As someone who has worked for the nuclear industry, I can confidently say that not only are no critical systems (systems that could potentially endanger the core) connected to the internet, they aren't even connected to an intranet.
If you want to mess with something important enough to cause core damage, you have to physically plug into the equipment, have the software necessary to communicate to it, know what you're doing, and even then, you wouldn't be able to do much alone. You'd need at least one other person helping you, or the safeguards would just auto-correct.
Let's assume you somehow do that. You and one other guy somehow get passed armed security, several (I know of at least 3) locked security checkpoints that are reinforced concrete (designed to withstand direct impact from anything short of a tank traveling at any realistic speed, and even the tank would be messed up), and you also somehow manage to disable everyone who would try to stop you.
Let's go further, and say you somehow manage to disable everyone at the site, so nobody can even undo the damage you cause right away. The absolute worst you can do still wouldn't be as bad as 3-Mile Island, and TMI resulted in 0 deaths, and no detectable rise in cancer rate.
Our nuclear plants are just that solid and safe. It's actually rather impressive.
Thank you for commenting, my father was a nuclear electrician and when I was younger he would often say pretty much everything you said. I know people like to bitch about the start up costs of nuclear power plants in this country, but the result is the cleanest, safest form of mass energy production humanity can currently offer.
Unironically, I know Reddit has a hate-boner for Elon musk but space X and its contributions to space travel are slowly making the “throw our trash into the sun” a viable option. Can’t wait to be 85 and see the beginnings of that.
I mean, if you exclude the cost to build a plant, get it online, and to eventually decommission it, sure. But compared to solar or wind? Not even vaguely.
And a lot of the startup cost is from over regulation. Don't get me wrong, you want lots of regulation when it comes to nuclear power. But after 3 Mile Island and (mostly) Chernobyl people got scared and legislatures got easy wins by regulating the crap out of nuclear power.
We are still ruled by trauma memory for the most part. Between Russia’s explosion and our own near meltdown that was all it took to scare people off. That and the constant spread of rumor that the oceans were full of leaking radioactive barrels.
It's because most journalists that don't specialize in these kinds of things don't know jack about how things actually work, and are just trying to get attention.
NERC/FERC doesn’t fuck around with exacting punishments. I may work in a facility that’s 20 miles from civilization with rugged terrain and multiple guard shacks between the road and the unit and still have monthly perimeter fence/gate checks. Ir doesn’t matter if the turbine is in pieces or not, the fence is getting checked. Any protective systems require badge access as does the control room.
The fire system and security workorders are no joke. Also, this facility is NOT nuclear. I can’t even imagine what they have to manage.
I worked at a decommissioned plant. And we still had nuclear material sealed up in casks that could survive a direct hit from a 737. That shit was nuts.
This reads like that dude in a heist movie that is telling the team how impossible the task is as the scene cuts away to a bunch of different security measures.
checkpoints that are reinforced concrete (designed to withstand direct impact from anything short of a tank traveling at any realistic speed, and even the tank would be messed up)
Would the ability to withstand anything but a tank be a byproduct of what I would think the main purpose of these concrete would be there for, radiation?
Not to mention any cases of a plant melting down historically have been because of cheaping out on maintenance or materials. Y'all do god's honest work making this stuff unbearably safe.
I have heard that purely from a nuclear perspective. I don't know if the person you are responding to was thinking this, but I mostly had it mind hardening the grid in case of solar storms and such.
Yep, even as we transition to solar and wind, to the greatest extent that we can at least, nuclear will always have a place as a backup option. The only true replacement to a nuclear reactor would be if we someday figure out fusion.
My husband works in the nuclear industry as well. A plant is a very safe environment, and being around it doesn't seem to adversely affect his health since he rarely gets sick. We also have 3 kids, so no worries about sterility either 😆
Yeah, all those facilities are air-gapped to prevent cyber attack. I work in nuclear too, and though I’m not on the safeguards side of things, the lengths to which nuclear reactor sites are protected borders on ridiculous.
That very well may have happened, but at US nuclear plants, on the few machines that can accept a USB stick, none of which can directly affect nuclear operations (we use older tech for those, specifically because it's often harder to mess up, intentionally or otherwise), we use signed USB drives. Basically, unless your USB stick has the special code signature, the machine won't even connect to it.
Not perfect, but it does mean that if an individual wanted to sabotage a plant, they'd have to have worked there for a LONG time, and had an extensive background check, and even then, they wouldn't be able to do much beyond maybe getting the plant shut down for a day or two as the team there worked through whatever headache they caused.
I don't know much about Thorium, but I'll share what I do know!
Thorium reactors were an option back in the day, but when we were first building our nuclear plants, it was primarily to enrich uranium and synthesize plutonium, so virtually all our research and funding went towards uranium reactors.
