Offshore Floating Nuclear Power Plant Physical Security Study

The ONP research team from the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department at MIT has been researching and developing the possibility of a nuclear reactor deployed up to on an offshore platform out to sea. Such a reactor deployed up to twelve nautical miles offshore poses a significant security risk that needs to be addressed. Through the studies of MIT graduate Vince Kindfuller, a security plan was proposed in the ICONE24-61029 paper. This research aims to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed security plan for the ONP-300 and ONP-1100 through the use of a simulation software developed by ARES Corporation, to expand on the security plan to include a response to nonviolent adversaries, and to alter the security plan and plant design as necessary to increase the effectiveness of the security configuration while limiting expenses.

Initially, different attack scenarios were investigated and four design-basis threats (DBT) were formulated based on knowledge from industry professionals. Through the use of ARES software, results indicated that the initial surface design for the ONP 300 led to major line-of-sight issues for guards on the top deck of the plant. The security force as a whole performed below the minimum acceptable level. This realization led to changes with the ONP 300’s security configuration and structural layout.

Upon development of a platform layout that maximized security performance, a sensitivity analysis was conducted on the following aspects of the security plan: size of the adversary force, size of the guard force, and use of a hostile insider attack. The results of sensitivity analysis proved sufficient to lower the anticipated number of guards and therefore save operational costs. This analysis concludes with blast analysis to determine the location of the physical barrier and an overview of ONP-1100 security performance.

The major contribution of this work is therefore two-fold: implementation of security-enhancing features are accomplished at the very early stage of the ONP design when innovative features can be best identified and implemented in a cost-effective manner and application of a Monte Carlo numerical tool which allows testing of the effectiveness of the design to defeat intruder scenarios as well as identify design modification to enhance security performance.