Year
1978
Abstract
Design and assessment of the material control aspect of nuclear safeguard systems requires consideration of three types of functional ele- ments: (1) material handling or processing, (2) actions of adversaries in their attempt to divert nuclear materials from their normal containment, and (3) components of material control and accounting and physical security sys- tems that detect and respond to stimuli generated by the adversary actions. This paper describes a Material Control System Simulator (MCSS) program that simplifies computer simulation of safeguard systems by providing predefined functional models of these three types of elements. Specification of model systems requires only data pertaining to the performance characterization of these functional elements, so users with no prior computer simulation or programming experience can model and study the dynamic performance of safe- guard systems. The paper presents an overview of MCSS and an example diver- sion attempt simulation that illustrates some of the features of the pro- gram.