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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.
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.
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.
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.
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