France Investigating Mysterious Drone Activity Over 7 Nuclear Power Plant Sites 128
thygate writes In France, an investigation has been launched into the appearance of "drones" on 7 different nuclear power plant sites across the country in the last month. Some of the plants involved are Creys-Malville en Bugey in the southeast, Blayais in the southwest, Cattenom en Chooz in the northeast, Gravelines in the north, and Nogent-sur-Seine, close to Paris. It is forbidden to fly over these sites on altitudes less than 1 km in a 5 km radius. According to a spokesman of the state electric company that runs the facilities (EDF), there was no danger to the security and production of the plants. However these incidents will likely bring nuclear safety concerns back into the spotlight.
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Hurry up and surrender so we can go back to drinking wine and eating cheese.
But I am le tired.
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Then go take a nap!
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Well then have a nap. THEN SURRENDER!
Re:Surrender! (Score:5, Insightful)
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They surrendered because their various political groups were so busy undermining each other they had no time to actually defend the country. France had communists, fascists, monarchists, and parliamentary political divisions all fighting against one another instead of defending the citizens of France. They were a disgrace and the French citizens paid dearly for their political cowardice and back room deal making. Also a hell of a lot of French soldiers died providing the rear guard during the British evacua
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That's all fair comment. The power of the Axis forces was, after all, rooted in the unity of feeling the various fascist groups instilled in their populations.
But it's a million miles from the modern myth of France just waving a white flag.
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If that had been true, the Italian armed forces would have been as formidable as the German. Despite some very impressive feats of Italian arms, mostly by smaller units, the Italian armed forces were generally unsuccessful. German military power was rooted in Germany's great industrial capacity, its large population, its better army training, and a lot of work on mobile
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There was a good deal of political back-biting before the war, but (with the exception of the communists, who didn't really accomplish much) the factions pulled more or less together to defend France. The initial disposition of French forces was inept, as was the initial reaction to the German breakthrough. This was not a result of malice, or lack of good will, but bad generalship (having General Georges running the front under the overdetailed orders of French Army commander General Gamelin did not work
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The British survived the German air attacks and naval siege primarily because of US industrial and food assistance before the US officially even joined the war. The US also provided fuel, jeeps, trucks, weapons, and food to Russia using both US and British ships. This gave Stalin the time and resources he needed to locate all the military officers and scientists he condemned to the gulags prior to the war. Factories in the US were building Spitfires and other military equipment while practically ignoring t
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The British survived the German air attacks and naval siege primarily on their own efforts. US assistance became very useful over time, and the British could not have successfully invaded France without the US, but survival was on their own. Similarly, the Soviets survived primarily on their own efforts. After the German winter offensive failed, the Soviets were never in anywhere near as dire straits again, and there was really not much Western assistance in 1941. Without Western assistance, Soviet cou
how to identify drone parties (Score:2)
shoot the damn things down. you will hear from the owners soon enough. if it's nation-states, at the UN. if it's big kids and big toys, the courts.
it's the ones that don't bring any compaints that you had to worry about.
Have they checked up on the Swiss Green Party? (Score:3, Interesting)
They have a history of "direct action" against French nuclear plants.
They fired five RPG-7 rounds at the Superphenix when it was still under construction in 1982.
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Wow... how have I never heard about this?!
Re:Have they checked up on the Swiss Green Party? (Score:5, Informative)
Not the Green Party, just one guy [wikipedia.org] who later became a Green politician
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There are IRA members that committed murder that are lapping it up as politicians, being paid by the people they were trying to kill.
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The terrorist-turned-politician thing is pretty hard to swallow, but the alternative is leaving people caught in the "terrorist trap". Most people who join radical groups are young and angry. Within the group, this anger is supported, maintained and channelled into direct action. If you can't forgive and forget this sort of stuff, you offer no alternative "adult" life to people who have gone through direct action, and they are basically left with the choice of seeing their actions as legitimate or seeing th
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They fired five RPG-7 rounds at the Superphenix when it was still under construction in 1982.
RPG-7 rounds, which did...nothing
GP did not say that they did. If it is the incident I am thinking of, I understand that they aimed at an open door, and one actually went in. It was a workshop door and the rocket hit a lathe. I expect it made more mess than damage.
