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Launching into tomorrow: NRIC guides new era of research and deployment
In June 2025, the Department of Energy announced the Reactor Pilot Program, an authorization pathway that allowed reactor developers to partner with the DOE to get first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors built and tested. Soon after, the DOE rolled out a complementary Fuel Line Pilot Program, which aimed to fast-track fuel projects. In all, 20 projects were accepted into the new programs.
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.