At Lawrence Livermore, subject matter experts (SMEs) in wide-ranging disciplines apply cutting-edge science and engineering capabilities to make transformative technological breakthroughs in service to the nation. Perhaps less well known is that the Laboratory’s science and engineering prowess permeates into the operations and business side of the house, enabling a systems-based approach to physical security that protects the people, evolving infrastructure, materials, and other essential resources needed to successfully execute programmatic objectives.
Indeed, the Laboratory is responsible for more than 450,000 critical assets—personnel, radiological materials, biological agents and toxins, chemicals, sensitive information, facilities, and other critical program resources—that, under threat from bad actors, could have serious repercussions. Meticulous attention to the design and assessment of the physical systems used to protect these critical assets allows programs to conduct mission-relevant work in a safe and regulatory-compliant environment.
The Laboratory’s Security Planning and Analysis Group (SPAG), a team of scientific and technical SMEs, provides the analytical basis for Livermore’s Safeguards and Security Program. “SPAG is responsible for the science of security,” says group leader Daniel Meachum. With extensive experience in areas ranging from biology and radiological materials to system integration and tactical response, SPAG applies its vast expertise to develop protection strategies for high-consequence targets and coordinates with programs and federal risk acceptance authorities to implement effective measures. Meachum says, “Our goal is to protect security assets at Livermore by meeting Department of Energy (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) requirements in a way that minimizes impact to operations, so we can better enable the mission.”
Detect, Delay, Respond
SPAG’s systems-based approach to physical security—a continuous feedback loop of identification, characterization, risk assessment, risk coordination and management, and performance validation—ensures protection systems meet or exceed DOE compliance requirements and reduce programmatic impacts, decrease costs, and keep overall system reliability high. Chemicals that pose a dispersal risk serve as an example of this approach in practice. “If we screen those chemical assets using only conservative criteria, the protection levels must fulfill the most stringent requirements,” says Sam Lee, Security’s Protection Program manager and lead of the Assurance Management Office. “However, if we conduct a more advanced analysis based on how the chemical is stored, how it behaves in its present form, and the atmospherics of the area, we can qualitatively show why a considered risk is not a legitimate concern.”
For those assets with the highest-risk probabilities, SPAG conducts performance-based assessments, which have an increased level of analytical rigor. “For these assets, we must demonstrate the performance of the protection system to our federal risk acceptance authorities, showing how the components effectively mitigate the risk,” says Grant Caudill, a health physicist and the SPAG team’s radiological materials SME. “We have different ways to accomplish effective performance through three key variables: detect, delay, and respond.”
Relative to any asset, these three variables provide the basis for any protection system design and are used to ascertain its effectiveness score—a metric for how well the system executes its function. Under the “detect” umbrella are tools such as cameras, sensors, and alarms. “Delay” relates to implementing conditions that would slow down bad actors from accomplishing their goal—installing fences, concertina wire, and concrete vehicle barriers, for example. Finally, “respond” defines the tactical methodologies for apprehending perpetrators. Lee says, “When developing protection strategies, these three components together comprise systems that are graded relative to the types of assets.”
Advanced Tools for the Job
Developing effective protection strategies begins with asset identification. Caudill says, “We utilize the Laboratory’s many institutional databases, which individually contain information on different asset types, to develop a comprehensive inventory.” Over the last year, Livermore biologist and SPAG biological agents and toxins SME, Jacky Lo, has been integrating AI to improve the identification process. “AI provides an extremely efficient way to write many lines of code to help digest and process all the raw data,” says Lo. The framework is seamless—a tandem AI and workflow automation process that scrubs unnecessary data from the collection and delivers a cleaner dataset from which to start follow-on tasks. Lo notes, “By integrating AI with workflow automation, we significantly reduced the time and effort required. What once took two analysts over eight weeks to do, we can now do with one analyst in a week.”
SPAG next turns its attention to characterizing each asset according to DOE Orders, a process that involves categorizing assets into “protection levels” based on the potential consequences of loss. Lo says, “For instance, if biological, chemical, or radiological materials were used for a dispersal event, we would want to know whether that incident would be localized or extend outside the Laboratory.” This type of information informs the asset’s protection level designation, with higher risk assets requiring a more extensive analysis and a tailored protection strategy.
