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Title: Pathway Aggregation in the Risk Assessment of Proliferation Resistance and Physical Protection (PR&PP) of Nuclear Energy Systems

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1172631· OSTI ID:1172631
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  1. Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH (United States)
  2. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)

The framework for Proliferation Resistance and Physical Protection (PR & PP) evaluation is to define a set of challenges, to obtain the system responses, and to assess the outcomes. The assessment of outcomes heavily relies on pathways, defined as sequences of events or actions that could potentially be followed by a State or a group of individuals in order to achieve a proliferation objective, with the defined threats as initiating events. There may be large number of segments connecting pathway stages (e.g. acquisition, processing, and fabrication for PR) which can lead to even larger number of pathways or scenarios through possible different combinations of segment connections, each with associated probabilities contributing to the overall risk. Clustering of these scenarios in specified stage attribute intervals is important for their tractable analysis and outcome assessment. A software tool for scenario generation and clustering (OSUPR) is developed that utilizes the PRCALC code developed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for scenario generation and the K- means, mean shift and adaptive mean shift algorithms as possible clustering schemes. The results of the study using the Example Sodium Fast Breeder as an example system show that clustering facilitates the probabilistic or deterministic analysis of scenarios to identify system vulnerabilities and communication of the major risk contributors to stakeholders. The results of the study also show that the mean shift algorithm has the most potential for assisting the analysis of the scenarios generated by PRCALC.

Research Organization:
The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH (United States); Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
DOE Contract Number:
AC07-05ID14517
OSTI ID:
1172631
Report Number(s):
DOE/NEUP-11-3162; 11-3162; TRN: US1500039
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English