Tag Archives: Nuclear Facilities

Hanford nuclear site accident puts focus on aging U.S. facilities

An aerial photo shows Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, U.S. on July 5, 2011. Courtesy National Nuclear Security Administration/Handout via REUTERS

By Tom James

SEATTLE (Reuters) – The collapse of a tunnel used to store radioactive waste at one of the most contaminated U.S. nuclear sites has raised concerns among watchdog groups and others who study the country’s nuclear facilities because many are aging and fraught with problems.

“They’re fighting a losing battle to keep these plants from falling apart,” said Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Energy who was charged with making an inventory of nuclear sites under President Bill Clinton.

“The longer you wait to deal with this problem, the more dangerous it becomes,” said Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he focuses on nuclear energy and disarmament.

The Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.

No radiation was released during Tuesday’s incident at a plutonium-handling facility in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, but thousands of workers were ordered to take cover and some were evacuated as a precaution.

The state of facilities in the U.S. nuclear network has been detailed by the Department of Energy, Government Accountability Office and Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. They have noted eroding walls, leaking roofs, and risks of electrical fires and groundwater contamination.

In 2016, Frank Klotz, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department agency overseeing maintenance of nuclear warheads, warned Congress about risks posed by aging facilities.

Decontaminating and demolishing the Energy Department’s shuttered facilities will cost $32 billion, it said in a 2016 report. It also noted a $6 billion maintenance backlog.

In the 1940s the U.S. government built Hanford and other complexes to produce plutonium and uranium for atomic bombs under the Manhattan Project.

“That was an era when the defense mission took priority over everything else,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We’re dealing with the legacy of that.”

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Many of those sites are now vacant but contaminated.

A 2009 Energy Department survey found nearly 300 shuttered, contaminated and deteriorating sites. Six years later it found that fewer than 60 had been cleaned up.

A 2015 Energy Department audit said delays in cleaning contaminated facilities “expose the Department, its employees and the public to ever-increasing levels of risk.”

Risks identified at the sites included leaking roofs carrying radioactivity into groundwater, roof collapses and electrical fires that could release radioactive particles.

A 2014 Energy Department audit noted a high risk of fire and groundwater contamination at the shuttered Heavy Element Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is surrounded by homes and businesses near California’s Bay Area.

Problems have also been identified at active facilities including the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation in South Carolina. A 2015 report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board found “severe” erosion in concrete walls of an exhaust tunnel used to prevent release of radioactive air.

A 2016 Energy Department audit of one of the United States’ main uranium handling facilities, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, warned that “intense precipitation or snow” could collapse parts its roof, possibly causing an accident involving radioactivity.

“It sounds crazy, but it’s true,” said Don Hancock, who has studied the Tennessee facility in his work at the Southwest Information and Research Center, an Albuquerque nonprofit that monitors nuclear sites.

In Hanford’s case, risk of a tunnel collapse was known in 2015, when the Energy Department noted wooden beams in one tunnel had lost 40 percent of their strength and were being weakened by gamma radiation.

Energy Department spokesman Mark Heeter in nearby Richland said in an email that the agency saw Tuesday’s prompt discovery of the collapse as a success.

“The maintenance and improvement of aging infrastructure across the Hanford site … remains a top priority,” he said.

Nationwide, part of the risk comes from having to maintain and safeguard so many sites with different types of nuclear waste, said Frank Wolak, head of Stanford University’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development.

“You’re asking for trouble with the fact that you’ve got it spread all over the country,” he said. “The right answer is to consolidate the stuff that is highly contaminated, and apply the best technology to it.”

(Reporting by Tom James; Editing by Ben Klayman)

German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses

Nuclear power plant is pictured in Gundremmingen

By Christoph Steitz and Eric Auchard

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – A nuclear power plant in Germany has been found to be infected with computer viruses, but they appear not to have posed a threat to the facility’s operations because it is isolated from the Internet, the station’s operator said on Tuesday.

The Gundremmingen plant, located about 120 km (75 miles) northwest of Munich, is run by the German utility RWE <RWEG.DE>.

The viruses, which include “W32.Ramnit” and “Conficker”, were discovered at Gundremmingen’s B unit in a computer system retrofitted in 2008 with data visualization software associated with equipment for moving nuclear fuel rods, RWE said.

Malware was also found on 18 removable data drives, mainly USB sticks, in office computers maintained separately from the plant’s operating systems. RWE said it had increased cyber-security measures as a result.

W32.Ramnit is designed to steal files from infected computers and targets Microsoft Windows software, according to the security firm Symantec. First discovered in 2010, it is distributed through data sticks, among other methods, and is intended to give an attacker remote control over a system when it is connected to the Internet.

Conficker has infected millions of Windows computers worldwide since it first came to light in 2008. It is able to spread through networks and by copying itself onto removable data drives, Symantec said.

RWE has informed Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), which is working with IT specialists at the group to look into the incident.

The BSI was not immediately available for comment.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for Finland-based F-Secure, said that infections of critical infrastructure were surprisingly common, but that they were generally not dangerous unless the plant had been targeted specifically.

The most common viruses spread without much awareness of where they are, he said.

As an example, Hypponen said he had recently spoken to a European aircraft maker that said it cleans the cockpits of its planes every week of malware designed for Android phones. The malware spread to the planes only because factory employees were charging their phones with the USB port in the cockpit.

Because the plane runs a different operating system, nothing would befall it. But it would pass the virus on to other devices that plugged into the charger.

In 2013, a computer virus attacked a turbine control system at a U.S. power company after a technician inserted an infected USB computer drive into the network, keeping a plant off line for three weeks. (http://reut.rs/241M2kH)

After Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster five years ago, concern in Germany over the safety of nuclear power triggered a decision by the government to speed up the shutdown of nuclear plants. Tuesday was the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

(Additional reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Joseph Nasr in Berlin; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Himani Sarkar)

North Korea Boosting Nuclear Arsenal

North Korean officials have stated their nuclear enrichment plant is now operating at full capacity.

The director of North Korea’s Atomic Energy Institute praised what he considered the innovations of his research teams.

“[The scientists have worked] to guarantee the reliability of the nuclear deterrent in every way by steadily improving the levels of nuclear weapons with various missions in quality and quantity,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency quoted the unnamed director.

“All the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon including the uranium enrichment plant and 5 MW graphite-moderated reactor were rearranged, changed or readjusted and they started normal operation.”

The news of the full nuclear operation comes a day after the country reported they would be launching satellites using long-range missiles that could also carry a potential nuclear payload.  South Korean officials say that the launches, if they take place, would be a violation of United Nations resolutions.

“South Korea and the United States are jointly watching for all possibilities with regard to North Korea’s (potential) long-range missile launch,” said South Korea’s Defense Ministry spokesman, Kim Min-seok, according to the news agency. “So far, no particular signs have been seen.”

North Korea Doubles Size of Nuclear Facilities

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is reporting that North Korea has substantially increased the size of their nuclear facilities.

Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, told a 35-nation board at the United Nations that locations which “house uranium enrichment centrifuges, which could make bomb fuel” are showing activity from recent satellite photographs of the area.

“Since my last report, we have observed renovation and construction activities at various locations… particularly at the Yongbyon nuclear complex,” Amano stated.

Amano said the Yongbyon facility had “doubled in size.”  Atomic experts say the plant could produce enough enriched plutonium a year for one nuclear bomb.

“These appear to be broadly consistent with [North Korea’s] statements that it is further developing its nuclear capabilities,” Amano added.

Amano said the IAEA will continue to monitor the nuclear sites using satellite images.