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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 RAIN scale: A good intention that falls short
Radiation protection specialists agree that clear communication of radiation risks remains a vexing challenge that cannot be solved solely by finding new ways to convey technical information.
Earlier this year, an article in Nuclear News described a new radiation risk communication tool, known as the Radiation Index, or, RAIN (“Let it RAIN: A new approach to radiation communication,” NN, Jan. 2025, p. 36). The authors of the article created the RAIN scale to improve radiation risk communication to the general public who are not well-versed in important aspects of radiation exposures, including radiation dose quantities, units, and values; associated health consequences; and the benefits derived from radiation exposures.
Wen Si, Jianghai Li, Xiaojin Huang (Tsinghua Univ)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1361-1369
This paper focuses on anomaly detection for Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems at nuclear power plants. Cybersecurity of I&C systems is significant to Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). When the I&C systems are under cyber-attacks, not only the I&C systems themselves are sabotaged, but also the controlled physical systems may be damaged. Traditional classification-based anomaly detection models are learned from the labeled training data, including normal data instances and abnormal ones. However, during the operation of NPPs, most of the recorded data are normal whereas little abnormal data can be recorded. Therefore, the one-class classification method which assumes all the training data instances only have one class label is suitable for training the anomaly detection model of the I&C systems. A replicator neural network (RNN), as the one-class anomaly detection model, is trained by replicating the input data with one class label to the desired outputs, i.e. the target data. After the RNN training with the recorded data of normal operations, the outputs for the normal data are almost the same as the target data replicated from the inputs. Meanwhile, the outputs for the abnormal data would deviate greatly from the inputs. Therefore, the outliers significant different from normal ones will be detected by the trained RNN. The performance of the RNN-based method are evaluated on the testing datasets consisting of normal data and generated abnormal ones.