Chairman of nuclear weapons oversight agency steps down amid internal turmoil, By Patrick Malone, Center for Public Integrity Feb. 8, 2018
The chairman of a federal oversight agency responsible for safety at nuclear weapons facilities has stepped down amid turmoil over both his management and his recommendation to President Trump that the agency be abolished.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board — chaired until this week by lawyer and marine engineer Sean Sullivan – is a tiny institution by federal standards, but has played a key role in tightening safety practices at nuclear weapons research and production facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, among others.
DD 3rd Feb 2018, Nuclear: the book that undermines the safety of French power plants. The JDD publishes preview extracts of Nuclear, immediate danger , a survey book that challenges the dogma of the safety and profitability of French power stations.
At the forefront of concerns: the alarming state of several tanks, which contain the heart of the reactors. “That’s it, we are there atthe age of 40. By 2028, 48 reactors [out of 58 in service in France] – those of the level of 900 MW and a part of the reactors of 1,300 MW – will reach this canonical age.
Since the mid-2000s, because of its financial difficulties that prevent it from investing in new means of production, EDF is asking for, calling for, even imposing, that all of its nuclear power stations be allowed to operate at the same time. beyond the age of forty, and prolonged by twenty years. […]
[Among the elements that will] determine the extension or the stop of the vats: do they have defects, of
origin or appeared with the time, which compromise the safety?
This is one of the biggest secrets of the nuclear industry in France. […] According to EDF, 10 tanks in operation have cracks that date from their manufacture. […] Tricastin, with its reactor 1, is the worst central of the country.
This reactor combines all the problems: defects under coating, no margin at break, and exceeding the fragility forecast at forty years! Not to mention the risk of catastrophic flooding in the event of an earthquake, as noted in September 2017 by the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), which has automatically stopped the operation of the four reactors of the plant while waiting for EDF finally, work to reinforce the dike of the Donzère-Mondragon canal. The plant is below the canal, 6 m below the water.
Pierre-Franck Chevet, the president of the ASN, told us’ that in the event of a strong earthquake we could go to a situation, with four simultaneous reactors merging, which potentially looks like a Fukushima type accident. EDF has found the immediate stoppage of the plant to carry out this unjustified work, I find it justified. ” http://www.lejdd.fr/societe/nucleaire-le-livre-qui-met-a-mal-la-surete-des-centrales-francaises-3564173
JDD 3rd Feb 2018, Nuclear: the book that undermines the safety of French power plants. The JDD publishes preview extracts of Nuclear, immediate danger , a survey book that challenges the dogma of the safety and profitability of French power stations.
At the forefront of concerns: the alarming state of severaltanks, which contain the heart of the reactors. “That’s it, we are there atthe age of 40. By 2028, 48 reactors [out of 58 in service in France] – those of the level of 900 MW and a part of the reactors of 1,300 MW – will reach this canonical age.
Since the mid-2000s, because of its financial difficulties that prevent it from investing in new means of production, EDF is asking for, calling for, even imposing, that all of its nuclear power stations be allowed to operate at the same time. beyond the age of forty, and prolonged by twenty years. […]
[Among the elements that will] determine the extension or the stop of the vats: do they have defects, of
origin or appeared with the time, which compromise the safety?
This is one of the biggest secrets of the nuclear industry in France. […] According to EDF, 10 tanks in operation have cracks that date from their manufacture. […] Tricastin, with its reactor 1, is the worst central of the country.
This reactor combines all the problems: defects under coating, no margin at break, and exceeding the fragility forecast at forty years! Not to mention the risk of catastrophic flooding in the event of an earthquake, as noted in September 2017 by the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), which has automatically stopped the operation of the four reactors of the plant while waiting for EDF finally, work to reinforce the dike of the Donzère-Mondragon canal. The plant is below the canal, 6 m below the water.
Pierre-Franck Chevet, the president of the ASN, told us’ that in the event of a strong earthquake we could go to a situation, with four simultaneous reactors merging, which potentially looks like a Fukushima type accident. EDF has found the immediate stoppage of the plant to carry out this unjustified work, I find it justified. ” http://www.lejdd.fr/societe/nucleaire-le-livre-qui-met-a-mal-la-surete-des-centrales-francaises-3564173
Last summer, when the Belgian government revealed that seventy new cracks had been discovered in the boiler of the country’s Tihange 2 nuclear reactor, towns near the country’s borders reacted with exasperation.
The power plant lies just 60km from the triple border where Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands meet, close to the Dutch town of Maastricht and the German town of Aachen.
These were not the first cracks to be discovered. Tihange is now more than four decades old, but it was built to only have a lifespan of 30 years. Already in 2014 an inspection found thousands of small ‘microcracks’ in the reactor. The neighboring German state of Northrhine-Westphalia became so alarmed that it ordered iodine tablets for German citizens in case of a Belgian nuclear accident.
