Under the Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence (NSDD), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed techniques to understand human operational factors present in the operation of radiation detection systems deployed for border security purposes. These techniques involve synthesizing structured and unstructured data present in these systems from radiation portal monitors (RPMs), video camera records, and records manually entered by human operators. Through analysis of these records, ORNL detects potential issues in the concept of operations, standard operating procedures, operability, training, or maintenance that may impact overall system effectiveness at detecting and interdicting nuclear or radiological materials of concern. This work enables stakeholders to understand operational strengths and weaknesses related to such systems with greater accuracy and granularity than previous methods, such as analysis of RPM data alone. When armed with such knowledge, stakeholders are empowered to act with greater effectiveness in addressing such issues and can understand how their efforts are likely to impact the system’s efficacy. Through two years of analysis of different types of border sites, ORNL has found a variety of operational issues, some known and some previously unrecognized. This presentation explores the methodology of ORNL’s analysis and reviews some generalized findings and potential paths to remediation.
Year
2020
Abstract