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U.S. Plans to Tighten Nuclear Power Plant Security

Posted by samzenpus on from the don't-come-in-here dept.

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)."

3 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Slightly offtopic but .. by oudzeeman · · Score: 4, Informative
    In the US, after the three mile island incident in 1979, all unapproved reactor orders were cancelled, and no new orders were made. Some reactors that had already been approved prior to the incident didn't come online until the mid 90's. If these orders had not been cancelled and new orders were being put in, we would probably have 2-3 times this number of reactors (Nixon wanted 1000 by the year 2000, BUT before the accident new orders had already began to slow because with all the regulations and the oil crisis ending nuclear power became very expensive compared to oil). Unfortunately, nuclear was never cheap enough to challenge coal, which the US has plenty of.

    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.

  2. I worked at a Nuclear Power Plant by kf6auf · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Volunteering... by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 5, Informative
    What exactly was wrong with the reactor design with Chernobyl?

    • 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.
    • Unsafe RBMK design, which has a huge positive void coefficient, i.e. it is (mis)designed in such a way that when the cooling water in the primary circuit starts boiling, the nuclear reaction accelerates... with predictable consequences. Most western designs have a slightly negative void coefficient (boiling water leads to slowdown of reaction), which makes the design intrinsically safer.