Tihange isn’t the only plant of concern. The Doel 3 reactor, near the Belgian port city of Antwerp next to the Dutch border, also has cracks. These reactors have been subject to sudden shutdowns which have caused disruption to the Belgian electricity network. The country is 40 percent reliant on nuclear power for its electricity.
n neighboring Germany, nuclear power has remained very unpopular with the public since the 1970s. After the 2011 Fukishima nuclear disaster in Japan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to phase out nuclear power in the country for safety reasons. But Germany is powerless to do anything about nuclear plants just across its borders, which pose the same safety risks to German citizens as domestic plants would.
NEVERTHELESS, GERMAN POLITICIANS HAVE harshly criticized what they see as Belgian inaction over the safety of its aging plants. And the concern is likely to grow louder following the broadcast of a documentary this week on German television alleging a series of near-accidents at the Tihange plant.
No cooperation
But despite the complaints from Dutch and German politicians, a report published this week found that they haven’t made much of an effort to work with their Belgian counterparts to resolve the problem. A Belgo-German cooperation group set up in 2016 has done little to change that situation, it found.
The report, published by the Dutch Safety Board, did not address the safety of the plants but instead the degree to which the three countries are working together on their maintenance and contingency plans in the event of a nuclear incident. It found that though cooperation has been set up on paper, “it probably will not run smoothly if a nuclear accident were to occur in reality.”
According to the report, preparations for an incident at the plants varies widely between the three countries. Some have iodine pills at the ready, others have evacuation instructions that differ from those that would be given to neighboring populations. In the event of an accident, the report warns, citizens would not know which set of instructions to follow.
The result, the report warns, could be “confusion and unrest” – particularly as linguistic and cultural differences are exasperated by an unfolding emergency situation.
For their part, the Belgian government insists that despite the cracks, the reactors are still perfectly safe and the temporary shutdowns have been simply due to an abundance of caution. Nevertheless, the country’s health ministry said in 2016 that it would provide iodine tablets to citizens around the plant, just in case.
While many Belgians share their neighbors’ alarm, others feel that they are being used as a political punching bag by neighboring politicians looking to score cheap points. While there is deep anti-nuclear feeling in Germany and The Netherlands, Belgium has a similarly positive attitude to the power source as its southern neighbor France.
In the mean time, people in this triple border region don’t know who to believe. But their attitudes tend to be set by which side of the border they reside in. In the event of a nuclear accident, however, the radiation would effect them all equally.
WASHINGTON — It’s a question that lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been asking the Pentagon for years: Are the command-and-control systems between the president and the nation’s nuclear forces totally secure and defendable from cyber or electronic attacks?
The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review the Pentagon released on Friday says systems today remain “assured and effective” but the report warns of growing risks. The nuclear command and control networks that were on the cutting edge in the 1970s are now “subject to challenges from both aging system components and new, growing 21st century threats,” the NPR says. “Of particular concern are expanding threats in space and cyber space.”
The NPR strikes an alarming tone on the state of the technology that makes up the nuclear command, control and communications system, known as NC3.
The NC3 is a hodgepodge of hardware and software — warning satellites and radars; communications satellites, aircraft, and ground stations; fixed and mobile command posts; and the control centers for nuclear systems. The NPR says many of these systems use antiquated technology that has not been modernized in almost three decades………
“Space is no longer a sanctuary and orbital space is increasingly congested, competitive and contested,” the NPR says. “A number of countries, particularly China and Russia, have developed the means to disrupt, disable, and destroy U.S. assets in space.” …….
More radioactive contamination triggers management change at Hanford, BY ANNETTE CARY, acary@tricityherald.comJanuary 29, 2018
The Department of Energy is replacing the managers of a critical radioactive clean-up project after the continued spread of contamination on the Hanford site.
The move is intended to rebuild confidence with workers and the public and show the project is being safely managed.
In a study published earlier this month, researchers discovered that yeasts are surprisingly capable of withstanding radioactive and acidic conditions, like those that would follow a nuclear detonation. A species of yeast called Rhodotorula taiwanensis can even form a type of shield, called a biofilm, to stop radioactivity from spreading. The reddish fungus — which Popular Sciencedubs “hardcore yeast” — was originally found in an abandoned acid mine in Maryland, and it has even proved more effective in halting radioactive spread than a microbe that researchers nicknamed “Conan the Bacterium” for its resistance to radiation.
“The potential for yeast is enormous,” said the study’s co-author Michael Daly. He and other researchers are hoping to use their newfound fungal ally to stop the leakage of Cold War-era nuclear waste, which is stored at 120 sites around the country. The largest of these, the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington, houses more than 50 million gallons of nuclear byproduct — and has contaminated 10,000 football fields’ worth of soil since it was used to assemble the first atomic bombs during the Manhattan Project.
