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A Strategy for NACS investment in Machine Learning

The Nuclear and Chemical Sciences (NACS) Division furnishes the expertise in the scientific areas of chemical, nuclear and isotopic sciences that are foundational in the Laboratory’s national security missions. This expertise is maintained and advanced through identification, development and application of state-of-the-art theoretical, computational and experimental methods and tools. Recent developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) techniques enabled by advances in computing capabilities and widespread availability of powerful software implementations have made use of these techniques ubiquitous across both science and industry. While the scope of AI/ML applications is incredibly large and evolves very rapidly, the topics most relevant to NACS missions fall into the general category of detecting, categorizing or identifying features in large, complex datasets using either supervised or unsupervised learning. This covers both basic scientific data analysis and the development of efficient surrogate models of real-life technological systems, experimental detectors, or theoretical models. To remain at the forefront of its core scientific disciplines, NACS must both cultivate ML expertise as well as continuously explore applying this expertise to new problems or utilizing new methods. This document identifies the key areas where this support is critical and provides a strategy for investing in them.

38 RADIATION CHEMISTRY, RADIOCHEMISTRY, AND NUCLEA↗

Creating Continuous Integration Infrastructure for Software Development on U.S. Department of Energy High-Performance Computing Systems

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) software deployment effort developed and advanced DevOps capabilities. One goal was to enable robust continuous integration (CI) workflows that span the protected high performance computing (HPC) environments found within many of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) national laboratories. This article highlights several challenges encountered with enabling automation, such as charging models for CI jobs, and meeting individualized security requirements that revolve around strongly associating running code with a human identity. Here, it also describes how the Jacamar CI tool evolved to meet latter requirements and became a key aspect of the solutions currently offered. Derived from this experience, we offer a conceptual framework for understanding current and future CI challenges at DOE facilities and offer suggestions for long-term solutions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

FAIR Ecosystems for Science at Scale

High Performance Computing (HPC) centers provide resources to users who require greater scale to “get science done”. They deploy infrastructure with singular hardware architectures, cutting-edge software environments, and stricter security measures as compared with users’ own resources. As a result, users often create and configure digital artifacts in ways that are specialized for the unique infrastructure at a given HPC center. Each user of that center will face similar challenges as they develop specialized solutions to take full advantages of the center’s resources, potentially resulting in significant duplication of effort. Much duplicated effort could be avoided, however, if users of these centers found it easier to discover others’ solutions and artifacts as well as share their own. The FAIR principles address this problem by presenting guidelines focused around metadata practices to be implemented by vaguely defined “communities”; in practice, these tend to gather by domain (e.g. bioinformatics, geosciences, agriculture). Domain-based communities can unfortunately end up functioning as silos that tend both to inhibit sharing of solutions and best practices as well as to encourage fragile and unsustainable improvised solutions in the absence of best-practice guidance. We propose that these communities pursuing “science at scale” be nurtured both individually and collectively by HPC centers so that users can take advantage of shared challenges across disciplines and potentially across HPC centers. We describe an architecture based on the EOSC-Life FAIR Workflows Collaboratory, specialized for use with and inside HPC centers such as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), and we speculate on user incentives to encourage adoption. We note that a focus on FAIR workflow components rather than FAIR workflows is more likely to benefit the users of HPC centers.

Wilkinson, Sean [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000214437479)↗

Design Considerations for Secure Wireless Sensor Communication Systems in Harsh Electromagnetic Environments of Nuclear Reactor Facilities

Wireless sensors can potentially play a significant role in safety, efficiency, and reliability of the instrumentation and control process in current and next generation nuclear power reactors. While conventional narrowband wireless sensors have shown a certain level of success in some nuclear power plants (NPPs), the radio frequency (RF) propagation challenges posed by the heavy metallic and cluttered environment of NPPs has prevented their widespread use in such operations. Furthermore, these challenges include RF wave propagation in harsh (reflective, absorptive, cluttered) environments, data security issues, and RF interference to and from other devices in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor core. In this paper, first we address how ultrawideband (UWB) RF technology can complement the narrowband (i.e., WiFi) solutions that have been used in some NPPs by providing an alternative solution in addressing the signal propagation issues in such electromagnetically harsh environments. Second, we discuss and present the UWB software simulation results on multipath harsh environments, and then address the data security issues. In the final sections of the paper, we present the experimental results of using UWB signaling in a representative harsh environment conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology research reactor site. We plan to develop the UWB communications hardware based on the results of this paper and report on its performance in the field with emphasis on the security aspects of the system in a subsequent paper.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Quantum Networks for Resilient Power Grids: Theory and Simulated Evaluation

