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Data Storm Caused Nuclear Plant To Shut Down
rs232 writes to let us know that the US House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security called this week for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to further investigate the cause of excessive network traffic that shut down an Alabama nuclear plant. Investigators want to know whether the data storm could have been initiated from outside the plant.
This actually can be avoided (and AFAIK current designs do). Fast, electronic level response to avoid blackouts and such requires very much less time than changing reactor output would either allow or facilitate anyway, so the direct machine to machine communication links don't really need to go to the power cycle control systems at all. Instead, rapid response grid balancing is done at external switchpoints. For the newer designs, these are outside the whole plant at substations, let alone just outside the core areas. Between these links and reactor control systems, there's supposed to always be an air gap.
Given that, any hacking would have to include a social engineering element designed to fool the operators into making the wrong decisions. If we include that stipulation, yes, it's quite conceivable. If we postulate someone bridging the air gap, maybe by something as simple as hooking a laptop that also contains a wireless card into the control network, then a non-social engineering attack becomes conceivable, but not really otherwise.
DOE and NRA doctrine is that adjusting reactor output based solely on a trigger event outside the core instrumentation is supposed to always require a high level human decision. Supervisors are also at least supposed to be trained to the point where they can make these decisions without adding any more response time than a conventional, (i.e. hydroelectric or coal based), plant would need for their human level decision events. (Yes they have them. For example the four TVA dams that supply Alcoa aluminum face a whole series of individual and joint human level decisions every time Alcoa's main furnace system glitches, and these have to include how long Alcoa expects them to need to dump power elsewhere, and for each of them, what options the other three dams are considering).
The DOE does not legally presume that reactors are even as responsible for balancing the grid as conventional plants, but given how much older a lot of the conventional plants are, it's pretty easy to do much, much better than is strictly required, and it should be noted that, in the last New York blackout all the cascade effects and switching failures happened in 1940's era or earlier fossil fuel plants, and the worst points were 1930's or even 1920's era designs. Still, the rules are that if the conventional plants are failing at load balancing, even if the grid is experiencing severe cascade failures, the nuclear sites will let the whole thing crash rather than take the risks of trying to stabilize the grid by actually modulating their reactions.
Who is John Cabal?