But with the mighty yeast on their side, these scientists are hopeful that they can contain the dangerous waste. Read more at Popular Science. Shivani Ishwar
CT machines can now be hacked to boost radiation and cause ‘severe damage’ to patient, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researchers warn that medical imaging devices aren’t properly protected against cyberthreats. Tech Republic By Conner Forrest|January 30, 2018
Medical imaging device (MID) manufacturers and healthcare providers must work harder to protect these machines from cyberattacks. — Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2018
An attackers could compromise a computer behind a CT machine, increase the radiation levels and cause “severe damage” and harm to a hospital patient. — Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2018
In a new report detailing cyberattacks on medical imaging devices (MIDs), researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) Malware Lab noted that attackers could hack a computed tomography (CT) device and cause “severe damage” to a patient.
In the paper— Know Your Enemy: Characteristics of Cyber-Attacks on Medical Imaging Devices—researchers explain that many medical devices like CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines don’t receive regular updates and are easy to exploit. For CT machines, an attacker could compromise the computer that controls it and up the radiation levels to hurt a patient. Attackers could also disable or block MIDs during a ransomware attack, according to a BGU press release.
Nuclear waste coming to Nevada from all corners of the country would be dangerous, Las Vegas’ mayor told bipartisan city leaders in Washington, D.C. Mayor Carolyn Goodman was in the capital for the U.S. Conference of Mayors winter meetings. She spoke to fellow members about the nation’s aging infrastructure and other risks associated with bringing nuclear waste to Nevada, where a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain has been a political football for years. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s infrastructure an average D+ rating.
“Anywhere it’s transported is at risk because of the tunnels, the bridges, the railroads, the roads,” she said. “An accident … puts millions and millions of people around the country at risk for loss of life, cancer and everything else.”
The conference of mayors has expressed concern about the transportation of nuclear waste since as early as 2002, although the group has not explicitly come out against the dumpsite. Goodman said she is talking to mayors at this winter’s meetings and working to get a resolution passed.
“You have to tell them that this stuff is being transported through their city or 50 miles away and the spill-out from an accident” will impact them, she said.
The mothballed Yucca Mountain project could see movement under President Donald Trump, who has called for funding to prepare for the licensing process. The proposed project stalled years ago under President Barack Obama and then-Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.
Henderson Mayor Debra March and Bob Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, were among the Nevada contingent to hold the reception. Halstead and Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., spoke to the audience about concerns associated with the project. Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., is the only member of Nevada’s delegation who has not signed onto legislation calling for consent-based siting for nuclear waste storage.
“The issues are very very concerning,” Goodman said. “It’s not so much about Nevada as it is about the people throughout the country who are placing their residents and their visitors at risk.”
Bellona 24th Jan 2018, Bellona publishes groundbreaking report on the state of Ukraine’s nuclear
industry. It won’t come as a surprise that safety would be a critical
challenge still facing the nuclear industry in Ukraine, which inherited the
infamous Chernobyl plant when the Soviet Union collapsed.
HACKING NUCLEAR SYSTEMS IS THE ULTIMATE CYBER THREAT. ARE WE PREPARED? The VergeNightmare scenario By Sean Lyngaas
“………The stakes are high for this multibillion-dollar sector: a cyberattack combined with a physical one could, in theory, lead to the release of radiation or the theft of fissile material. However remote the possibility, the nuclear industry doesn’t have the luxury of banking on probabilities. And even a minor attack on a plant’s IT systems could further erode public confidence in nuclear power. It is this cruelly small room for error that motivates some in the industry to imagine what, until fairly recently, was unimaginable.
he Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nonprofit co-founded by Ted Turner, has tallied about two-dozen cyber incidents since 1990, at least 11 of which were malicious. Those include a December 2014 attack in which suspected North Korean hackers stole blueprints for South Korean nuclear reactors and estimates of radiation exposure to local residents. The affected power company, which provides 30 percent of the country’s electricity, responded by carrying out cyber drills at plants around the country.
In another attack, hackers posing as a Japanese university student sent malicious emails to researchers at the University of Toyama Hydrogen Isotope Research Center, one of the world’s top research sites on the radioactive isotope that makes a hydrogen bomb. From November 2015 to June 2016, the hackers stole over 59,000 files, according to media reports, including research on the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant.
Any list of cyber incidents in the nuclear sector, however, is very likely incomplete. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for example, only requires operators to report to the commission cyber incidents that affect the safety, security functions, or emergency preparedness of the plant, excluding potentially significant attacks on IT systems. It is, in general, extremely difficult for a hacker to breach a plant’s inner control systems implicated in the former category, but not nearly as challenging to penetrate the non-critical IT networks included in the latter……..
