Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

US Nuclear Power Enters the Digital Age

Posted by timothy on from the up-down-up-down-a-b-b-b-a dept.

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."

31 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. Duke Energy Forever by Tau+Neutrino · · Score: 4, Funny

    And they said it would never arrive...

    --
    Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
    1. Re:Duke Energy Forever by jd · · Score: 3, Funny

      What about the Nukem part? :)

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    2. Re:Duke Energy Forever by vegiVamp · · Score: 3

      Just wait for the next tsunami/earthquake combo.

      --
      What a depressingly stupid machine.
    3. Re:Duke Energy Forever by LordKronos · · Score: 4, Informative

      Just wait for the next tsunami/earthquake combo.

      If a tsunami hits there, then I think we've got FAR bigger things to worry about:
      http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Oconee+Nuclear+Station&aq=&sll=33.779147,-78.706055&sspn=6.883004,16.907959&ie=UTF8&hq=Oconee+Nuclear+Station&hnear=&z=7

      I'd bet anything big enough to reach that far inland is big enough to wipe out our entire eastern coast, from Maine to Florida.

  2. Great timing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    So let me get this straight. Before, they were too worried about hackers, but now, they feel it's perfectly safe to do this?

    Let me guess. They're installing Windows XP, too.

    1. Re:Great timing. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

      We wouldn't want to fall behind Iran...

    2. Re:Great timing. by Iamthecheese · · Score: 5, Funny

      Windows XP was a stable, hugely popular operating system that has had over a decade of bug and security patches. Give me XP over the latest xnix flavor any day.

      --
      If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
    3. Re:Great timing. by IgnoramusMaximus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  3. This should work out well.. by SuperCharlie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    South Carolina's Oconee Nuclear Station will replace its analog monitoring and operating controls with digital systems

    Chinese Military Admits Existence of Cyberwarfare Unit

    Wait..

  4. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Absolutely nothing. We went with the proven nuclear-industry reliability of Siemens(tm)(r) brand PLC hardware. Absolutely nothing could go wrong.

  5. Ooo! I can solve that one! by SeaFox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...hackers have been the reason digital systems haven't been adopted sooner.

    Here's an idea, let's not connect it to the Internet.

    1. Re:Ooo! I can solve that one! by kvvbassboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      AFAIK, Stuxnet was brought into the system through USB.

    2. Re:Ooo! I can solve that one! by yincrash · · Score: 3, Insightful
      not necessarily. you can use an existing employee as an unwitting vector by infecting an employee's pc who transfers work documents back and forth between work and home via usb key.

      so not just no internet access, you also need defined protocols for any media used

    3. Re:Ooo! I can solve that one! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not really, it's been shown again and again that if you just drop off enough infected usb keys at an employee parking lot, during a morning or during lunch, that those employees will pick them up and naturally look up what's on those usb keys as soon as they get back in their office.

    4. Re:Ooo! I can solve that one! by antifoidulus · · Score: 3, Informative

      and if it's not connected to a network it becomes a very labour intensive task to push out updates to the systems to prevent against the viruses.

      Maybe it is with windows with all that Microsoft Genuine advantage bullshit, but pushing out updates to Linux and OS X systems that are not connected to the Internet is pretty easy, i should know, i admined a huge network of them. Linux is probably the easiest. I just created a kickstart with the absolute minimum # of packages, used that as my base, and then put a copy of that system on the Internet to automatically download updates. All I have to do is periodically airgap the files(DVD works fine) over to the update server I set up on the LAN. All the machines just connect to that server and download their updates. Pretty damn simple. And if you are really hardcore, you can configure your machines to only download signed packages from trusted vendors(this is the default in RHEL for example). I spend maybe 15 minutes a week airgapping the things over... Now if you use that festering pile of insecure shit called Windows then you may have a point.

      --
      Monstar L
    5. Re:Ooo! I can solve that one! by Raven737 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I looked up how Stuxnet works because it was relevant to my work and company (we use a lot of S7 PLCs on our production network).

      The original was now much more than a glorified backdoor. It would install itself but did not contain any directly malicious payload. It would try to connect back to attacker, then the attacker could send and execute any payload they wanted.

      It is likely the first payloads where used to identify priorities the attacked system (downloading source code etc). Then a malicious attack payload was specifically created to do the most harm and sent.

      It was a glorified backdoor because it could propagate by itself and had the components to detect and connect to, upload and hide code to PLCs.

      If it was installed by USB on a PC that was not connected to the internet then it would not have caused any direct harm since it wouldn't have been able to connect to the attacker.

      Anyway, of course you can design a variant of Stuxnet that can try to damage any PLC without prior knowledge (contain a malicious payload), but i doubt it would be very effective. Without knowing what a PLC does / is supposed to do, the damage by simply changing values would likely be minimal and be immediately recognized.

  6. Hackers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Hackers? by buchner.johannes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Isolate the system, for Christ's sake

      No, go further. Isolate all parts of the system. Only have well-defined 1-1 communication where you need it. I.e. no network where everything talks.

