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U.S. Plans to Tighten Nuclear Power Plant Security
CDMA_Demo writes "The 103 nuclear reactors running in USA can voluntarily agree to follow a new 15 page update to a 1996 regulatory guide. The update notes possibility of "unauthorized, undesirable, and unsafe intrusions", and recommends measures aginst such activities. It also recommends such facilities to be cut off from external networks: "Remote access...[that may pose a potential security risk]...should not be implemented". The Slammer worm in 2001 managed to bring down the network at Ohio's David-Besse nuclear plant and concerns kept growing at the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)."
Please google for the string "dirty bomb".
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
I remember reading the article and that somewhere down the line it said that it was workstations that went down, not anything related to power generation capabilities or plant safety. Maybe someone can find a link to that article about that particular incident, but as I recall the facts of the article were far less, uh, scandalous than the headline.
- Revamp the rail network; it's currently in a state where it can't service the whole country.
- Electrify the entire rail network.
- Electrify city streets in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. (in the form of overhead power lines).
- Replace all the diesel/petrol burning trucks with trains (for inter-city transport) or electric trucks (for intra-city transport).
- Replace all private cars with electric cars.
- Introduce a large-scale repair crew for when the lines inevitably break for whatever reason.
Then there's air transport. I can't see 747s being powered by electricity any time soon. And as for non transport needs, what about plastics? Fertiliser? Chemicals in general?And once you've done all this -- how much did it cost you? How much will the electricity generation (which has just gone up an order of magnitude, most likely) cost? How will you store all the waste? (A lot of that last point can be taken care of with reprocessing.) And finally: how will you get over the politic hurdle of the populace's perception that "nuclear == bad"?
Probably the best bet for nuclear power would be fusion, and that's a fair way off yet before it's practical (if it ever is!)
My home state of Maine became the site of the first complete decomissioning of a large commercial reactor. The plant became operational in '72 ( and it had to survive a referendum to close it in '80, '82, and '87). In '95 it was shutdown many months for repairs and they discovered cracks in the steam generator tubes. The plant opened back up for less than a year I believe, they evaluated the cost to refit the plant and they decided they would have a hard time making back the investment in refitting the plant, so they shut it down permanently. They had originally intended to operate the plant at least until 2020 or 2030. Part of the huge cost was the fact that they need to store the waste onsite. Now all that is left of the plant is a semi-permanent high-level waste storage facility on a few acre footprint. Several hundred acres of the plants land are already being developed on. Several hundred more are a peninsula where the waste storage is located and the gated access make it less attractive for commercial development.
Bush wants to have a new reactor running in the US in the next 10 years. This will be the first approved since '79 and the first to come online since the mid 90's.
A chemical weapon is easier to make, more deadly, spreads further, and is harder to clean up because it gets into the ecosystem. You end up having trouble with birds that have flown miles away.
A germ attack is probably about as hard as a dirty bomb, but it spreads on its own after.
Neither of the above weapons is easily found with a geiger counter, as a dirty bomb is unless it's wrapped in heavy shielding. That makes a dirty bomb very inconvenient to move about or smuggle in.
Finally, they already have enough nuclear material for a dirty bomb. There's plenty of material as dangerous as a spent fuel rod circulating.
The only reason that a terrorist would set off a dirty bomb is that we're so scared of the word "radioactive." Symbolic.
I even worked in IT. Here is how it works (at least at the one I worked at): all of the software that actually runs the plant is over 25 years old (and therefore does not run Windows). It runs some obscure custom shit, not that obscurity is efficient at security, but I guess it kinda helps. Yes, the computers used by the Secretaries, the Maintenance staff, the Managers, etc. all run Windows. The servers ran Red Had 7.3. This is all fluff. If this breaks or gets corrupted one of two things happens to the reactor: 1. Nothing or 2. Nothing. There are two ways the the system is electrically connected to the outside world, and both of them are through high voltage power lines, which cannot really be used to send data in to break things. If you want to break something, you need to physically be there to do it.
If you work in a nuclear power plant, you are going to continue to do everything you can think of to make it even harder for someone to sabotage the place. Physically, this includes multiple walls, gates, barricades, guns, and more to protect the containments. From a procedural standpoint, this means anyone who wants to get on-site gets ran through a database to check your history, after getting an employee escort. Anyone who wants to get into the protected area gets personally approved after a more in depth background check, and a heck of a lot of red tape.
If you are just Joe Public (no offense), you have a much higher chance of dying in a car accident so I wouldn't worry about this.
And No, I didn't RTFA, but I figured as long as my comment was more useful than the rest of them (read: references to 24), I figured this comment would be helpful.
This is anecdotal, but minorly noteworthy - My mom used to work for the company that owned and operated Three Mile Island - the (physical) security was intense: the perimeter was ringed by towers manned by security offers with rifles and a 'no warning shot' policy - you approached the perimeter from an undesignated direction and you got shot, period.
I still have one of the security force's hats, says "TMI Rapid Response Team" and has a crosshairs in the middle.
Triv
Maine Yankee was decommissioned last year. Perhaps that part of the dialog had already been written, or they researched in books instead of the Intraweb?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The Main Plant Computer System at my nuke plant doesn't actually do anything but monitor system parameters. It cannot cause the plant to do anything. It's very handy, but not vital to safety at all. I'd imagine other plants are set up the same.
Solid state logic systems do run the safety systems, but there's no way to interface with them besides the physical controls that are directly connected to them.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
But they are. You need to read the fine Security Focus article again, but I'll quote the worst parts for you.