One of the first known cyber incidents at a nuclear plant took place in 1992 when rogue programmer Oleg Savchuk deliberately infected the computer system of a plant in Lithuania with a virus. Savchuk was arrested and became a precautionary footnote in the history of nuclear security. It would take a set of much more seismic events to illuminate the danger of cyber threats to nuclear operators.
In March 2007, with US energy regulators looking on, engineers at the Idaho National Lab showed how 21 lines of computer code could cripple a huge generator, as journalist Kim Zetter writes in her book. It was only through this jaw-dropping experiment, known as Aurora, that some energy industry officials came to accept that digital tools are capable of physical destruction………
While safety and security are paramount at nuclear plants, business considerations also come into play as many plants, including the vast majority of the 61 in the US, are privately owned. The financial and reputational damage that a successful cyberattack could wreak has led some executives to walk through them in advance…….. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/23/16920062/hacking-nuclear-systems-cyberattack
Casually prep for nuclear war with this Minecraft tour of the Russian and American fallout bunkers
by Taylor Hatmaker(@tayhatmake 19 JAN 18, To draw attention to the escalating threat of global nuclear annihilation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which works to “prevent catastrophic attacks with weapons of mass destruction and disruption—nuclear, biological, radiological, chemical and cyber,” has partnered with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies to craft a virtual tour of the nuclear fallout facilities that Russian and/or American leadership will be whisked into in the event of nuclear war.
The team has really outdone itself with the Fallout-esque teaser video.
The Lavish Bunkers Where U.S and Russian Leaders (still) Plan to Fight A Nuclear War
As NTI explains:
Nothing better illustrates the continuing absurdity of plans to fight a nuclear war than the massive complex of underground bunkers that the United States and Russia have built to survive and fight on even after both societies have collapsed. To help explain the scale of these facilities, we have reconstructed two, Site R in rural Pennsylvania (also known as Raven Rock) and the Kosvinsky underground command facility in Russia, roughly to scale using the popular immersive gaming platform Minecraft………https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/18/minecraft-nuclear-fallout-shelter-nti/
After safety breaches, new Los Alamos director pushes for accountability at nuclear weapons lab, Science , By April Reese, —The new director of Los Alamos National Laboratory here, Terry Wallace, took the helm earlier this month at a particularly challenging time in the U.S. nuclear weapons lab’s storied 75-year history. Repeated safety violations necessitated a temporary shutdown of much of the lab’s plutonium facility from 2013 to 2015, and further infractions in August 2017— including improper storage of plutonium metal that could have triggered an uncontrolled fission reaction—prompted the U.S. Department of Energy, Los Alamos’s overseer, to put the lab’s management contract out for bid. A consortium will continue to run the national laboratory until the winning bidder takes over the $2.5-billion-a-year operation this fall.
Since it was built in secret in 1943 to house the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb in 1945, Los Alamos has diversified its R&D portfolio. Its research areas now include everything from studying wildfire behavior to developing vaccines. But the lab’s central mission may well be updated in the coming months: President Donald Trump’s administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the media earlier this month, signaled interest in developing new low-yield nuclear weapons, even as some of the lab’s most knowledgeable weapons experts are nearing retirement age. …….
We’re the only place [in the United States] that does large-scale work on plutonium. We must meet the expectations to be the safest and most secure site in the country. At the same time, the realization that those expectations are under a magnifying glass, sometimes I think we miss that.
We cannot have any accidents. We do things at times that are simply unacceptable……..
Nuclear war, extreme weather top list of 2018 global threats, SMH, Kim Hjelmgaard, 18 Jan 18, London: Nuclear war, cyber attacks and environmental disasters top the list of man-made threats to global stability in 2018, according to a survey of 1000 international leaders from business, government, education and service groups.
The threat of another global financial meltdown, more likely in past years, has ebbed because of economic expansions underway worldwide, the annual World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report found. It was released on Wednesday in advance of the forum’s meeting next week in Davos, Switzerland.
Mother Nature topped the most significant risks facing the world for a second year in a row, the survey showed. That includes natural disasters and extreme weather events that human-caused climate change may be abetting.
The risk of nuclear war climbed up the list of concerns as a result of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s tests of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and US President Donald Trump’s bellicose vows to annihilate North Korea if it launches an attack.
A near unanimous 93 per cent of respondents expect a worsening of “political or economic confrontations/frictions between major powers” this year. Nearly 80 per cent think risks associated with “state-on-state military conflict or incursion” and “regional conflicts drawing in major powers” will be higher than in years past.
Trump will join other world and business leaders in the Swiss Alpine resort January 23-26 for the forum, where he is scheduled to give the closing address, organisers said……….
