Yesterday I had a very interesting discussion having dinner about the future of energies. I was in a minority against nuclear energy as solution to the future. One of my reasons was (is) the human factor in the security of
nuclear power plants. Today a new in Securityfocus supports my drawbacks: a ‘data storm’ in the LAN of Browns Ferry power plant (Alabama, USA) caused failure in any PLC (Programmable Logic Control) that stopped re-circulation water pumps, so operators were forced to stop the reactor.
The first, private investigation concluded it was a bad response of cheap hardware failure, the NRC accepted this theory and decided not to investigate. But the Homeland Security Committee forced a more deep investigation to determinate if the data flood came from an external DoS attack.
Both possible causes are extremely serious and amazing. And it happened in the USA…