US Nuclear Power Enters the Digital Age 291
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by
timothy
from the up-down-up-down-a-b-b-b-a dept.
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."
Ooo! I can solve that one! (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.
Hackers? (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.
Re:Ooo! I can solve that one! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:1, Insightful)
Nothing! Absolutely nothing!
Given the arrogant and secretive corporate culture of current nuclear power companies, nothing we'll ever hear about anyway.
Slashdot fanboys will still love them though.
a china syndrome, Chernobyl or Fukushima (Score:1, Insightful)
a china syndrome, Chernobyl or Fukushima. The last thing we need is a BSOD taking out the cooling system.
They better be non networked of side of the plant and maybe not running windows.
AND NO Homer Simpsons
Re:Really? (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
Re:Ooo! I can solve that one! (Score:4, Insightful)
so not just no internet access, you also need defined protocols for any media used
Re:Great timing. (Score:5, 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.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, ... (Score:4, 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.
Re:Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, ... (Score:5, 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?
Re:Hackers? (Score:5, 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.
Re:Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, you need to compare the alternatives though. IF the German government have a realistic idea of how to compensate for the loss of 30% of their energy production, by all means go ahead. Otherwise, Germany will need to import and compensate for the loss by laying more cables to Sweden, Poland and France.
Sweden can only sell energy during the summer, and then 30 % will be from nuclear, France will sell energy but something like 80-90% will be from nuclear and Poland will happily deliver coal based power. It may be possible to build gas powered plants as well, but then Germany would have to rely even more on Russia. This would naturally not be good for Europe, whose large scale goal should be independence from foreign (non European) energy.
It is doable to guarantee base load power supply in Germany and dismantle all the nuclear power plants, but the compensation will most likely need to come from outside of Germany. In general you need about 1000 windmills per dismantled nuclear power plant. Each with a safety radius of 300 m (assuming 2x the height of the windmill for a 2 MW plant with 30-40% average efficiency). The problem with replacing with wind is the following: in the case of no wind, no power will be produced (this happens, but most likely not covering entire Germany), in the case of to much wind (this happens, probably even covering all of Germany), the wind power plants must be stopped to prevent them from breaking apart.
Another way would be to increase the efficiency of coal plants. This may work for reducing CO2 if nuclear plants are still operational, but when the nuclear plants are turned off, it will not result in any CO2 reductions, since they need to produce more power. Germany will thus not be able to reach its stated goals of CO2 reduction.
As said, they better have a very good plan for this!
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, 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.
Nuke + Internet = Very Bad (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't understand the reasoning behind being afraid of hackers. JUST DON'T PUT THE FUCKING NUKE ON THE INTERNET!!! Keep the thing off the grid and you're golden. Then all you have to worry about is physical security, which is exactly what you had to worry about before when you were analog......