Annual Report

Nuclear Policy, Safety, Security
and Regulation
Nuclear policy and its impact on energy
generation scenarios within the UK and
for other countries that are developing
nuclear power. Generation of base-load
electricity by nuclear power stations
with minimal emissions. Questions surrounding
the economic viability, and
perceived risks and public acceptability
associated with powerplant operations
and radioactive wastes.
a supercomputer to analyse over 134 million
possible inspection timelines that the software
would compute an ‘optimum’ regime schedule
over a treaty lifespan of 2 years.
The models and results can then be studied
and their expected outcomes assessed by AWE
for predicting behaviour and assisting in decision
making situations regarding proposed inspection
regime treaties.
PhD Projects
Formal Verification of Treaty Processes
Researcher: Paul Beaumont
Supervisor: Prof. Michael Huth, Prof. Chris Hankin
Sponsor: AWE
This research project aims to extend and combine
mathematical modelling approaches to
work with the inherent lack of available data in
the domain of nuclear arms control treaty design
and implementation.
We have been working with Bayesian Belief Networks,
dynamical systems and game theoretic
frameworks to model potential arms control
arrangements with under-specified symbolic
parameters. Our unique contribution is to assert
equations for the beliefs and inspections
control processes in a piece of software known
as Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). This
offers a general purpose approach to the automated
analysis of mathematical models and
we use SMT to analyse the under-specifications
and build confidence through robust analysis.
These new modelling and analysis methods allow
for a much more sophisticated approach
to modelling arms control: we have harnessed
Centre for Nuclear Engineering Annual Report 2014-2016 58