SPAG leverages the Laboratory’s unique modeling and analysis capabilities to produce tangible data for assessments. The National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC) develops tools essential for dispersion modeling, helping evaluate where the most dangerous or highest concentrations of a hazardous material will travel if released into the air. (See S&TR, December 2024, Eyes on the Environment.) Lee says, “We input atmospherics and environmental factors into Livermore-developed software for tracking dispersal events using real-time weather data.” NARAC’s accessibility to SPAG and wide acceptance as a gold standard in atmospheric modeling by DOE and NNSA makes it indispensable for providing trusted data to stakeholders for informing protective strategy decisions.
The Laboratory’s High Explosives Applications Facility (HEAF)—a DOE–NNSA Center of Excellence for high explosives research and development—is another reliable capability. “HEAF helps analyze delay mechanisms, such as vehicle barriers, for determining standoff distance for a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device,” says Lee. The team uses different blast modeling solutions with varying levels of sophistication to evaluate the effects of blast overpressure (the rapid air pressure increase caused by an explosion’s shock wave). Rather than manually drawing out blast radii with a compass and a map, explosive experts can perform much more detailed analyses, considering building material compositions and other features to determine more realistic standoff distances.
Utilizing advances in modeling and simulation, Caudill has also been working extensively on conceptual vulnerability assessments with the modeling company RhinoCorps to develop ModSim (modeling and simulation) environments using virtual representations of real-world conditions. Meachum says, “These simulations are essentially digital twins of some Laboratory facilities that we can use to evaluate the effectiveness of the physical protection systems for detect, delay, respond; probability of neutralization; and overall system effectiveness based off of the design basis threat, adversary capabilities, and other scenarios.”
Based on DOE Orders and the team’s assessments, SPAG then provides the analysis that informs which physical protection components to implement. Modeling helps at this phase, too, allowing the team to compare how much and which types of detect, delay, and respond mitigations most effectively address threats to intended targets. The team then validates the systems through rigorous performance testing. Michael Ramirez, a former member of the Laboratory’s Protective Force who has an extensive background in security, is SPAG’s performance testing SME. “Our purpose is to make sure that we’re maintaining the health of our systems and ensuring that our responses are on point with our protection strategy,” he says.
The team conducts evaluations routinely, but systems are also put through periodic stress tests during major exercises, wherein the entire detect, delay, and respond plan is enacted for a manufactured scenario. Meachum says, “Performance testing validates the figures of merit for safeguards and security and ensures that the data used in the analyses are accurate and that the systems are effective in the way we credit them in the assessments.” In cases where multiple system designs are deemed acceptable for implementation, the consideration becomes one of cost and impact to the Laboratory. The SPAG team spends time evaluating what the most cost-effective implementations would be and whether redundancies in system-level security can be exploited to protect multiple assets. Lee says, “Our performance- and risk-based security operations concept supports customers in their decisions to accept risk where appropriate because they understand we have limited resources and a finite budget.”
Cooperation Is Everything
The SPAG team agrees that the success of the entire security process is a collaborative effort. Meachum says, “Cooperation is key. We engage with programmatic stakeholders and risk acceptance authorities to determine the best strategy to protect assets in an order-compliant manner with high system effectiveness while also minimizing impact to operations—that level of effort requires partnership.”
SPAG’s SMEs are vital to this effort. They help identify the attractiveness level of items in their purview and assist with evaluating risks and mitigations. They also serve as points of contact between program authorities to coordinate assessment activities. Collectively, SPAG strives for interoperability among the other mission-enabling organizations, such as Emergency Management and the Environment, Safety, and Health Directorate—each with their own requirements related to high-risk assets. Meachum says, “We are working to collaborate more effectively with our counterparts to set one common operating picture and reduce the burden on facilities.”
The Laboratory’s involvement in security also includes collaboration with other institutions. NNSA maintains an integrated project team where SMEs interact with federal employees to identify best practices and evolving criteria. “To be compliant and thorough in our assessments, we have to perform our analyses a certain way, and although a bit more effort may be required initially, ultimately, we are being good stewards by not needlessly wasting money,” says Lee. “When we all work together, we can better facilitate the Laboratory’s important work. In fulfilling our security mission, the Laboratory can accomplish its mission to perform cutting-edge science.”
—Caryn Meissner
For further information contact Sam Lee (925) 422-9162 (lee1033 [at] llnl.gov (lee1033[at]llnl[dot]gov)) or Dan Meachum (925) 424-3470 (meachum2 [at] llnl.gov (meachum2[at]llnl[dot]gov)).
