Developing Interactive Means to Teach Nuclear 3S Topics

In 2014 Sandia National Laboratories developed a tabletop exercise to help students apply Nuclear Safety, Security, and Safeguards (3S) principles to a hypothetical nuclear facility. In the tabletop each of the three topics were broken out so that participants could first learn about security, safety, and safeguards individually before negotiating a facility design including all 3S elements. After five years of the first iteration of the tabletop, Sandia staff updated the tabletop exercise to make it more modular and represent the wide variety of threats that facilities may potentially face. By dividing the tabletop exercise into modules, students have gained a better understanding of the interplay between the 3S systems and how they have complimentary and competing aims. This paper will introduce the impetus for the 3S tabletop exercise and summarize Sandia’s use of the exercise over the last five years. After discussing lessons learned from running the tabletop with multiple audiences, this paper will describe how such exercises meet the need for creative applications to help students understand 3S principles. The effectiveness of Sandia’s 3S tabletop will be examined in terms of comparing the qualitative tabletop exercise outcomes, as well as investigating the advantages and disadvantages between the original and current forms of the exercise.