The T1 line, investigators later found, was one of multiple ingresses into Davis-Besse's business network ... From the business network, the worm [slammer] spread to the plant network, where it found purchase in at least one unpatched Windows server. ... Users noticed slow performance on Davis-Besse's business network at 9:00 a.m. ... At 4:50 p.m., the congestion created by the worm's scanning crashed the plant's computerized display panel, called the Safety Parameter Display System. An SPDS monitors the most crucial safety indicators at a plant, like coolant systems, core temperature sensors, and external radiation sensors. Many of those continue to require careful monitoring even while a plant is offline, ... At 5:13 p.m. ... the "Plant Process Computer" crashed. Both systems had redundant analog backups that were unaffected by the worm, but, "The unavailability of the SPDS and the PPC was burdensome on the operators," notes the March advisory.
That's not a headline, that's a detailed technical report.
Having worked at a plant, I can say that the picture is accurate. Winblows servers have snuck into plant networks and they are awful pieces of shit that have no place there. While they are not in direct control, they can cause trouble if you depend on them to make decisions. A box that blows your network can cause even more problems because it blinds you to what might be critical information and communications. A back up you are not staffed to use is not a backup.
It's not just power plants and operators at risk. Winblows born network congestion is also implicated in the huge 2003 power outage that killed people. When hospitals, home medical equipment, EMS, stoplights, and other things we take for granted lose power, people die.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> due to a very poorly designed reactor, a shutdown of the insufficient safety systems, and a government that didn't care about its people.
What exactly was wrong with the reactor design with Chernobyl?
~70 percent of worlds nuclear reactors are almost identical to the Chernobyl reactor, only difference being that no-one is running unauthorized experiments with all safety precautions manually overridden on those still active.
> None of those conditions exists in US nuclear power plants.
Are you willing to bet your life on that?
Remember the blackouts few months ago, which were caused by virus infection in power supply services?
In other words, how close to a nuclear facility are you living?
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
No containment (outer shell): once the reactor itself is burst, the radioactive material is out in the open, whereas in western designs, there is still an outer shell.
Years ago I did some research on Chernobyl accident and remember reading that there was a concrete containment shell, but it blew up with the reactor. Most of the sites I now found by googling repeat the statement that there was no containment shell, but at least this site claims the opposite: "2. Despite official statements made in the U.S. right after the accident, Chernobyl No. 4 did have a reinforced-concrete containment--one that was installed in 1980. Whether the shell was comparable to what you'd find on the average U.S. reactor isn't clear. In any event, Chernobyl No. 4's outer shell was probably breached by a powerful hydrogen explosion, which, you may recall, was the greatest fear in the days following the Three Mile Island accident. The power released in such an explosion could be great enough to destroy any existing reactor's containment."
Sorry, your source is wrong. There are a lot of sources with inaccuracies about the Chernobyl incident due to the USSR's lack of glastnos. I've done a great deal of research on the accident and the RMBK 1000 design used in Unit 4. There was never any containment structure as it was seen as a waste of money since the Soviet government made sure that the people believed in the design's infallibility as they've never heard of any problems with the plant including the positive void coefficient causing the reactor to run away(Again due to the lack of glastnos, Even other units in the same power plant experienced problems that would've probably made a huge difference if the crew of Unit 4 were allowed to know about it). One thing about shell is that it doesn't have to mean containment. Perhaps this author misunderstood the design and is referring to the thick concrete biological shield(Thick, but not that thick. Thick enough to do its job of shielding from radiation but could not withstand the pressure build up). One thing I've noticed was that even the books that had ridiculously wrong accounts of what happened at Chernobyl(Again, due to the lack of glastnos as the government wouldn't let them publish anything that defied the infallibility of the Communist regime) admitted the lack of a containment structure which is only because they still insisted in their writings that the lack of a containment structure in the RMBK design was fine since the RBMK was so safe(Yes, they wrote this AFTER Chernobyl).
After skimming that site you gave, I'd have to say that they haven't done their research. The claim that the accident was caused entirely by human errors is just plain wrong. The accident was caused for the most part by the fataly poor design of the RBMK reactor and that design combined with the Soviet way of running the nuclear industry made an accident inevidable anyone. It's a absolute miracle it didn't happen sooner! The explosion happened when someone hit the AZ button. That's the EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN button. This caused the accident because all the control rods were dropped at once which due to a huge design flaw pushed neutron absorbing and reactor cooling water out of the core allowing for a heat surge great enough to twist the channels to prevent the rods from descending further and allowing the explosion. Tell me, if an explosion happens when you hit an emergency shutdown system, whose fault is it? As far as the operators knew, the AZ button should've been a completely safe way to stop that reactor. The point of an emergency system is to be a failsafe way to bail from a bad situation, to prevent disaster. It was due to the poor design of the control rods that the AZ button instead caused an incredible surge. There's a book that explains all the alleged violations of the operators and how many of the supposed terrible one didn't really contribute to the accident. Alot of the violations weren't because the operators were rouges but really normal in Soviet power plants. The truly significant violation was the removal of practically all inserted control rods which a guideline disallowed(AFTER Chernobyl!) and was protested by the operators but ordered by the Deputy Chief Engineer.
"Within half a minute they realized that the reactor was running out of control, and they tried to shut it down by dropping all the control rods into the core. Probably because the fuel rods had already overheated and distorted, some of the control rods failed to go all the way into place."
Wrong. Definate lack of research. This statement implies that the rods simply never made it into the core and it was the already present conditions from before the AZ button that caused the explosion. Wrong. It was the conditions created by the entrance of all those rods into the core because the graphite at the end of the rods did make it inside to make conditions far worse.
When you do research, consider the source. A source entitled "Mother Earth" is not considered a reliable source as it would certainly be imbued with irrational