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.

Comments

Have they checked up on the Swiss Green Party?

[cirby]

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.

Re:Have they checked up on the Swiss Green Party?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the Green Party, just one guy who later became a Green politician

Re:Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome.

[Harlequin80]

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.

 

Anti-Nuclear group looking for scare material?

[Harlequin80]

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!!!!!!!!!

Re:Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome.

[Charliemopps]

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.

Re:Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome.

[rogueippacket]

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.

Re: Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome

[crazyninjamonkey4]

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.

Re:Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome.

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:Surrender!

[Half-pint HAL]

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.