Publications

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The executive branch of the United States government has acknowledged and identified threats to the water supply infrastructure of the United States. These threats include contamination of the water supply, aging infrastructure components, and malicious attack. Government recognition of the importance of providing safe, secure, and reliable water supplies has a historical precedence in the water works of the ancient Romans, who recognized the same basic threats to their water supply infrastructure the United States acknowledges today. System surety is the philosophy of ''designing for threats, planning for failure, and managing for success'' in system design and implementation. System surety is an alternative to traditional compliance-based approaches to safety, security, and reliability. Four types of surety are recognized: reactive surety; proactive surety, preventative surety; and fundamental, inherent surety. The five steps of the system surety approach can be used to establish the type of surety needed for the water infrastructure and the methods used to realize a sure water infrastructure. The benefit to the water industry of using the system surety approach to infrastructure design and assessment is a proactive approach to safety, security, and reliability for water transmission, treatment, distribution, and wastewater collection and treatment.

Sandia National Laboratories has refined a process for developing inherently safer system designs, based on methods used by the Laboratories to design detonation safety into nuclear weapons. The process was created when the Laboratories realized that standard engineering practices did not provide the level of safety assurance necessary for nuclear weapon operations, with their potential for catastrophic accidents. A systematic approach, which relies on mutually supportive design principles integrated through fundamental physical principles, was developed to ensure a predictably safe system response under a variety of operational and accident based stresses. Robust, safe system designs result from this thematic approach to safety, minimizing the number of safety critical features. This safety assurance process has two profound benefits: the process avoids the need to understand or limit the ultimate intensity of off normal environments and it avoids the requirement to analyze and test a bewildering and virtually infinite array of accident environment scenarios (e.g., directional threats, sequencing of environments, time races, etc.) to demonstrate conformance to all safety requirements.

Sandia National Laboratories has developed a systematic approach for achieving high confidence in major products requiring high reliability for use in high-consequence applications. A high-consequence application is one in which product failure could result in significant loss of life, damage to major systems or to the environment, financial loss, or political repercussions. The application of this process has proven to be of significant benefit in the early identification, verification, and correction of potential product design and manufacturing process failure modes. Early identification and correction of these failures modes and the corresponding controls placed on safety-critical features, ensures product adherence to safety-critical design requirements, and enhances product quality, reliability, and the cost effectiveness of delivered products. Safety-critical features include design features such as materials and dimensions, as well as manufacturing features such as assembly processes, inspections, and testing.