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.
Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Smarter waste strategies: Helping deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear
At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
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.