Year
2015
Abstract
There is a growing concern from both national regulators and the IAEA of the threat posed by terrorist 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 the theft or sabotage of the nuclear and radiological material. Currently design of physical protection systems and security procedures is done using subjective expert opinion as well as time consuming and expensive live exercises. These methods have served well but a middle ground that allows the experts to more rigorously design and test a facility in absence of live action exercises would be highly desirable. To this end a tool was designed around the force on force simulation program STAGE to allow the full 3d simulation of a nuclear facility. This model allows for simple user modifications of engagement scenarios simulating detection probabilities of various detectors, 3d layout of the facility, as well as simple guard and adversary behaviour. Many detectors were added to more accurately reflect the types of sensors present at a nuclear facility. Having modelled 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. A model was therefore designed to perform Monte Carlo analysis for determining how effective the defence force was against certain attacks utilizing the built in probabilities for detectors and engagements. This technique can be used to give experts more robust tools that are simple to use for the design and verification of security systems that can be used to better plan and execute live action exercises.