I don't suppose the guy expected to cause much damage, but rather wanted to make some point. To me it makes the point that it is extremely difficult to damage a power station and that there are some nutters around (sorry, that's two points), but I don't think that is what
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I've always thought it amusing that the Europeans chide us over gun ownership, yet it seems infinitely easier to get military grade weapons and materials over there
I am European, and, sorry, I would not have a clue how to get hold of such weapons.
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If someone were so morally bankrupt enough to create a drone army to infiltrate certain gaps and structural weaknesses in the plant and detonate significant payload to disrupt cooling/power/containment, surrounding area is going to be uninhabitable for a looong time.
Time for plants to consider netting, maybe? If it would help at all? Perhaps reinforce areas so that drones can't easily fly into them?
I'd think, a combination of automatic RF and laser countermeasures. It might actually be fun to design.
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The swedish EMP cannon seems like a shoe in for this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors_HPM_Blackout
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Even more fun: drain the Sheik of Qatar's bank account by feeding his drones carefully concocted false information, say that a particular exploitable "access port" through the containment vessel exists. Applaud as the local ISIS sleeper cell strike team vainly slams into solid concrete.
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Sadly, reality is not a James Bond flick.
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An access port? Perhaps an exhaust vent might be more believable. Stick it at the end of some sort of culvert or ravine, possibly with a few watch towers along side to make it appear a more likely target. You could even "lose" some blueprints showing this vulnerability that these rebellious terrorists could smuggle out to their hidden base. The only way to destroy the reactor would be to fly the drones down the gully and loose their payloads against the vent, setting up a chain-reaction that (they believe)
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The exhaust vent makes a "whooshing" sound when operational to make it easier to locate.
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You might be right, but I think the point is, the first step is to take out the drone to protect your assets. And it seems to me that drones are particularly vulnerable to electronic countermeasures.
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Re:Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome. (Score:4, Insightful)
Drones have a fairly low weight limit and are not hard to spot. In order to flood the area with enough drones to do significant damage you would absolutely know you were under attack.
If you could stage an attack of 100 remotely operator drones with enough HE to do serious damage you could probably do a lot more damage putting the same effort into a battery of mortars.
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A couple well placed hand grenades can take out most Tier-4 data centers. You need a bit more than that for a (nuclear) power plant, but a 2kg payload can do some real damage.
That said, the time to repair is minimal for anything I can think of, although you might be able to degrade the long-term service life.
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A couple well placed hand grenades can take out most Tier-4 data centers. You need a bit more than that for a (nuclear) power plant, but a 2kg payload can do some real damage.
That said, the time to repair is minimal for anything I can think of, although you might be able to degrade the long-term service life.
Actually, no, you can provoke a meltdown.
NRC convened a panel of Industry makers and operators of Nuclear power plants to make recommendations to protect plants against sabotage. It is possible however I think it would be irresponsible to discus how. And before you start looking, the report is not on the net anymore either.
Re:Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Or perhaps there was this MASSIVE fucking Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people and a massive earthquake.
I think you might have forgotten about having a massive amount of sea water pouring into the facility. Roads into and out of the area destroyed. Emergency services essentially crippled. You take out the generators and the grid tie and even IF that could melt down the facility (note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima) there would be 100 generators and
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(note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima)
It was noted at the time that it was a common design, and the earlier and later ones would have had the same effect from cutting outside power and disabling the generators.
It was the loss of outside power (and backup) that caused the meltdown. Not the earthquake, nor the tsunami. Those may have caused the loss of power, but did not cause the meltdown directly.
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There are 81 BWR plants in operation around the world. Of a total of 434 plants. Of those 81 over half are Gen 3 or later designs which do not have the same failure method as the Gen 2 Fukushima design.
That does not however change the fact that the Tsunami and earth quake destroyed the emergency response capability. Remove those issues and taking out the generator and outside power will not cause the plant to meltdown because the plant isn't operating inside a bubble. A new generator will arrive on the
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The batteries only run the lights and electronics. The pumps need generators the size of diesel locomotives.
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There are 81 BWR plants in operation around the world. Of a total of 434 plants. Of those 81 over half are Gen 3 or later designs which do not have the same failure method as the Gen 2 Fukushima design.
Fukashima was a Gen 1 derived from a GE design. Two reactors were GE, one Hitachi and another was Toshiba(iirc).
That does not however change the fact that the Tsunami and earth quake destroyed the emergency response capability.