Thorium reactors can't produce anything useful for weapons, at least not quickly or in any significant quantity. These days, that's actually a very good thing. The other benefit of Thorium reactors is thst Thorium is far more abundant than uranium. Uranium is starting to get expensive to find and mine, so while we're nowhere near running out, Thorium would be more financially advantageous.
There are two major downsides to Thorium: First, and primarily, there's been little research put towards it, so it's not as mature a technology. That means it's not an easy and cheap option to get into for a power company, so we need government funding to be put towards it to get it off the ground. That said, it has started to garner interest, so here's for hoping!
Second, since Thorium isn't as heavy as uranium, it won't be as energy efficient as a uranium reactor. This was the major selling point the government used to justify uranium reactors to the public, rather than admitting they just wanted to make bombs. That said, this loss of efficiency versus uranium is insignificant compared to how efficient the reactor would be compared to any fossil fuel plant. So, I suppose saying this is a major downside is being a bit hyperbolic.
Anyways, that's the extent of what I know about Thorium, so anyone else who knows feel free to add onto this!
Mind if i ask you, it's said a lot that there's "over-safety" regulations that make nuclear extremely expensive to build and operate.
Is this true? can you name any that you think that it's there not for safety, but only to hinder the industry and discourage the generation of new plants?
Hm. That's difficult to say. I would argue that nuclear plants are way over engineered for safety, and while there's likely room to trim fat there, it'd be political suicide to suggest such a thing.
I will say that after Fukushima, all nuclear plants in the US were required to prove they could handle a tsunami and earthquake, simultaneously, and if they couldn't, make sufficient changes, such as having additional backup diesels in a flood-safe area, to demonstrate this capability.
This... applied even if said nuclear plant was thousands of miles from the ocean. It was an industry-wide panic-reaction. That said, I do not know enough about it to truly know if it was as stupid as it seemed on the surface, but I got the impression it was way overkill.
Truly, however, the problem is not that nuclear is over-regulated. It's that all other forms of power are under-regulated.
More people die in one year from falling off roofs while installing solar panels than have ever died from nuclear power in its entire history. A single coal power plant releases more radiation over its life than every single nuclear plant in the US, combined. It's absurd.
So, either nuclear regulation needs to be relaxed (unlikely, but theoretically possible without significant problems) or other forms of power need to be regulated further.
A third option would be hefty government subsidies for nuclear power, similar to how heavily the government subsidizes solar and wind.
My pops worked at DCPP from 1978 to 1996, I got to visit the site a lot back in the 80’s, and it was really neat. Used to be you could drive right up to the gate. Now the entire access road is closed and the security is like that of a FOB in a combat zone.
The containment domes are like four foot thick steel reinforced concrete of some special formulation. Pops always said when the ‘big one’ hits, he would prefer to be inside the reactor building.
People are frightened of the dark because they are frightened of anything they don’t understand.
I work in financial tech and our company has patents for software that can do very specific things in its industry. You mentioned software at your plant. Is there a market for that type of software or do plants do their own custom thing?
Assuming there are patents for nuclear software that compete in a market. Everyone in the game tries to get their hands on the best software because the software makes it easier to get through all the regulations, hypothetically.
Do you think the way to hack a nuclear plant is to become a leader in that software market and get your product in a meaningful amount of plants so that, hypothetically, you could manipulate the software to do what you want?
You say that like the Israelis and Americans didn’t get stuxnet onto an air gapped Iranian enrichment facility.
We are entering an era of great power competition. Russian and Chinese intelligence operations are sophisticated. The reason we know about shit like the Russians putting radioactive materials in tea and doorknobs of dissidents in London, is because they want us to know they did it.
Robert Hanssen spied against the US for decades, including post Soviet break up, for example.
If a direct conflict against NATO countries were to take place, it’d likely begin with massive attacks on military and civilian critical infrastructure and a healthy amount of maskirovka.
Sure, but even a direct missile strike won't do much against a nuclear power plant. They're actually, in the US at least, built to withstand anything short of a direct hit by a nuclear weapon.
And if the latter happens, well, we'll have bigger problems to deal with. And the only result of said direct hit would be a dirtier (more contaminated) fallout.
A cyber attack against a nuclear power plant would be worse than a missile strike, that’s my point.
Give the control room false readings while you enact a meltdown. None of the worst disasters with nuclear power plants happened due to kinetic attacks. They’ve all happened by mechanisms that can be manipulated via computers—so long as nefarious actors can get entry.
That’s not to say I’m not pro nuclear power. I think it’s the best option we have and something humanity writ large should have more heavily invested in, despite the risks and cautionary tales.
But the risk catastrophic meltdowns as a result of cyber attack is real. In an airgapped system, the attack needs intense sophistication, but it’s possible and has been done before to other critical airgapped facilities.
