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DOE-NE’s newest fuel consortium includes defense from antitrust laws
The Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy is setting up a nuclear fuel Defense Production Act Consortium that will seek voluntary agreements with interested companies “to increase fuel availability, provide more access to reliable power, and end America’s reliance on foreign sources of enriched uranium and critical materials needed to power the nation’s nuclear renaissance.” According to an August 22 DOE press release, the plan invokes the Defense Production Act (DPA) to give consortium members “defense from antitrust laws when certain criteria are met” and “allow industry consultation to develop plans of action.” DOE-NE is looking for interested companies to join the consortium ahead of its first meeting, scheduled for October 14.
Lee T. Maccarone, Daniel G. Cole (Univ of Pittsburgh)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 387-398
Cyber-physical systems consist of interconnected physical processes and computational re- sources. Because the physical world is connected to the cyber world, cyber-attacks can result in damage to the physical system. If an attacker could access control inputs and mask measure- ments, a cyber-attack could damage the system while remaining undetected by plant operators or control systems. By masking certain sets of measurements, an attacker may cause a portion of the state space to become unobservable, meaning that it is impossible to reconstruct those states. This is called an observability attack. A sequential game-theoretic approach is presented to analyze observability attacks. The sequential game consists of alternating defense and attack stages. In each defense stage, the de- fender's strategy set consists of reinforcing all possible combinations of system measurements. In each attack stage, the attacker's strategy set has two components: a reconnaissance component and a measurement-masking component. The attacker's and defender's payo s are quanti ed at the end of each defense-attack sequence using the responses of the observable and unobservable states. The observability attack game is analyzed for two defense-attack rounds for a nuclear balance of plant system. A mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium is identi ed.