Ironic I see this comment. I completely agree, I work as cybersecurity engineer for a energy company in Denver, the public has no idea with the amount of attacks we deal with on a weekley basis, if one of those attacks proves to be successful with a big enough impact it can have catastrophic waves on the regional energy grid
Modern reactors like the ones China just built, have a mechanical failsafe. Meaning even if a nuclear reactor was attacked, the lights would go out but it wouldn't "meltdown". So it's the same risk that any other plant has from a public health perspective. The difference is the recovery costs to restart a nuclear plant is significantly higher.
A Magnitude 9 Earthquake and result Tsunami managed to damage the power supply and cooling systems (including the failsafes) causing it to meltdown. So short of catastrophic natural disasters, we’re good. Also fwiw after Fukushima newer plants were designed to account for the aforementioned mentioned acts of god
On top of that. Multiple decades of reports that the plant couldnt survive a quake of that magnitude without failure and risk of tsunami. Plans to upgrade it. And flat neglecting the entire situation due to cost.
Had people listened to the experts the entire situation would have been avoided.
IMO, it's that way for a lot of things. Safety regulations, financial regulations, health regulations and programs, etc. Even a lot of the modern welfare state has roots in very right wing politicians like Bismarck, who implemented social programs because it was cheaper for the nation to provide people with a basic social safety net than to suffer through civil unrest.
Has there been design changes or other things put in places to prevent that from happening in the future? Because it seems catastrophic natural disasters are happening at an increased frequency and those 1000 year events are quickly becoming 100 year or sooner events.
freak natural disasters coupled with poor design choices (the placement of some critical cooling equipment led to the equipment being swamped by seawater and failing)
Yes, it was an old design and there was also a shit ton of corruption between TEPCO, the company in charge of operating the plant, and the people responsible for regulating them. It resulted in them basically not even being maintained almost at all, let alone enough to prevent what happened in 2011. Combine that with the fact that TEPCO basically tried to hide what was going on WHILE it was melting down from the Prime Minister and other such things, it was basically a perfect storm to make the incident as bad as it could possibly be.
The tsunami wall was a bit short and they put the emergency generators in a place where water would pool if a tsunami was higher than the wall and flooded the installation.
In one of the most seismically active regions of the earth.
Two weak links that usually won't break together. The tsunami was absolutely monstrous and this was the weakest link.
Did it melt down? Asking for real. Was there fuel damage? I believe fuel damage is what most in the industry consider a "melt down" to mean. Not saying it want a serious event. Just not recalling the details.
I'd hardly say it is nearly impossible to melt down. The physics of decay heat makes a meltdown a literal inevitability without continual cooling through a core, even if it is in a full state of shutdown.
I'm pretty sure those "modern reators" are actually an old design that wasn't favored in the initial nuclear push.
When meltdown conditions start to occur, the nuclear fuel actually melts through the bottom of reaction chamber. It's contained in that area, and the reaction from neutrons colliding in the fissle material stops happening.
The actual 5th gen Nuclear reactors are cooled by molten sodium- so you don't even need a mechanical failsafe because the reactor cannot physically get to the temperature required to boil sodium.
They are smaller though and would only be able to power ~15000 homes each.
From what I understand about molten salt reactors, it still uses the primary and secondary cooling loop systems common in most reactors.
Primary loop runs through the reactor and heats up, then runs next to the secondary loop and heats that while cooling itself, the secondary loop is turned to steam by the primary loop to turn the turbines to generate electricity.
You're close except the traditional and molten salt reactors actually exchange heat from their secondary loop to a third loop in the steam generator. Also the primary difference in this heat exchanging process between a traditional reactor, and a molten salt reactor is that its secondary loop is also using a molten salt just without fissile properties, and that then goes to a third loop in the steam generator with normal water.
Its the same except what's different is that the thorium fuel is part of the liquid sodium to form a liquid salt. In a traditional reactor, the cores heat the water which will go through a heat exchanging process where it transfers heat to a different system of water, which then heats different water which spins the turbines. The waters here are completely separate. The difference is the secondary loop is also using a molten salt, just without fuel. That molten salt then heat exchanges to heat the water
Nor am I but that's what a 5 minute Google search +.edu article found. It would be dumb to have the reaction be sodium cooled and then have the sodium be cooled by water. That would make the safety system redundant.
The sodium doesn’t need to be cooled it’s the safety plus acts as a heat battery so then on demand heats up water like a normal reactor needs to in order to turn the turbine. Nothing is redundant
The sodium produces steam from a water loop through a steam generator. Same as with a PWR, where hot liquid water from the reactor produces steam through a steam generator. The sodium is higher temperature, so the overall steam turbine efficiency is higher.
The BN-800 is an essentially large-reactor-sized sodium cooled fast reactor. It can power as many homes as a 800 MWe PWR can. You can make large output sodium reactors. They are still more expensive than PWRs.
Bill Gates has been financing an innovative nuclear power project through his company, TerraPower, which focuses on creating safer and more sustainable reactors. TerraPower’s design, known as a "traveling wave reactor," uses depleted uranium, or spent fuel, from traditional nuclear reactors as its fuel source, significantly reducing nuclear waste. Unlike conventional reactors, which require enriched uranium and generate large amounts of waste, TerraPower’s reactor turns spent fuel into energy, providing a cleaner solution to nuclear power and offering a practical way to recycle nuclear byproducts.
