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France Investigating Mysterious Drone Activity Over 7 Nuclear Power Plant Sites
thygate writes In France, an investigation has been launched into the appearance of "drones" on 7 different nuclear power plant sites across the country in the last month. Some of the plants involved are Creys-Malville en Bugey in the southeast, Blayais in the southwest, Cattenom en Chooz in the northeast, Gravelines in the north, and Nogent-sur-Seine, close to Paris. It is forbidden to fly over these sites on altitudes less than 1 km in a 5 km radius. According to a spokesman of the state electric company that runs the facilities (EDF), there was no danger to the security and production of the plants. However these incidents will likely bring nuclear safety concerns back into the spotlight.
They have a history of "direct action" against French nuclear plants.
They fired five RPG-7 rounds at the Superphenix when it was still under construction in 1982.
If someone were so morally bankrupt enough to create a drone army to infiltrate certain gaps and structural weaknesses in the plant and detonate significant payload to disrupt cooling/power/containment, surrounding area is going to be uninhabitable for a looong time.
Time for plants to consider netting, maybe? If it would help at all? Perhaps reinforce areas so that drones can't easily fly into them?
READY.
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Drones have a fairly low weight limit and are not hard to spot. In order to flood the area with enough drones to do significant damage you would absolutely know you were under attack.
If you could stage an attack of 100 remotely operator drones with enough HE to do serious damage you could probably do a lot more damage putting the same effort into a battery of mortars.
My first thought is it is probably some anti-nuclear group hoping to get scary pictures and data to skew horribly to terrorise the public. They probably had some cheap and nasty Geiger counter on them and we will get something like - DID YOU KNOW THE AIR ABOVE A NUCLEAR POWERPLANT IS 10,000,000,000,000,00000000 TIMES MORE RADIOACTIVE THEN NORMAL?!?!?! YOU ARE BREATHING THIS IN!!!!!!!!!
If someone were so morally bankrupt enough to create a drone army to infiltrate certain gaps and structural weaknesses in the plant and detonate significant payload to disrupt cooling/power/containment, surrounding area is going to be uninhabitable for a looong time.
That's not even remotely true.
That doesn't sound remotely true. Most of the important equipment (HVAC, Power, Connectivity) is made of iron and steel and sits behind concrete walls (or underground in the case of fiber), separated either by large distances or placed at opposite ends of the same buildings. So unless you have full building access to walk around and stick explosives inside conduits, raceways, fuel tanks, and generator housings (which you won't if it's a Tier 4 datacenter), there's no way lobbing a few grenades from the parking lot will do anything but force a controlled shutdown of some systems for emergency repairs.
Fun fact, even a datacenter in the middle of a desert can cool every piece of equipment inside via a process known as evaporative cooling; using a heat exchanger connected to an underground water tank or adequate commercial supply, the differential in humidity inside causes heat to be evaporated in the desert sun.
They most likely aren't talking about reapers. Just some dumbass with 1200 bucks who doesn't really understand what kind of shit storm this causes for people who are trying to fly similar aircraft in a legitimate manner.
Bah, it's just the reflection of Venus off of a weather balloon.
Table-ized A.I.
Tell that to the people who used to live around Fukushima.
Wow! a 9.0 earthquake followed by a 30 ft tsunami! That must have been a big ass drone.
But you have to get close with a hand grenade. You can probably do a lot of damage with a hand gun if you can get into the right place. Or even a crow bar.
However there tends to be a pretty big fence around these sorts of places and has the kind of people who wouldn't take too kindly to you trying to lob a grenade from a carpark.
Working on the premise that you can only get access to light munitions (ie a predator drone with a load off hellfires is off the cards) you are probably looking at commercial quad rotor type drones. You may be able to get 2kgs of c4 into a kind of close location but it won't be shaped and you will be very unlikely to be able to have it effectively placed. (these things are hard as hell to fly close to solid objects)
So you would likely get surface blasting with limited compression to cause structural damage. You might, if you were particularly lucky, manage to get it into a cooling tower and fracture the concrete but much more than that is unlikely. You could take out the grid ties fairly easily, and maybe get key personnel. but I would suggest melt down risk is basically zero.
Compare that to a crew with an m224 mortar system. A well trained crew (3 people) can launch 20 shells per minute of 60mm HE shells from up to 3+ kms away.
If that doesn't pack enough punch the m252 pushes you out to 5km away and lands 81mm shells. You can't fire as quick but you would have some serious penetration power before they were able to triangulate your position and come get you. 5 minutes with that and you are looking at 30 - 50 rounds on the target, could the super structure withstand that?
Overall I think the risk of a drone attack is almost zero as there are much cheaper, easier and more effective options.
If fukushima taught us anything, it's that you need to cut the power coming in (the plants require mains power from the grid to operate), and disable the generator. Those two things, and nearly all designs of plants will melt down. Only one of those things is on site. The other is "easy" to take down (drive a pickup truck into a nearby power line support). They don't even have to be simultaneous if you disable the generator in a way that isn't discovered. Find out who supplies it with diesel. Infiltrate them. At some point, they'll do a top-up of fuel. Spoil it. Then you have from then to the next generator test to take out mains power coming into the plant. Though a portable generator might be brought in, apparently nobody thought of that at fukushima, or it happened too fast.
Learn to love Alaska
Loss of grid power and disabling the generators caused a meltdown. That wouldn't be too hard to do in a targeted attack.
Learn to love Alaska
Or perhaps there was this MASSIVE fucking Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people and a massive earthquake.
I think you might have forgotten about having a massive amount of sea water pouring into the facility. Roads into and out of the area destroyed. Emergency services essentially crippled. You take out the generators and the grid tie and even IF that could melt down the facility (note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima) there would be 100 generators and people on site within hours in any other circumstance outside of a massive earthquake and a killer Tsunami.
They did bring in portable generators at Fukushima. They had battery powered generators, and they also had external pumps (fire engines) that were trying to push cooling water into the reactors. Neither worked because the plumbing for the emergency cooling system was damaged, and due to a lack of power for monitoring equipment they didn't know that some of the valves were in the wrong position. Basically they had the means to avert disaster but confusion on the ground and (at the time unknown) damage from the earthquake scuppered them.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well then have a nap. THEN SURRENDER!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Why do people mod this racist rubbish as "funny"? France surrendered in WWII... yes. Because their towns were being obliterated by the Nazi war machine and they didn't have the strength to fight back, as the Allies had been forced to withdraw their ground troops via Dunkirk to prevent complete and unequivocal defeat. They didn't surrender without a fight.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
If that had been true, the Italian armed forces would have been as formidable as the German. Despite some very impressive feats of Italian arms, mostly by smaller units, the Italian armed forces were generally unsuccessful. German military power was rooted in Germany's great industrial capacity, its large population, its better army training, and a lot of work on mobile warfare doctrine and practice and the integration of tactical air power that no other power could match (the Soviets had actually had comparable doctrine, before Stalin killed pretty much all the Deep Battle proponents and theorists).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes