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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)."
You know you got owned when someone cracked your power plant and the fuel rods spell "owned" in binary.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poems write you!
This, the week after a similar weakness* is shown on 24?
Remember to always question policy this way: WWJBD? What Would Jack Bauer Do?
That is all.
* Yes I know, it's TV.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
What follows is the transcript of a conversation that took place between a top US defense official and his wife after watching this week's episode of Fox's popular drama 24.
Wife: It's a good thing the real nuclear power plants don't allow remote access! Man what fanciful terror alert situation will those 24 writers think of next?
Official: Uh...
My uncle is a security guard at a nuclear power plant. He is 59 years old and his occupation before nuclear powerlant security guard was truck driver. He is the most honest and trusworthy man you will ever meet, but he is 59 years old and had a triple bypass last year.
Delta Force operators come on an occasional announced, i.e. they know they're coming, basis to try to infiltrate. Supposedly they have succeeded every time.
1. Terrorists storm a reactor and try to steal uranium or plutonium to make bombs.
Not likely. Assuming attackers could shoot their way past the beefed-up phalanx of armed guards, traffic barriers and guard towers that now surround every nuclear plant, they'd still have to fight their way into the reactor building through multiple levels of remote-activated blast doors--where access requires the right key card and palm print--to get to the spent-fuel pond, says Michael Wallace, president of Constellation Energy's generation group, which operates five nuclear reactors. The pond is where highly radioactive used fuel sits in 14-foot-long stainless steel assemblies cooling under 40 feet of water. Terrorists couldn't just grab this stuff and run because, unshielded, it gives off a lethal dose of radiation in less than a minute. To avoid exposure, terrorists would have to force workers to use a giant crane inside the reactor to load the assemblies into huge transfer casks, then open the mammoth doors of the reactor building and use another crane to lift the cask onto a waiting truck--all the while being shot at by the National Guard.
And While we are at it, How about crashing a plane into the reactor?
2. Terrorists crash a plane into a reactor, leading to overheating and a meltdown.
Even less likely. Assume that terrorists could get past tightened airport security and fight off passengers to get through new, improved cockpit doors and take control of a plane. Even then they'd have to crash the jet directly into a reactor to have any chance of breaking containment. In 2002 the Electric Power Research Institute performed a $1 million computer simulation to assess such a risk. Conclusion: A direct hit from a 450,000-pound Boeing 767 flying low to the ground at 350mph would ruin a plant's ability to make electricity but not break the reactor's cement shield. Reason: A reactor, smaller in profile than the Pentagon or World Trade Center, would not absorb the full force of the plane's impact. And, for all the force behind it, a plane, built of aluminum and titanium, has far less mass than the 20-foot-thick steel-and-concrete sarcophagus enclosing a nuclear reactor. It would be like dropping a watermelon on a fire hydrant from 100 feet.
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