nuclear-news

Hans Blix warns on nuclear power stations as terrorist bait

Nuclear power plants are terrorist bait, need extra protection – ex-IAEA chief to RT Rt.com.  11 Oct, 2016 Nuclear power plants are one of the best protected facilities in the world, but they still remain likely targets for terrorists and therefore require extra protection, Hans Blix, former IAEA chief, told RT.

“One has to be very careful, of course, about installations like nuclear power plants and enrichment plants,” said Blix, who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency between 1981 and 1997…..

Blix stressed that modern nuclear facilities “are getting more digitalized – earlier, they weren’t – and they now have to be given a special new protection” from potential cyber-attacks.

He recalled the hack at Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz back in 2010 “where a malware called ‘Stuxnet’ was smuggled in and managed to stop several hundred enrichment centrifuges.”…….

According to Blix, the risk of radicals creating a so-called ‘dirty bomb,’ which combines radioactive material with conventional explosives, shouldn’t be ignored either.

“Caesium [which is extracted from waste produced by nuclear reactors] is something that is used in hospitals in many places and if it’s stolen or goes astray it can also be used in a dirty bomb and exploded somewhere in the center of a city – whether Moscow, New York or Washington. We have to be careful everywhere,” he said……

Also on Tuesday, current IAEA head, Yukiya Amano, warned that risks of terrorist attacks against nuclear power plants or militants eventually making a “dirty bomb” are very real. He stressed that terrorist groups, such as Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), pose a serious threat to nuclear power stations.

There was an attempt to smuggle enriched uranium as well a cyberattack, which disrupted a nuclear plant’s operations, in recent years, Amano said without elaborating. https://www.rt.com/news/362428-nuclear-plants-terrorists-iaea-blix/

October 19, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, safety