Exercise of the management of a crisis (emergency situation) initiated by a malevolent act

In addition to exercises performed in the field of security, it was decided, in agreement with the competent authorities in charge of safety and security, to achieve an exercise in the field of safety with a terrorist attack of a nuclear power plant as initiator. The security exercises are in fact primarily designed to test the coordination and reaction of various entities involved in responding to a malicious attack on a nuclear facility, the safety “part” being merely simulated. It was interesting to supplement this approach with an exercise interfacing safety and security in which the response - in terms of security - would be simulated. The specifics of such an exercise are: -The initiator of the degradation of the facility safety being malicious, the sequences of equipment failures may be different from those resulting from a classical safety scenario; -A number of movements and actions on the site are prohibited because of the presence of attackers; -Treatment time of the threat should be taken into account in assessing the time the installation returns to a safe condition. Moreover, such an exercise should not lead to exchanges of sensitive information -on the threat or on the vulnerability of the facility or its components. It is presented as a series of degraded states of the installation considered. The first exercise of that type took place on French NPP November 26, 2009. It is part of nuclear security drills conducted at the request of the ASN. This exercise helped to highlight elements of strategy such as the need for a rapid processing of the threat for the restoration of the situation. Other exercises of this kind should be conducted at annual intervals to validate the findings of the first exercise. Finally, we must emphasize the wealth in terms of training of the management of such an extreme situation by teams of experts and the prefecture.