Nuclear Protection

State-of-the-art products come from international consortium

• By Katharina Geutebruck
• Jul 01, 2010

The International Special Training Center, near Obninsk in the Russian Federation, includes a training facility for the protection of nuclear materials and installations.

The facility opened in May 2009, following an extensive upgrade.

Guests recently had the opportunity to tour the indoor and outdoor training and testing grounds and the array of new security equipment provided by manufacturers in the United States, Canada, Israel, Italy, Japan, France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom.

State-of-the-Art Protection
The ISTC is a national certification and testing laboratory for physical protection equipment for Russian power plants and engineering structures. Set up in 1993, the goal of the intergovernmental cooperation between the United States, Russia, the European Union and Japan was to redirect former Soviet weapons scientists to explore peaceful research and reduce proliferation of the mass destruction weapons technologies.

The center supports a wide variety of science and technology projects in biotechnologies and the environment as well as nuclear studies and the improvement of nuclear safety.

“Besides always being networkable and open for integration, the systems are particularly suitable for this kind of application because of their video and alarm management characteristics,” said Lev Datsenko, Geutebruck’s regional manager for Eastern Europe. “This will ensure that operators have complete control of extensive and complex installations. An additional attraction is that their video encoding is so fast that there are no latency problems so users get real-time handling of speed dome cameras and pan and tilt systems.”

Recent Upgrades
With Canada’s support through its Security Fund, the International Atomic Energy Agency has been able to upgrade facilities at Obninsk. This is where operators and inspectors of physical protection systems at nuclear facilities from the former Soviet Union and other IAEA member states receive practical training and newly developed equipment is tested and approved for use in the field.

To ensure that its training on combating attack, sabotage and theft of nuclear materials is as realistic as possible, the center now has a range of security equipment typical of current nuclear installations.

Applications at the site include Geutebruck’s re_porter and GeViScope video security platforms, which have been integrated with a large number of thirdparty systems, including person and vehicle access control systems, and a variety of different intruder and perimeter detection facilities to simulate the complex systems used in nuclear plants.

The center also employs a pan-and-tilt camera system at the outdoor training area. This color camera system also is equipped with an IR spotlight, but the system can incorporate a CCD camera and a thermal imaging cameras to enable the identification of intruders in fog and smoke.