Quantum networks are considered the future of secure communication in the coming quantum era. Yet there lack significant efforts on developing practical quantum networks for power grids. Here, in this paper, we establish a quantum network-based power grid (QNetGrid) framework and develops a real-time, reliable, flexible, programmable, and cost-effective QNetGrid software testbed containing repeater-based quantum communication, quantum routing, real software-defined networking (SDN) switches, and real-time networked microgrids (NMs) operations. It makes the following contributions: 1) a repeater and routing based quantum network simulator (QNSim) is developed, 2) repeaters with and without quantum memories are respectively simulated in QNSim, 3) different routing scenarios in QNetGrid are investigated, 4) a real-time QNetGrid software testbed is built in RTDS incorporating QNSim and real SDN switches, and 5) various test cases are designed, and experimental results produced with the QNetGrid testbed provide valuable insights for building quantum networks in power grids.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Spiking Markov Reward Process v.0.1

SAND2024-11150O The Spiking Markov Reward Process software is a spiking neural network that streams binary arithmetic and computes the state value function of a Markov reward process. The software will be released to the SpiNNcloud group for development of neuromorphic acceleration. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Wang, Felix↗

Developing Fugitive Emissions Sensor Networks

This document summarizes research performed under the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project titled Developing Fugitive Emissions Sensor Networks: New Optimization Algorithms for Monitoring, Measurement and Verification. The purpose of this project is to develop methods and software to enhance detection programs through optimal design of the sensor network. This project includes both software development and field work. While this project is focused on methane emissions, the sensor placement optimization framework can be applied to a wide range of applications, including the placement of water quality sensors, surveillance cameras, fire and chemical detectors. This research has the potential to improve national security by improving the way sensors are deployed in the field.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Securing Inverter Communication: Proactive Intrusion Detection and Mitigation System to Tap, Analyze, and Act

The electric grid has undergone rapid, revolutionary changes in recent years; from the addition of advanced smart technologies to the growing penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) to increased interconnectivity and communications. However, these added communications, access interfaces, and third-party software to enable autonomous control schemes and interconnectivity also expand the attack surface of the grid. To address the gap of DER cybersecurity and secure the grid-edge to motivate a holistic, defense-in-depth approach, a proactive intrusion detection and mitigation system (PIDMS) device was developed to secure PV smart inverter communications. The PIDMS was developed as a distributed, flexible bump-in-the-wire (BITW) solution for protecting PV smart inverter communications. Both cyber (network traffic) and physical (power system measurements) are processed using network intrusion monitoring tools and custom machinelearning algorithms for deep packet analysis and cyber-physical event correlation. The PIDMS not only detects abnormal events but also deploys mitigations to limit or eliminate system impact; the PIDMS communicates with peer PIDMSs at different locations using the MQTT protocol for increased situational awareness and alerting. The details of the PIDMS methodology and prototype development are detailed in this report as well as the evaluation results within a cyber-physical emulation environment and subsequent industry feedback.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Efficient Clustering of Software Vulnerabilities using Self Organizing Map (SOM)

