Publications

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Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants contain a wealth of plant monitoring data including material measurements, process monitoring, administrative procedures, and physical protection elements. Future facilities are moving in the direction of highly-integrated plant monitoring systems that make efficient use of the plant data to improve monitoring and reduce costs. The Separations and Safeguards Performance Model (SSPM) is an analysis tool that is used for modeling advanced monitoring systems and to determine system response under diversion scenarios. This report both describes the architecture for such a future monitoring system and present results under various diversion scenarios. Improvements made in the past year include the development of statistical tests for detecting material loss, the integration of material balance alarms to improve physical protection, and the integration of administrative procedures. The SSPM has been used to demonstrate how advanced instrumentation (as developed in the Material Protection, Accounting, and Control Technologies campaign) can benefit the overall safeguards system as well as how all instrumentation is tied into the physical protection system. This concept has the potential to greatly improve the probability of detection for both abrupt and protracted diversion of nuclear material.

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Given the uncertain future of the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository for final disposal of used light water reactor fuel, the tactical strategy is to store used nuclear fuel (UNF) at utility sites in either pool or dry cask storage systems. Although no time threshold has been defined, the current recommendation for long-term management of UNF is 300 years. This presents possible regulatory and technical issues for both storage safety and security. This paper discusses ongoing work in address security for long-term storage of UNF. Previous work focused on an assessment of security requirements for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition, it has been determined that the dose rates for UNF will fall below the current 100 rem/hour self-protection threshold after 70 to 120 years. Work continues to address issues associated with maintaining security for long-term storage of UNF. Extending the self-protection concept and plans for performing assessments of the long-term security risk will be discussed. This work is part of a larger effort to develop concepts for a demonstration UNF storage site and to develop a technical basis for long-term storage of UNF and the associated transportation.

Given the uncertain future of the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository for final disposal of used light water reactor fuel, the tactical strategy is to store used nuclear fuel (UNF) at utility sites in either pool or dry cask storage systems. Although no time threshold has been defined, the current recommendation for long-term management of UNF is 300 years. This presents possible regulatory and technical issues for both storage safety and security. This paper discusses ongoing work in address security for long-term storage of UNF. Previous work focused on an assessment of security requirements for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition, it has been determined that the dose rates for UNF will fall below the current 100 rem/hour self-protection threshold after 70 to 120 years. Work continues to address issues associated with maintaining security for long-term storage of UNF. Extending the self-protection concept and plans for performing assessments of the long-term security risk will be discussed. This work is part of a larger effort to develop concepts for a demonstration UNF storage site and to develop a technical basis for long-term storage of UNF and the associated transportation.

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Material control and accountability (MC&A) operations that track and account for critical assets at nuclear facilities provide a key protection approach for defeating insider adversaries. MC&A activities, from monitoring to inventory measurements, provide critical information about target materials and define security elements that are useful against insider threats. However, these activities have been difficult to characterize in ways that are compatible with the path analysis methods that are used to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of a site's protection system. The path analysis methodology focuses on a systematic, quantitative evaluation of the physical protection component of the system for potential external threats, and often calculates the probability that the physical protection system (PPS) is effective (PE) in defeating an adversary who uses that attack pathway. In previous work, Dawson and Hester observed that many MC&A activities can be considered a type of sensor system with alarm and assessment capabilities that provide reccurring opportunities for "detecting" the status of critical items. This work has extended that characterization of MC&A activities as probabilistic sensors that are interwoven within each protection layer of the PPS. In addition, MC&A activities have similar characteristics to operator tasks performed in a nuclear power plant (NPP) in that the reliability of these activities depends significantly on human performance. Many of the procedures involve human performance in checking for anomalous conditions. Further characterization of MC&A activities as operational procedures that check the status of critical assets provides a basis for applying human reliability analysis (HRA) models and methods to determine probabilities of detection for MC&A protection elements. This paper will discuss the application of HRA methods used in nuclear power plant probabilistic risk assessments to define detection probabilities and to formulate "timely detection" for MC&A operations. This work has enabled the development of an integrated path analysis methodology in which MC&A operations can be combined with traditional sensor data in the calculation of PPS effectiveness. Explicitly incorporating MC&A operations into the existing evaluation methodology provides the basis for an effectiveness measure for insider threats, and the resulting PE calculations will provide an integrated effectiveness measure that addresses both external and insider threats. The extended path analysis methodology is being further investigated as the basis for including the PPS and MC&A activities in an integrated safeguards and security system for advanced fuel cycle facilities. Copyright © 2011 by ASME.

Material control and accounting (MC&A) safeguards operations that track and account for critical assets at nuclear facilities provide a key protection approach for defeating insider adversaries. These activities, however, have been difficult to characterize in ways that are compatible with the probabilistic path analysis methods that are used to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of a site's physical protection (security) system (PPS). MC&A activities have many similar characteristics to operator procedures performed in a nuclear power plant (NPP) to check for anomalous conditions. This work applies human reliability analysis (HRA) methods and models for human performance of NPP operations to develop detection probabilities for MC&A activities. This has enabled the development of an extended probabilistic path analysis methodology in which MC&A protections can be combined with traditional sensor data in the calculation of PPS effectiveness. The extended path analysis methodology provides an integrated evaluation of a safeguards and security system that addresses its effectiveness for attacks by both outside and inside adversaries.