Publications

Enhancing Power Plant Safety through Coupling Plant Simulators to Cyber Digital Architecture

Adams, Susan S.; Bruneau, Robert J.; Jacobs, Nicholas J.; Murchison, Nicole M.; Sandoval, Daniel R.; Seng, Bibiana E.

There are differences in how cyber - attack, sabotage, or discrete component failure mechanisms manifest within power plants and what these events would look like within the control room from an operator's perspective. This research focuses on understanding how a cyber event would affect the operation of the plant, how an operator would perceive the event, and if the operator's actions based on those perceptions will allow him/her to maintain plant safety. This research is funded as part of Sandia's Laborator y Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program to develop scenarios with cyber induced failure of plant systems coupled with a generic pressurized water reactor plant training simulator. The cyber scenario s w ere developed separately and injected into the simulator operational state to simulate an attack. These scenarios will determine if Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) operators can 1) recognize that the control room indicators were presenting incorrect or erroneous i nformation and 2) take appropriate actions to keep the plant safe. This will also provide the opportunity to assess the operator cognitive workload during such events and identify where improvements might be made. This paper will review results of a pilot study run with NPP operators to investigate performance under various cyber scenarios. The d iscussion will provide an overview of the approach, scenario selection, metrics captured , resulting insights into operator actions and plant response to multiple sc enarios of the NPP system .