Determining the effectiveness of nuclear security through computer simulation

Abstract

There is a growing concern from both national regulators and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the threat posed by attacks against iconic targets such as nuclear power plants. This has led to an increased desire to be able to objectively measure the effectiveness of the physical security of these sites to prevent theft or sabotage of the nuclear and radiological material. Currently verification of physical protection systems is done using subjective expert opinion as well as time consuming and expensive live exercises. A method that allows experts to design and test a facility in the absence of live action exercises using larger sample sizes would be highly desirable. To _ll the niche a synthetic environment model was designed around the force on force simulation program STAGE to allow the full 3-D simulation of a nuclear facility. This allows for simple user modifications to the model, allowing many scenarios to be tested. Many detectors were added to more accurately reflect the types of sensors present at a nuclear facility. Having modeled the facility and the probabilities associated with various events, Monte-Carlo methods were applied to obtain statistics on how effective the guard force was at stopping the adversarial force. This technique can be used to give experts more robust, simple to use tools for the design and verification of physical protection systems.