The common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) database was created with a mission to ``identify, define, and catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities''. This rich body of information can be used to enable rapid and efficient response to secure and defend cyber operations and protect critical cyber infrastructure. The main goal of this paper is to develop a visual analytics tool to enable deep analysis of CVEs using unsupervised clustering techniques. We enhance our analysis by first mapping CVEs to hierarchical-classes in Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) using information in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Both the mapping and the numerical representation of CVEs are enabled by V2W-BERT, which uses natural language processing of the extensive information in NVD to generate a large tabular database of 137,226 CVE entries from 1999 to 2020, where each CVE is represented by a vector of 768 numerical features. The vectorized data is processed by Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), which is an unsupervised machine learning technique for dimensionality reduction, visual representation and clustering. Using a Torus map of 6417 units, we achieve ~10-fold data compression of ~140k CVEs using SOM. The trained map is further clustered using standard K-means clustering into 138 clusters of CVEs. We conducted a brief investigation of the rich mapping of CVEs to best-matching-units to K-means clusters, as well as CVEs to CWEs. For example, this novel mapping provided insight into the role of CWE-59 and CWE-264 in several CVEs that is otherwise hard to explore in the original data. We conclude that our this novel approach will not only enable deep analysis of the complex relationships between CVEs and CWEs, but also a mechanism to quickly respond to and design mitigation actions for rapidly evolving vulnerabilities that have not been mapped to existing CWEs.

Panchal, Khyati↗

Hydrogen Extremely Low Probability of Rupture Version 1

SAND2024-08511O The Hydrogen Extremely Low Probability of Rupture (HELPR) software toolkit provides probabilistic fracture assessments of natural gas infrastructure for transporting hydrogen. Using probabilistic sampling and sensitivity analysis—along with engineering fatigue and fracture mechanics— the software develops models that can predict structural integrity measures for natural gas pipelines under stress. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Schroeder, Benjamin↗

Wind Energy Forecasting with the Weather Research and Forecasting Model

This was a collaborative effort between Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC as manager and operator of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Siemens Energy, Inc. (Siemens) to develop a wind resource forecasting tool. LLNL was to develop an independent high-resolution mesoscale modeling capability forecasting tool that could be implemented in conjunction with existing wind farm control and monitoring software to provide forecasting of wind resources using local observations of winds and temperature. Research with LLNL’s state-of-the-art large-eddy simulation meteorological prediction model, based on the community WRF model and innovative turbulence parameterizations, would improve that model’s applicability to large wind farms offshore and in complex terrain. The modeling capability would include uncertainty quantification. Finally, the application of the modeling tool and existing global climate change predictions would enable the delineation of the likely effects of climate change on wind resources. Siemens was to provide high time resolution hub-height wind speed and other meteorological data streams, including temperature profiles from wind farms, for LLNL to incorporate into the modeling system, to validate and tune this forecasting model for their locations of interest. These data streams would also be used for longer-term studies of correlations of wind resources to climate oscillations to indicate how long-term climate change trends may affect the available wind resource. Siemens would also provide information and observations of turbine wakes for incorporation into the modeling tool. By implementing state-of-the-art turbulence parameterizations into a simulation model and/or ensembles of simulation models, and by integrating real-time hub height wind speed and other meteorological datastreams from wind farms into that model or ensemble of models, LLNL would develop a forecasting tool that could be implemented by Siemens as an add-on to existing wind farm control and monitoring software to provide owners with useful resource forecasting. The desired outcome was that the accuracy level of the output would be sufficient to substantiate power output commitments. The final deliverable for this work would consist of a document outlining the algorithms and software tools that could be integrated into Siemens Wind Park Supervisor.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

NMIS/FNMIS Comparison for US DOE Office of Nuclear Verification

A comparison of the characteristics of the Nuclear Materials Identification System (NMIS) and its more fieldable version that was developed for future treaty applications, the Fieldable Nuclear Materials Identification System (FNMIS), is presented. Both systems were developed for the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Verification (ONV). Under the Warhead Safety and Security Exchange Agreement, NMIS was also jointly developed with the Russian Federation. The configuration of the systems and their characteristics are described. In addition, the capabilities, advantages and disadvantages, and a comparison fast-neutron transmission imaging measurement is presented. The comparison measurements gave essentially the same results because the software and imaging apparatus have the same capabilities, with the FNMIS completing the measurements slightly faster. NMIS is an open system that is more easily modified for research applications and is not suitable for the ONV mission, and FNMIS is compatible with an information barrier, which is more useful for ONV applications.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗

SBIR Phase II Final Report - A Robust Wireless Communication System for Harsh Environments Including Nuclear Facilities

