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WIPP: Lessons in transportation safety
As part of a future consent-based approach by the federal government to site new deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste, local communities and states that are considering hosting such facilities are sure to have many questions. Currently, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only example of such a repository in operation, and it offers the opportunity for state and local officials to visit and judge for themselves the risks and benefits of hosting a similar facility. But its history can also provide lessons for these officials, particularly the political process leading up to the opening of WIPP, the safety of WIPP operations and transportation of waste from generator facilities to the site, and the economic impacts the project has had on the local area of Carlsbad, as well as the rest of the state of New Mexico.
Arvind Sundaram, Hany Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1163-1181
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1812349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Can predictive models develop cognizance or awareness of how they have been used? Can models detect if they are being manipulated or executed in nonauthorized manners? Can a software track information propagation through its subroutines to improve execution efficiency? Can this be achieved in a covert manner, i.e., avoiding the use of additional variables, additional lines of code, and conventional logging files, and instead rely directly on the physics being simulated to develop the required cognizance? Achieving these goals under the looming threat of insiders is considered an open challenging problem. This paper introduces a new modeling paradigm to covertly develop cognizance that is of critical value when predictive software is used in both adversarial and nonadversarial settings. Given the wide range of applications possible with this new modeling paradigm, the paper will focus on introducing the mathematical theory and limit the initial demonstration to a physics-based model of a nuclear reactor. This model describes a representative industrial control system of a nuclear reactor model containing two coupled subsystems: a heat-producing core and a steam generator. The goal is to demonstrate how each subsystem physics model can remain cognizant of the state of the subsystem. The proposed methodology will provide communication solutions for future reactor technologies to enable advanced reactor control and remote reactor operations.