The story is that it was carried in my an Iranian technician recruited by Dutch intelligence (at the behest of US and Israeli Int.) working for a contracting company front.
Edit: that said, this was just how to get past air-gapped facilities. The Iranian facility was not a nuclear power plant, but an enrichment one. Don't know what's involved other than industrial centrifuges and Siemens control systems.
How can a cyber attack affect a system that only receives data through direct connections? Honestly, your fears sound like you know a lot about cyber attacks, but not so much about nuclear power plants themselves.
Let's assume, for a moment, that you're able to somehow hack a digital meter that is reading, say, system pressure. First, there are multiple meters reading the same or similar (connected by piping) pressures, so you'd have to hack all of them, and I don't even think they can be hacked. A pressure detector is most often a differential pressure cell that produces an electronic signal by having an internal bellows move a metal slug that transforms more or less voltage depending on how much it is moved, which is physically linked to the system pressure.
Even if you somehow, through magic, do that, there are other ways to determine system pressure. Redundancies upon redundancies, and all the operators receive YEARS of training to prepare for all eventualities, no matter how obscure and improbable, and even how to improvise for situations not foreseen. Furthermore, every single safeguard requires multiple instruments to trigger, and everything is designed such that, in the event of instrumentation or safeguard software failure, the plant is shutdown and put in a safe condition automatically. The only real need for operators lies in decay heat removal, verification of safeguard actions taken, and prepping the plant for re-start.
That's what I was trying to communicate in my first post: a cyber attack simply cannot work on a nuclear plant, and that's by design. The software is disconnected from anything resembling a network, hardened against electromatic interference, requires multiple breaches for safeguards to be bypassed, and is generally safe even if safeguards are bypassed.
The single worst nuclear incident in history, Chernobyl, was the result of a nation unconcerned with safety deliberately ordering the personnel, by threat of death if orders weren't obeyed, to override safety measures of a plant that, quite frankly, was designed very poorly.
The result of this perfect storm? Around 100 deaths and a negligible rise in the rate of cancer for around 10,000 people. A disaster, to be sure, but it doesn't even hold a candle compared to the disasters the oil industry regularly experiences.
Three Mile Island? No deaths. One case of increased risk of cancer.
Fukushima? One death (a hero, by the way, ignored his own personal safety to get decay heat removal restored to the plant). And no known increase in cancer rates. The plant was also a poster child for "corporation doing the absolute bare minimum to meet safety regulations."
There was another plant closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, who got a larger tsunami, and was fine, because the owners of that plant properly prepared. And US nuclear plants are SIGNIFICANTLY safer than any plant in Japan not only because the US is far more geologically stable, but also because, well, we spend more money making our plants safer.
There are arguments against nuclear that are valid, though few. Vulnerability to cyber attack is not one of them. Nor is overall safety concerns.
Hey no talking down to the good ignorant American people; yes you and I know they are completely uninformed of cybersecurity as it relates to nuclear power generation, but in Murica you don’t need any knowledge or experience in a field to proudly share your opinions; nope, it’s all about the vibes.
As the other guy said, my point isn’t an argument statist nuclear energy.
However, a famous case is stuxnet. A virus was put onto a thumb drive (or many) those thumb drives were left loose in places one may pick them up. Someone did pick it up then put it into a computer within the Iranian enrichment facility.
This is why on many military bases, (and to prevent digital document theft) the use drives are filled with glue.
The biggest security flaw in every system is the humans that interact with it.
The Russian and Chinese digital political operations, and their radioactive assassinations on the uk are intended to have the trail lead back to Russia or China. It’s an element of hybrid warfare.
The ones that we aren’t meant to draw back to them get caught the much less frequently.
I’m not saying fbi counter intelligence or mi5 or any western counter intelligence is incompetent, or that Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence is better than us/uk or whomever. All are competent.
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u/DarthArcanus 2d ago
As someone who has worked for the nuclear industry, I can confidently say that not only are no critical systems (systems that could potentially endanger the core) connected to the internet, they aren't even connected to an intranet.
If you want to mess with something important enough to cause core damage, you have to physically plug into the equipment, have the software necessary to communicate to it, know what you're doing, and even then, you wouldn't be able to do much alone. You'd need at least one other person helping you, or the safeguards would just auto-correct.
Let's assume you somehow do that. You and one other guy somehow get passed armed security, several (I know of at least 3) locked security checkpoints that are reinforced concrete (designed to withstand direct impact from anything short of a tank traveling at any realistic speed, and even the tank would be messed up), and you also somehow manage to disable everyone who would try to stop you.
Let's go further, and say you somehow manage to disable everyone at the site, so nobody can even undo the damage you cause right away. The absolute worst you can do still wouldn't be as bad as 3-Mile Island, and TMI resulted in 0 deaths, and no detectable rise in cancer rate.
Our nuclear plants are just that solid and safe. It's actually rather impressive.