About the Topic: As fiscal year 2001 came to an end, the Hart-Rudman Commission and its recommendations for a post-Cold War national security structure were still on the agenda of Washington decision-makers. After the attacks of September 11, the comprehensive approach envisioned in Hart-Rudman was abandoned in favor of a piecemeal approach, resulting in such legislation as the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. As we enter what could be described as a "post-post-9/11 environment," it is worth asking whether the U.S. needs to consider a more comprehensive review, with Hart-Rudman as a starting point.

About the Speaker: William Nolte is research professor and director, Center for Intelligence Research and Education, at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland.  He retired from federal service in 2006 as the chancellor of the National Intelligence University system within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A career National Security Agency officer, he served in a range of positions as senior intelligence authority, director of education and training, and chief of legislative affairs at NSA; as deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia and later director of strategic planning at the National Intelligence Council; and as assistant deputy DCI for analysis. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland, and has taught at Georgetown and George Washington universities.

This presentation will describe the NRC’s mission, the traditional approach to regulation of nuclear power facilities, and the NRC’s more recent use of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) in regulation. The presentation will also explore uncertainties in PRA and the role they play in NRC decision making.

About the speaker: The Honorable George Apostolakis was sworn in as a Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on April 23, 2010, to a term ending on June 30, 2014.

Dr. Apostolakis has had a distinguished career as an engineer, professor and risk analyst. Before joining the NRC, he was a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also a member and former Chairman of the statutory Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards of the NRC.

In 2007, Dr. Apostolakis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "innovations in the theory and practice of probabilistic risk assessment and risk management." He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety and is the founder of the International Conferences on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management. He received the Tommy Thompson Award for his contributions to improvement of reactor safety in 1999 and the Arthur Holly Compton Award in Education in 2005 from the American Nuclear Society.

Dr. Apostolakis is an internationally recognized expert in risk assessment. He has published more than 120 papers in technical journals and has made numerous presentations at national and international conferences. He has edited or co-edited eight books and conference proceedings and has participated in many probabilistic risk assessment courses and reviews.

Dr. Apostolakis received his diploma in electrical engineering from the National Technical University in Athens, Greece in 1969. He earned a master's degree in engineering science in 1970 and a Ph.D. in engineering science and applied mathematics in 1973, both from the California Institute of Technology.

About the Topic: Japan’s March 2011 Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami led to core damage in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station. This presentation will describe both the short-term and long-term actions of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to implement lessons learned from the Fukushima accident and will highlight Commissioner Apostolakis’ views on the accident. The presentation will also describe the findings of the Commissioner’s Risk Management Task Force chartered to develop a strategic vision and options for adopting a more comprehensive and holistic risk-informed, performance-based regulatory approach for the NRC.

About the Speaker: George Apostolakis was sworn in as a Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on April 23, 2010, to a term ending on June 30, 2014. 

Dr. Apostolakis has had a distinguished career as an engineer, professor and risk analyst. Before joining the NRC, he was a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He was also a member and former Chairman of the statutory Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards of the NRC. In 2007, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "innovations in the theory and practice of probabilistic risk assessment and risk management." He received the Tommy Thompson Award for his contributions to improvement of reactor safety in 1999 and the Arthur Holly Compton Award in Education in 2005 from the American Nuclear Society.

Sponsored by

The Preventive Defense Project and the

CISAC Science Seminar Series

Roughly 85% of the critical infrastructure systems in the United States is owned or operated by the private sector. Managers of these systems must keep everything running and try to ensure nothing bad happens, despite increasing system complexity and demand for continuing improvements in efficiency. This challenge naturally leads to the questions “which parts of an infrastructure are critical,” “how critical are they,” and “how should we invest limited budget to defend our infrastructure?”

We introduce two- and three-stage optimization models that represent the strategic, game-theoretic interactions between preparations to defend critical infrastructure, an “attacker” who observes these preparations before acting, and a “defender” who operates the surviving infrastructure as best as possible after an optimal attack. We identify worst-case disruptions in the operation of a system by solving a system interdiction problem. Then, given an available budget and list of possible defensive investments (e.g., hardening, redundancy, capacity expansion), we solve for a combination of investments that makes the system maximally resilient to worst-case disruption. We show some unexpected results that have proven insightful.

These models apply equally well to government, military, and commercial systems. Between our NPS student-officers and faculty, we have conducted over 150 case studies on systems ranging from electric power, to transportation, to supply chains, to the Internet.

About the speaker: David L. Alderson, Ph.D, joined the Naval Postgraduate School faculty in 2006 after working for three years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on the function and operation of critical infrastructures, with particular emphasis on how to invest limited resources to ensure efficient and resilient performance in the face of accidents, failures, natural disasters, or deliberate attacks. He currently serves as the Director of the NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID). As part of a Multiple University Research Initiative (MURI) team studying "Next-Generation Network Science," he studies tradeoffs between efficiency, complexity, and fragility in a wide variety of public and private network-centric systems. He has extensive experience working on the Internet and other complex communication networks, having been a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA. He is a member of INFORMS and MORS.