Undeniably, nuclear and radioactive material is most vulnerable during the transport phases of the nuclear fuel life cycle and nuclear and radioactive material supply chains. Yet these transport security gaps remain:
- adversaries have an upper hand during transport,
- inconsistent implementation complicates secure transport operations,
- widespread inadequacies in security measures for transport create additional challenges,
- an urgent need exists for strong leadership in transport security regimes for nuclear and radioactive material, and
- emerging technologies and evolving threats are altering the transport security landscape.
To tackle these gaps, the Transportation Security Engineering & Analysis Group is responsible for assessing and analyzing packages, systems, and processes for nuclear, radiological, chemical, or biological material transport. The group serves to mitigate risks to supply chain security interruptions of high consequence materials worldwide by staying ahead of the next-generation adversary. The group approaches transportation security from a multi-disciplinary perspective, bringing together expertise in engineering, planning, law, and operations.
To achieve their mission, the group possesses core competencies in policy and regulatory framework, research, and development, cyber and information security, insider mitigation, capacity building, and systems analysis/tradecraft.
ORNL recently opened the , enabling new research, development, and testing of security equipment. GEARS builds on ORNL’s science expertise in cyber resilience, remote sensing, data analysis, and nonproliferation to advance the state of the art in vehicle and transportation security. View the .