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    2. Re:Hackers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I can't comment on Points #1, #2, or #4, but I worked in a hospital network for several years and I can tell you that sites were blocked for very good reasons. Like the time we found out 40% of our internet bandwidth was being sucked up by internet radio, ESPN.com, Youtube, and Weatherbug (a few packets every few min is one thing, a few packets every few minutes from 10,000 computers going out the firewall at once for no good reason is something else). As for doctors needing stuff for legitimate reasons? Let me tell you about the Department head that got his team exempted from the internet filters because his team was too important to be second-guessed. We had to get a network tech to go down & muck out all the donkey porn popups every three days. This continued until the female network tech decided that she was sick of knowing what these elite doctors did with their hospital-provided computers & threatened to sue for a Hostile Work environment unless we either A) Re-Blocked the doctors or B) Stopped making the network techs clean up the computer (effectively making it unusable).

  7. Re:Really? by MyFirstNameIsPaul · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was and electrician in the Naval Nuclear Power Program from 94-00 and they used hardly any digital anything. Motor controllers were made up of relays. Voltage regulators worked on saturated cores and such. Even the control rods were moved using AC or DC motors, depending on the plant. It seems hard to believe, but nuclear power is a technology from the 50s. The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, was launched in 1954, which I find amazing that 57 years ago they had nuclear power plants that could operate a ship while underwater, and that ship wasn't decommissioned until 1980. Yes, for alarms there are mostly just various things that trip relays such as thermocouples, pressure switches, salinity cells, etc. If you understand how the plant works, it's easy to see how it doesn't require anything digital to run. However, you could definitely save some serious cash in manpower by automating things.

    --

    I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.

  8. Re:Really? by countertrolling · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  9. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by Radworker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And I suppose your opinion is based on something other than hear-say? Like maybe a little personal experience? Until then I suggest you avoid putting your foot in your mouth. I worked in the industry for 20 years and while I wouldn't paint them as choir boys, I know that the Corporate bean counters aren't the demons you portray them to be.

  10. Re:This is actually scary by khallow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I googled around and all I found was some stories about Duke partnering in "clean energy technologies" with a dominant (and probably partly state-owned) Chinese electricity provider. So what is the nature of this relationship with China?

  11. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by dotancohen · · Score: 5, Funny

    And do you know what we would call the catastrophic failure event in which Duke Energy might irradiate a large swath of land? Hint: it includes the word Nukem!

    --
    It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  12. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, ... by Qbertino · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... the german Government just decided yesterday to finally abandon and decommission all nuclear power by 2021. That's in 10 years. We'll be having a little extended backup reserve of 3 nuclear power plants, but their countdown has begun already.

    With regular nuclear power, we are now talking about a technology that Germans considers unmanageable, safety wise. You might want to ponder that for a minute.

    I for my part am glad that our current conservative government has finally gotten a clue (25 years after Chernobyl, none-the-less), also due to recent problems with our 'eternal' nuclear dump sites.

    Nuclear, as of current state of technology, is a bad idea. There is no fucking way that *anybody* can take over responsibility for 50 000 years worth of deadly toxic waste. Anyone who thought that needs a clobbering.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, ... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
  13. umm we already do this... by gearloos · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, being an Power Systems Controls Engineer at a major utility, I can tell you we already do analogs via a digital stream. The protocol of choice is DNP. It is a standard That also accepts the analog transducers used for the last 50 + years. I don't actually see why this is worthy of a story. The bigger story is how all of the utilities are going to adapt to the latest NERC-CIP regulations and adapt to "secure" versions of the various protocols. Things like secure DNP and a secure version of 61850.

    --
    "Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
  14. Hacers not the main problem with all digital I& by notany · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The biggest problem with digital I&C is the “software common cause failure issue"

    Imagine modern nuclear plant with multiple-channel redundancy in instrument and control systems, if one instrument fails, there are others. Same applies to whole cooling systems, if one cooling system fails, there are other completely independent systems that continue to work. Typically redundant systems use instruments from different manufacturers or instruments that are implemented with different technology.

    This is not possible for digital systems because they are too costly to implement multiple times. What this means is that redundant digital control systems use same software. If one system fails because of software error, others may follow. This has already happened in German nuclear plant that had new digital system installed. Only the old analog system that was still operational saved the reactor.

    This is why Finnish radiation and nuclear safety authority required changes in Areva's plans for the most modern nuclear reactor being build, Olkiluoto 3. They added analog safety requirements. Reactor must be able to shout down even when digital I&C has total failure. Relying for all digital systems compromises redundancy.

    More info:

    http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2053091

    http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Instrumentation-Control-Systems-Nuclear/dp/0309057329

    --
    Dyslexics have more fnu.
  15. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I hear they're going to shovel hippies into furnaces.

  16. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by gullevek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Thanks to a reliable inner Europe electricity network. As usual "we don't do nuclear", but that the electricity then gets imported from France or some other country is easily forgotten.

    --
    "Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
  17. I don't get it... by inthealpine · · Score: 3, Funny

    Don't network any of the systems. That's it. Problem solved.
    Watch the first season of Battlestar Galactica and you have a design model for the cost of a netflix subscription.

    --
    "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"