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Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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!
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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Lee T. Maccarone, Daniel G. Cole (Univ of Pittsburgh), Nageswara S.V. Rao, Alexander M. Melin, Sacit M. Cetiner (ORNL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 411-421
Cyber-physical systems consist of interconnected physical processes and computational re- sources. Because the cyber and physical worlds are integrated, vulnerabilities in both the cyber and physical domains can result in damage to the physical system. As cyber-physical systems, nuclear power plants must be secure in both domains in order to maintain operational safety. Nuclear power plants may be targeted by a variety of threat actors such as state actors, hack- tivists, and disgruntled employees|each with a unique motivation and set of resources. This work predicts the outcome of a cyber-physical attack on a nuclear power plant by examining the interaction between a threat actor and a plant defender. A game-theoretic approach is presented to analyze attacks on cyber-physical systems. The cyber-physical attack is analyzed as a two-player strategic-form game. The two players are an attacker and a defender: the defender attempts to maintain plant operation while the attacker attempts to disrupt it. The attacker's strategy set consists of a cyber attack, physical attack, cyber-physical attack, and abstaining from an attack. The defender's strategy set consists of a cyber reinforcement, physical reinforcement, cyber-physical reinforcement, and abstaining from reinforcement. Each player incurs a cost from either attacking or defending. If an attack is successful, the attacker incurs a gain and the defender incurs a loss. A mixed strategy Nash equilibrium is identi ed. Under the mixed Nash equilibrium conditions, the expected utility of the attacker is zero, and the expected utility of the defender is the cost of cyber-physical reinforcement.