Reducing digital risks and improving reliability in nuclear power integrated energy systems

Climate change and energy security are transforming the energy market leading to development of new integrated energy systems that coordinate multiple energy sources, energy storage, and industrial loads. Since renewables are often intermittent, the use of nuclear power plants can balance their irregular production with reliable and predictable energy generation. However, while the goal is to improve reliability and predictability, digital interconnections between facilities may lead to the introduction of unanticipated risks from the use of operational technology. These digital risks could include adversarial and non-adversarial risks from internal and external factors, such as human performance errors, design flaws, environmental conditions, and equipment degradation or failure. Similar to addressing nuclear safety risks, digital risks can be eliminated or mitigated during early design phases of the systems engineering lifecycle. Unlike safety risk, however, there is still an unmet need to integrate holistic digital risk into the decision analysis process. This paper explores risk-informed decision making at the mission level, facility level, and systems level during development of a concept of operations for a small modular reactor and integrated energy system project that has multiple interconnections and interdependencies. The examples provided demonstrate how objectives at each level will drive engineering questions and interdisciplinary decision analysis to balance competing objectives, stakeholder requirements, and constraints, while also considering functionality and performance, safety, digital risk, and reliability. Including digital risk considerations into the engineering decision analysis process for a nuclear power integrated energy system improves communication and integration among engineering teams to eliminate the silo effect, resulting in more effective, efficient, safe, secure, and reliable operations.