Evaluating Safeguards Effectiveness Against Protracted Theft of Special Nuclear Material by Insiders

The new draft DOE Material Control and Accountability Order 5633.3 requires that facilities handling special nuclear material (SNM) evaluate their effectiveness against protracted theft of SNM. Protracted theft means repeated thefts of small quantities of material to accumulate a goal quantity. To evaluate the safeguards effectiveness against protracted thefts, one must addresses several issues: (1) defining relevant time frames for various threat scenarios and delayed detection safeguards; (2) identifying which safeguards come into play more than once because of repeated adversary actions or because of periodic occurrence during the theft time frame (e.g., daily administrative check on presence of material); (3) considering whether the second and subsequent applications of safeguards are different in effectiveness from the first; (4) synthesizing how physical security, material control, and material accountability safeguards combine to provide protection against protracted theft scenarios. In this paper we discuss these issues and describe how we are augmenting the Analytic System and Software for Evaluating Safeguards and Security (ASSESS) to provide the user with a tool for evaluating effectiveness against protracted theft. Currently, the Insider module of ASSESS focuses on evaluating the \"timely\" detection of abrupt theft attempts by various types of single nonviolent insiders. In this paper we describe the approach we're implementing to augment ASSESS to handle various cases of protracted theft attempts.