FIELD OFFICE VALIDATION OF FACILITY PERFORMANCE WITH RESPECT TO PERFORMANCE EVALUATIONS AND VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENTS

The Department of Energy (DOE) requires its facilities which have custody of special nuclearmaterial (SNM) must demonstrate that their safeguards systems achieve a designated level of performance in detecting the theft or diversion of SNM. A major portion of the effort in conducting these vulnerability assessments is the determination of a quantitative value that describes the facility's capability of detecting and neutralizing the theft or diversion. However, the primary objective of these analyses is to assist DOE in making a qualitative statement regarding the adequacy of the safeguards programs throughout the DOE complex. The DOE field offices must validate that the evaluations performed by their contractors are correct. The validation effort will cover the full scope of the facility evaluation. The following elements would be included in a strong validation program: a review of the facility specific threat including adversary classes and targets, a review of detection elements and their associated quantifications, a review of the adversaries' best strategies, andotherelementsoftheevaluation. It is not practical to validate each individual element of the evaluation process. However, the field office should use a statistical sampling approach to select elements for review. Elements that contribute most to the facility's safeguards performance should have the highest probability of selection for review. This paper will provide an approach for field offices to design their validation efforts.