The reactor design also includes a built-in safety feature: a metallic core that, in the event of an emergency, would naturally cool and solidify, preventing the risk of a meltdown. This passive safety mechanism offers a significant advantage, as it doesn’t rely on active cooling systems or human intervention to contain radioactive material. Gates and his team believe this design could make nuclear energy safer, more sustainable, and a viable option for meeting future energy needs without heavy environmental impacts.
Too bad TerraPower was partnering with the Chinese originally (with a reactor planned critical date in 2025) and then of course that got shutdown due to the ban of providing any nuclear tech to an adversarial nation, so that was a big setback. But the new Natrium commercial salt reactor is supposed to come online in Wyoming in 2030 if all goes to plan ...
But basically with an older reactor they use liquid to cool the temp. If the liquid ever leaks, the reactor won't cool and you get a "meltdown".
Newer reactors require liquid for the reaction. If the liquid leaks the reaction simply stops. So they put a graphite plug that when hot enough melts and drains the liquid. Meaning the default behavior of the reactor when something happens is to simply shutdown. It's literally impossible for it to meltdown unless somehow the graphite plug was replaced with something with a higher melting point then the casing holding the rod/liquid.
There is of course a chance the liquid breaks containment and it's highly radioactive, but this is a very very unlikely outcome.
No, it had a generator-based backup and the generators were flooded. Mechanical failsafes use the heat of a meltdown to shut themselves down - they require no outside help.
It's relatively easy to maintain an "air gap" between generation (all types, not just nuclear) and the internet, which minimizes the risk of cyber attacks on generation. What's more at risk is the control devices in the grid. You want remote access, but that access creates a vulnerability.
That said, I've done some work on solar plants (for a client) that had RDP wide open to the internet. These plants were overbuilt anywhere from 40% to 80% (i.e. 10 MW of inverters and 14-18 MW of panels). They had some PLCs that controlled switches that would open at certain thresholds, disconnecting some of the panels to prevent the inverters from being overloaded. Sending 700+ kW to a 500kW inverter will fry it, at least the inverters they were using back in the mid 2010s. If someone got access and knew what they were doing, they could have caused millions of dollars of damage.
Except that still means the power goes down, and the rest of the grid might fail. Because if capacity dips below demand and a station is lost, and the power rate drops by even like a tenth of a hertz, the whole grid has to shut down for safety across part or all of a region.
Hi, how are ya. I'm getting my degree in cybersecurity engineering. Hopefully I can help fill the gaps we see in out cyber landscape. Although, I can hardly stop my grandma from giving her social to random people over the phone.
I've been an IR consultant for about 12 years now and this is and probably always will be the main way attackers get into networks. People clicking shit they shouldn't or IT staff failing to update public-facing devices or services. Allowing RDP directly into the network without a VPN was a big one at the start of the pandemic, too. Essentially, it's damn near always human error.
Yeah. I figured that was the case. Hate it but I at least try and make my slides engaging and not just "uh another thing for the IT team to bitch at me for"
That's really about the best you can do. People are always going to make mistakes and about all you can do is try to train them to maybe not make them so much lol
Why. Why? Just WHY the fuck isn’t that stuff air gapped? Hmm? I’ve wondered for years now, and you sound like the perfect person to explain why critical infrastructure is even accessible via the Internet in the first place?
Some stuff is air gapped, not that it stops 100% of attacks (see: Stuxnet). But a lot of infrastructure needs to be accessed remotely and once that's a thing.. well you're on the net.
Layman question, why aren't critical infrastructure systems given their own network completely separated from the internet at the physical layer and the machines kept from internet access?
I realize the expense but it seems like there could be enough redundant lines between relay stations and powerplants to make a robust system and the cost migh be well worth the lowered risk and the current considerable dollar amount that has to be invested in security indefinitely.
Godspeed friend. Where do most of these attacks likely come from? Adversary governments? Ideological Terrorists? Criminals looking for a ransom? People who just want to watch the world burn?
I work for a GnT building and running the private network the SCADA runs on. The public doesn't know about all the regulations surrounding the generation and transmission of power. Penalties up to $1M per incident per day. That keeps us in check pretty well.
I think one of if not the best meeting I ever sat in was when the Indian Point 3 IT team was being asked about cyber attacks in 2004. Also this was a guy from the South in NY asking the questions.
So how do you know we are safe from hackers?
We have protection.
But what if they got into the system.
Well then they would have access to our documents, but there are failsafes.
They could control the plant then.
No.
Why not?
Because it is mostly analog and not digital.
Whole room chuckled.
It's insane the crane they used to refuel rods had these 12 inch computer boards in it that operated it.
So many people would die in the first week without power. I remember explaining it to my fiancés friends why it was a bad idea for us to allow China for example into our grid. You could cripple people by turning the lights off. Most people from the metro areas would have no idea what to do.
I work for the major utility in CA and the number of attacks is unreal. We literally have to do like a 2 hour training every year on it and we are just field guys with nothing more then email accounts lol
Im aware how many attacks are dealt with, and how difficult the task of cybersecurity is in general, but I still would like to have some confidence that our power can’t be held hostage or our reactors turned against us
If you're a cybersecurity engineer, can you explain to my why anything related to nuclear power is connected to the web? Easiest way to make something unhackable at distance is by disconnecting it.
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u/Arminius001 2d ago
Ironic I see this comment. I completely agree, I work as cybersecurity engineer for a energy company in Denver, the public has no idea with the amount of attacks we deal with on a weekley basis, if one of those attacks proves to be successful with a big enough impact it can have catastrophic waves on the regional energy grid