Socio-Technical Interactions: A New Paradigm for Nuclear Security

Traditional physical protection system (PPS) design approaches (e.g., the renowned Design Evaluation and Process Outline-DEPO) tend to generate the same PPS design—and estimate for PPS effectiveness—for a given nuclear facility before and after a significant shift in corporate culture, operational priorities, or personnel turnover. On the other hand, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) offers a nuclear security culture model that uses a combination of management systems, leadership behaviors, and personnel behaviors to explain this potential variance in security performance stemming from social—rather than technical—changes. This disconnect suggests the need for a way to reconcile how the same nuclear facility can have different levels of security performance. The nuclear security, nuclear safety, organization science, and engineering systems literatures offer insights for explaining this disconnect. Some of these insights indicate that patterns of security practice are key drivers for understanding security performance—but are not adequately addressed in common security analysis approaches. Other insights illustrate the importance of how technical (e.g., PPS) and social (e.g., nuclear security culture) systems interact in explaining security performance. Still other insights suggest that an engineering systems approach is helpful in understanding how such socio-technical interactions and patterns of behaviors affect security performance levels. In support of these insights, this paper introduces a 2x2 matrix that provides a way to organize the relationships between PPS adequacy, security operations, adherence to procedures, and security performance to reconcile this disconnect in current approaches to nuclear security analysis. Though seemingly a static classification scheme, this socio-technical model for nuclear security introduces the importance of dynamic changes as drivers of security performance. After explaining this socio-technical model for security, this paper will discuss how security for nuclear facilities can be described in terms of interactions between technical (e.g., DEPO-based PPS) and social, or non-technical’ (e.g., IAEA nuclear security culture model-based) elements. Lastly, this paper will discuss implications for how this new paradigm can foster improvements for understanding, designing, operating, and evaluating nuclear security. (SAND2019-0718A)