But not of the USS Ronald Reagan, who was stationed to respond to and monitor the incident. The sailors of which are now suffering because of their exposure to the fallout. A frustratingly unnecessarily sacrifice considering the dogmatic pride of TEPCO and the Japanese government was what allowed this completely avoidable disaster to unfold.
Remove those issues and taking out the generator and outside power will not cause the plant to meltdown because the plant isn't operating inside a bubble.
You may not be aware that your statement contradicts the
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But nothing you are saying there contradicts what I was saying. That getting some spiked fuel into the onsite generator and cutting the grid tie would cause the reactor to melt down.
From what I understand the reactors do not meltdown the second the pumps are offline. In fact that even with the system offline and now pumping occurring the convection currents alone will keep the reactor in a safe zone for quite some time. More than enough time to bring new pumps / generators or power supply to site.
What ha
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But nothing you are saying there contradicts what I was saying. That getting some spiked fuel into the onsite generator and cutting the grid tie would cause the reactor to melt down.
You said a few things and deliberate sabotage, indeed anything, that exposes a BDI introduces the possibility of a meltdown. Add more exposures and you increase the possibility.
From what I understand the reactors do not meltdown the second the pumps are offline.
What you need to understand is a meltdown is not the only threat to a reactor. Fukushima exploded first and then melted down. The second the pumps are offline the reactor starts producing hydrogen.
In fact that even with the system offline and now pumping occurring the convection currents alone will keep the reactor in a safe zone for quite some time. More than enough time to bring new pumps / generators or power supply to site.
No, it will not keep it in a 'safe zone' for long enough to install a new generator. It may give you enough time to restart or repair an e
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And without the chaos & disruption caused by the earthquake & tsunami the power loss would have been too short to cause a problem.
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It was the loss of outside power (and backup) and the relative inaccessibility of the plant due to environmental conditions that caused the meltdown.
FTFY. That's all Harlequin was saying. Yes, the tsunami and earthquake didn't cause the meltdown, but they made human mobility in the area a nightmare.
Cutting the generator and power alone won't stop humans from performing workarounds to avoid a meltdown. Catastrophic environmental conditions combined with cutting power will (or at least could).
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Or perhaps there was this MASSIVE fucking Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people and a massive earthquake.
I think you might have forgotten about having a massive amount of sea water pouring into the facility. Roads into and out of the area destroyed. Emergency services essentially crippled.
None of which affect a reactor installation operated properly with suitable systems to mitigate basis design issues. Everything you have pointed out was covered by the official report into the disaster and the findings were that it was a "Man Made" disaster.
You take out the generators and the grid tie and even IF that could melt down the facility (note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima) there would be 100 generators and people on site within hours in any other circumstance outside of a massive earthquake and a killer Tsunami.
No, it has nothing to do with the generation of reactor, but the type of basis design issues and unfortunately generators don't counter the NRC scenarios for intentional sabotage.
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If fukushima taught us anything, it's that you need to cut the power coming in (the plants require mains power from the grid to operate), and disable the generator. Those two things, and nearly all designs of plants will melt down.
Except for ones with passive cooling. Guess which ones we should be building.
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Many modern plants have passive cooling that doesn't require mains power. Every plant I'm aware of has multiple generators and multiple redundant grid links. Disabling them all is not as trivial as you make it sound.
That aside, the compounding problem at Fukishima was that the surrounding infrastructure was totally wrecked because of the Tsunami. Most places in the world they'd just truck in a back up generator before anything untoward happened.
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They did bring in portable generators at Fukushima. They had battery powered generators, and they also had external pumps (fire engines) that were trying to push cooling water into the reactors. Neither worked because the plumbing for the emergency cooling system was damaged, and due to a lack of power for monitoring equipment they didn't know that some of the valves were in the wrong position. Basically they had the means to avert disaster but confusion on the ground and (at the time unknown) damage from t
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Do the plants require grid power really? When the earthquake hit, the reactors automatically shut down, disrupting local power generation. It seems likely that that would be enough to continue operations. If the plan is to poison the diesel fuel, ram the power line pole with a truck (which seems awfully ambitious when I look at high-voltage towers), and cause a major earthquake, it might be difficult to execute the steps all at the same time.
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Do the plants require grid power really?
At the age of 8, I toured my first nuclear power plant and asked the same thing. It was true then, and it's true now. Kill grid power (and the backups), and all (currently operational) nuclear power plants will melt down.