This is the Final Report for the DOE Phase II SBIR project “A Robust Wireless Communication System for Harsh Environments Including Nuclear Facilities.” The topics covered herein include technical progress made, progress against the planned milestones and deliverables, project outcomes, and a discussion on future expectations of deployment and impacts of the results of this work. In brief, all planned work for the project was successfully completed, on or ahead of schedule and on budget. The major accomplishment was the successful development of new sensor/communications systems with wideband (WB)/ultra-wideband (UWB) communications based on the software-defined-radio (SDR) technology to improve sensing and control in nuclear power plants and then a broad range of similar sensing applications. The impacts of these disciplines/focuses of this SBIR include: A new multi-frequency SDR-based architecture with WB/UWB communications integrated with sensors was developed, utilizing 310 MHz, 450 MHz, 915 MHz, and 5 GHz frequencies; Secure communications using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm; Sensing possibilities not effectively addressed by previous technologies was addressed; and, The newly developed wireless sensor communications system can adapt its communications parameters to its operational environment for optimal performance. The performance of this system has been evaluated by systematic laboratory and field testing. The field testing was conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Nuclear Test Reactor, and the McClellan Nuclear center at the University of California Davis (UC Davis), as well as at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The success in this project resulted in DSI being awarded “The DOE’s 2018 SBIR/STTR Small Business of the Year”. This technology has attracted interest from The Rolls Royce company with ongoing discussions under NDA for potential strategic partnership between DSI and Rolls Royce in providing wireless sensor communications in nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the success of this project has attracted significant interest from the United Nations International Atomic Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria, as well as other DOE and DOD offices. Currently, per request from IAEA, DOE’s office of International Safeguards has funded DSI to develop a WB/UWB wireless communication system for real-time transmission of images from IAEA’s safeguards cameras in various nuclear facilities. DSI also has received a Phase II and Phase II.5 SBIR awards from ARMY and NAVY for wireless communications capability for various DOD aircraft.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Microgrid Design Analysis Using Technology Management Optimization and the Performance Reliability Model

Microgrids are a focus of localized energy production that support resiliency, security, local con- trol, and increased access to renewable resources (among other potential benefits). The Smart Power Infrastructure Demonstration for Energy Reliability and Security (SPIDERS) Joint Capa- bility Technology Demonstration (JCTD) program between the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy (DOE), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) resulted in the pre- liminary design and deployment of three microgrids at military installations. This paper is focused on the analysis process and supporting software used to determine optimal designs for energy surety microgrids (ESMs) in the SPIDERS project. There are two key pieces of software, an ex- isting software application developed by Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) called Technology Management Optimization (TMO) and a new simulation developed for SPIDERS called the per- formance reliability model (PRM). TMO is a decision support tool that performs multi-objective optimization over a mixed discrete/continuous search space for which the performance measures are unrestricted in form. The PRM is able to statistically quantify the performance and reliability of a microgrid operating in islanded mode (disconnected from any utility power source). Together, these two software applications were used as part of the ESM process to generate the preliminary designs presented by SNL-led DOE team to the DOD. Acknowledgements Sandia National Laboratories and the SPIDERS technical team would like to acknowledge the following for help in the project: * Mike Hightower, who has been the key driving force for Energy Surety Microgrids * Juan Torres and Abbas Akhil, who developed the concept of microgrids for military instal- lations * Merrill Smith, U.S. Department of Energy SPIDERS Program Manager * Ross Roley and Rich Trundy from U.S. Pacific Command * Bill Waugaman and Bill Beary from U.S. Northern Command * Tarek Abdallah, Melanie Johnson, and Harold Sanborn of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory * Colleagues from Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) for their reviews, suggestions, and participation in the work.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗

