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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Yunfei Zhao (Ohio State), Linan Huang (New York Univ), Carol S. Smidts (Ohio State), Quanyan Zhu (New York Univ)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 399-410
As digital systems are being more widely employed in nuclear power plants, the potential for serious consequences caused by cyber-attacks on the plants has drawn increasing attention to cyber-security issues in the nuclear industry. Current practices focus on strategies for preventing cyber-attacks, while little research has been done on how to respond to cyber-attacks when they are detected. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic approach for responding to cyber-attacks on nuclear power plants. The interaction between the defender and the attacker is modeled as a two-player, nonzero-sum, stochastic game, which generalizes both Markov decision processes (MDP) and repeated games. We propose an approach for identifying system states and state transitions, and apply probabilistic risk assessment to obtain credible transition probabilities between system states under the action pair of defender and attacker. The Nash Equilibrium of the game provides the valid prediction of both players’ actions because no single player can benefit from unilaterally deviating from the equilibrium policy if the other player adheres to his/hers, hence it provides the best response of the defender to cyber-attacks. Dynamic programming represents the long-term cumulative utility in a recursive form and we form an equivalent nonlinear program to derive the equilibrium. As a case study, the proposed approach is applied to a simplified benchmark digital feedwater control system. The modeling of the system is presented, and discussions on both the equilibrium policy and state values obtained are provided.