Plant Design as an Adjunct to Physical Protection

Using a modern design for a nuclear power plant as a point of departure, this study examines the enhancement of protection which may be achieved by changes to the design. These changes include concepts such as complete physical separation of redundant trains of safety equipment, hardened enclosures for water storage tanks, and hardened shutdown heat removal systems. The degree of enhancement (value) is examined in terms such as the potential reduction in the number of vital areas and the increase in probability of adversary sequence interruption. The impacts considered include constraints imposed upon operations and maintenance personnel and increased capital and operating costs. The study concludes that increased resistance to sabotage can be achieved with an appropriate combination of design and physical protection measures, but that structural design changes alone do not provide significant increases in protection. Of the design alternatives studied, the hardened decay heat removal system with appropriate administrative controls appears to provide the best tradeoffs between additional protection and impacts.