A Scalable HPC Insider Threat Monitoring System

Cyber Equations, Inc. is reporting on the results of its DOE SBIR Phase I project for the development of a Scalable HPC Insider Threat Monitoring System. This final report to the Department of Energy for Task DE-FOA-0001618 covers the period from 02/21/2017 to 02/20/2018 and summarizes the larger research accomplishments, which can be divided in theoretical and laboratory experiments. One of the many challenges for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is the support of the high-performance computing (HPC) centers while providing quality information services, strategic vision, leadership, technical expertise, and capabilities necessary to enable the DOE to deliver effective, efficient, economical, and secure HPC services. In order to realize a secure DOE laboratory enterprise, DOE facilities operations must counter a wide range of cyber insider threats, from unsophisticated adversaries up to advanced, nation state sponsored actors. The DOE laboratories also presents an enormous insider attack surface of an ever-growing number of computers, networks, and devices all running a myriad of software. In addition, the DOE laboratories are connected to a variety of external organizations which multiplies the possibility of insider threat. During this SBIR project Cyber Equations developed a strategic combination of supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques to control scale and classify whether entities, such as hosts, actors, or documents, are showing suspicious insider behavior. We conducted experiments using real cyber data to show that changes in observable behavior (e.g., changes in outbound traffic patterns) are indicative of attacks executing (e.g., insiders exfiltrating data, bots calling home, or an attack spreading). The features and methods we use, have been used in the anomaly detection research and development community for a significant amount of time and robust implementations are openly available. K-Means clustering, Decision Trees, and Support Vector Machine based classifiers are readily available through the R language and open source H20 machine learning framework. The Cyber Equations approach is novel in its use of these classifiers combined with Hadoop based parallel processing technology. The five stages of processing used by CyberInsider improve scalability and reduce the high number of false positives normally associated with network anomaly detection. In summary, the Cyber Equations has successfully accomplished all of its Phase I tasks and demonstrated the feasibility of the Insider Threat Monitoring System.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Remote Target Engagement System (RTES) Generation 4 ("Gen 4")

RTES is designed to provide teleoperation of remote weapon platform capability at defensive physical protection locations requiring active lethal capabilities for final access denial. Multiple operator consoles allow for coordinated engagement of many weapon platforms by one or more operator consoles. This results in faster response times, increased effectiveness, and increased survivability from removing response force from harm's way increasing survivability. This software is developed against DoD requirements and has been safety and functionally reviewed and approved for operational use. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525. SAND2021-1935 O

Klingler, KristopherR.↗

A Review of Technologies that can Provide a 'Root of Trust' for Operational Technologies

The supply chain attack pathway is being increasingly used by adversaries to bypass security controls and gain unauthorized access to sensitive networks and equipment (e.g., Critical Digital Assets). Cyber-attacks targeting supply chain generally aim to compromise the environments, products, or services of vendors and suppliers to inject, add, or substitute authentic software and hardware with malicious elements. These malicious elements are deemed to be authentic as they arise from the vendor or supplier (i.e., the supply chain). This research aims at providing a survey of technologies that have the potential to reduce exposure of sensitive networks and equipment to these attacks, thereby improving tamper resistance. The recent advances in the performance and capabilities of these technologies in recent years has increased their potential applications to reduce or mitigate exposure of the supply chain attack pathway. The focus being on providing an analysis of the benefits and disadvantages of smart cards, secure tokens, and elements to provide root of trust. This analysis provides evidence that these roots of trust can increase the technical capability of equipment and networks to authenticate changes to software and configuration thereby increasing resilience to some supply chain attacks, such as those related to logistics and ICT channels, but not development environment attacks.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Structural Analysis Approach for the Defense Programs Package 3 (DPP-3)

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is the design authority for a new Type B hazardous materials transportation package designated as the Defense Programs Package 3 (DPP-3) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The DPP-3 has been developed using similar materials and fabrication methods employed in previous U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), DOE, and NNSA certified packages. The DPP-3 design criteria are derived from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (BPVC), NNSA guidance and NRC regulatory guides in order to safely and securely transport a variety of payloads. Final regulatory approval by the NNSA will require physical testing to demonstrate that the containment vessel (CV) remains leaktight after enduring the entire regulatory testing sequence prescribed in Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations Part 71 (10 CFR 71). In order to gain confidence that the DPP-3 will remain leaktight after testing, the DPP-3 has been structurally analyzed using the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software LS-DYNA. The FEA analyses serve two general purposes: first, they aid in design and development of the package, and second, they advise as to which drop orientations are expected to cause the most damage during regulatory testing. This paper will discuss how the design criteria are incorporated into analytical techniques needed to evaluate the FEA structural simulation results for 10 CFR 71 conditions to give confidence the DPP-3 testing campaign will be successful.

Sakalaukus Jr., Peter J.↗