Boosting Cybersecurity at Nuclear Plants: Zhao Lands DOE Award

A project led by University of Maryland (UMD) mechanical engineering and reliability engineering faculty member Yunfei Zhao is among 46 that have been selected for funding by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy.

The awards, funded through two DOE programs—the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) and Nuclear Science User Facilities—are designed to help the United States stay on the cutting edge of advanced nuclear technology research and development.

Zhao won the grant for his proposal, “Enhancing Nuclear Power Plant Cybersecurity through Improved Attack Scenario Generation,” which presents an innovative method for closing off vulnerabilities in digital operations at nuclear facilities. This grant is Zhao’s second one as a principal investigator from the DOE NEUP program.

Digital systems have been on the rise in the nuclear industry in recent years, bringing improvements in efficiency but also presenting opportunities for malicious actors. To mitigate such threats, cybersecurity experts deploy teams of white-hat hackers to take the point of view of an attacker and try to breach systems, with the goal of generating a comprehensive set of attack scenarios.

Zhao and his colleagues on the grant aim to take the approach a step further by harnessing intelligent machines to generate such scenarios. Under the DOE-funded proposal, the team will develop novel reinforcement learning methods for automatic, intelligent, and simulation-based scenario generation.

At the same time, the team plans to develop new methods for cyberattack detection and cyber risk analysis—methods that will allow cybersecurity teams to maximize the benefits of the attack scenario dataset and achieve major improvements over conventional methods.

A member of the UMD mechanical engineering faculty since 2023, Zhao teaches in the reliability engineering program and is a member of the Center for Risk and Reliability, a department-based hub that focuses on mitigating hazards in complex systems, including nuclear.

His collaborators on the grant include UMD Professor and CRR cofounder Mohammad Modarres, University of California, Santa Cruz computer science professor Alvaro Cardenas, Shannon Eggers from Idaho National Laboratory, and Andrew Hahn from Sandia National Laboratories. Jay Umholtz of GSE Performance Solutions is an unfunded collaborator.

“Supporting these projects is an important investment in the nation’s nuclear technologies, universities, and future workforce,” said Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Crosscuts, Michelle Scott, of the newly-announced grants. "DOE is committed to helping supply researchers and educators with the resources and funding they need to keep driving innovative nuclear energy research and scientific breakthroughs."

Published August 24, 2026