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US Nuclear Power Enters the Digital Age
An anonymous reader writes "South Carolina's Oconee Nuclear Station will replace its analog monitoring and operating controls with digital systems, as part of a $2 billion plant upgrade by its owner, Duke Energy. It will become the first nuke plant in the US to use digital controls, and its upgrade may be quickly followed by others. The main driver for the move is cost savings; worries about reliability and hackers have been the reason digital systems haven't been adopted sooner."
...hackers have been the reason digital systems haven't been adopted sooner.
Here's an idea, let's not connect it to the Internet.
Isolate the system, for Christ's sake. There's no reason that a system like this should have any connection to the Internet, any external access at all (except maybe read access for monitoring at home by the chief engineers or something), or -- and this is the part that people don't seem to get -- no freaking 802.11 access.
I find it amazing that, working in the medical field, every hospital I walk into is at least partially dependent on wireless networks. (Hint: Send desync commands continually with an iPod -- network down.) But not only that, but they go through all these hijinks to make life suck for legitimate users, and miss obvious things like direct network access through Ethernet ports. I walked into a room a few weeks ago, and a kid had plugged his laptop into the hospital Ethernet and it was (I later verified) BEHIND the firewall. Another hospital used WEP encryption for its "official" network, and my laptop broke it in about ten minutes in a call room.
You have all sorts of people working in administrative roles in these institutions that think security is defined as:
1. Disable the Windows "run" command to piss me off.
2. Don't allow me to click on the clock to see a calendar.
3. Block web sites randomly for "security" reasons. (Hint: I'm a doctor. If I'm going to a web site I either have some legitimate reason to, or I'm goofing off because I have some critical patient that I'm stuck in the hospital with.)
4. Throw up wireless networks with some idiotic click through screen before it will route anything, thus breaking every automated device on the market.
Probably any of us on Slashdot could do a better job than some of these idiots.
you could definitely save some serious cash...
Yes, and the article made that perfectly clear:
"Those utilities need to keep those plants running. To have unplanned outages as a result of an analog system isn't doing what we need it to do — that's a financial risk..."
It has nothing to do with such frivolous things like safety
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
This has nothing whatsoever to do with bashing Windows (although XP is a particularly funny idea in the context of nuclear facilities) but with the fact that no consumer-grade desktop OS is suitable for truly mission-critical applications. That also includes OS X as well as many popular Linux flavours.
That is because such systems are impossible to security audit, due to their sprawling complexity, which is a show-stopper in such environments (at least when total idiots are not in charge).
Anywhere where there is a demand for a high grade of reliability and rock-solid security, vastly trimmed-down subsets of an OS and GUI rendering systems that can be formally audited are used. Which usually means either BSD/Linux or some other commercial flavour of *nix like QNX, because such systems are written in a way that makes them easier to analyse at this level.
So you can leave your mindless "our team good! their team bad!" fanboi nonsense at the door.
I for my part am glad that our current conservative government has finally gotten a clue (25 years after Chernobyl, none-the-less),
so you're glad that your government decided to dump the electricity generation technology that has the fewest deaths per Joule, better than the next nearest by a factor of 10?
Going for deaths over bad publicity is your idea of getting a clue?
SJW n. One who posts facts.