There's enough waste heat from a near-meltdown to power a colling system, but doing so is costly and complex. And obviously never needed.
If the plan is to poison the diesel fuel, ram the power line pole with a truck (which seems awfully ambitious when I look at high-voltage towers),
The large power line towers are surprisingly fragile. The weight of the lines pulls them into the ground. If you don't like the idea of ramming them
Re:Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome. (Score:5, Interesting)
Fun fact, even a datacenter in the middle of a desert can cool every piece of equipment inside via a process known as evaporative cooling; using a heat exchanger connected to an underground water tank or adequate commercial supply, the differential in humidity inside causes heat to be evaporated in the desert sun.
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Fragmented shrapnel could easily puncture multiple coils, could easily break-off pressure gauges, could d
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Another fun fact: deserts rarely have water mains or a native surplus of water.
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But you have to get close with a hand grenade. You can probably do a lot of damage with a hand gun if you can get into the right place. Or even a crow bar.
However there tends to be a pretty big fence around these sorts of places and has the kind of people who wouldn't take too kindly to you trying to lob a grenade from a carpark.
Working on the premise that you can only get access to light munitions (ie a predator drone with a load off hellfires is off the cards) you are probably looking at commercial qua
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Re: Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unless the plant is surrounded in a glass dome. (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone were so morally bankrupt enough to create a drone army to infiltrate certain gaps and structural weaknesses in the plant and detonate significant payload to disrupt cooling/power/containment, surrounding area is going to be uninhabitable for a looong time.
That's not even remotely true.
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Tell that to the people who used to live around Fukushima.
Wow! a 9.0 earthquake followed by a 30 ft tsunami! That must have been a big ass drone.
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And if it hadn't been for the fucking massive earthquake and tsunami, generators would have arrived on site after a relatively short while and the situation calmly controlled.
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Tell that to the people who used to live around Fukushima.
Here's the Oklahoma city bombing:
http://img.timeinc.net/time/ph... [timeinc.net]
It took a Semi truck filled with Ammonium nitrate, parked a few feet from the building to do that. Concrete is a heck of a building material. Attackers would have much better luck storming the building with rifles and planting much smaller devices inside the reactor itself. You can't do this job with drones.
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Even a 747 fully loaded with fuel (9/11 style attack) wouldn't be enough to destroy the secondary (outer) and primary (inner) containment of a water cooled reactor.
Plus both Chernobyl and Fukushima mandatory evacuation have been questioned if they shouldn't right now be optional instead.
Nuclear experts continue to affirm there is a greater cancer risk of living in downtown Tokyo (from pollution) than in the Fukushima evac zone, yet, Tokyo isn't being evacuated.
There is so much anti nuclear non sense in the
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Guarapari-ES has very high radioactivity levels from Thorium rich monazite sands. So is has alpha, beta and gamma radiation (the Thorium decay chain).
The "Areia Preta" beach (black sand, from Barium that results from Thorium decay) has high enough radiation that a nuclear worker would be forbidden from being exposed to that much radiation more than a few days per year. Yet hundreds of thousands of people sunbathe right on those sands, without any measurable increase in cancer levels on the population.
I'm 42
Anti-Nuclear group looking for scare material? (Score:4, Insightful)
My first thought is it is probably some anti-nuclear group hoping to get scary pictures and data to skew horribly to terrorise the public. They probably had some cheap and nasty Geiger counter on them and we will get something like - DID YOU KNOW THE AIR ABOVE A NUCLEAR POWERPLANT IS 10,000,000,000,000,00000000 TIMES MORE RADIOACTIVE THEN NORMAL?!?!?! YOU ARE BREATHING THIS IN!!!!!!!!!
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You're an idiot. If Fukushima wasn't scary enough, nothing will be.
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Also, don't forget the thrill of flying a drone in a place that is usually not accessible to the public, and then uploading the footage to Youtube to get as many upvotes as you can, which the AR Drone app [parrot.com] makes it very easy to do. I'm sure that Youtube is getting national security take down requests from the French government as we speak.
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DID YOU KNOW THE AIR ABOVE A NUCLEAR POWERPLANT IS 10,000,000,000,000,00000000 TIMES MORE RADIOACTIVE THEN NORMAL?!?!?! YOU ARE BREATHING THIS IN!!!!!!!!!
Except that they'd be wrong if they said that. They should try flying over a coal power plant.
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Doesn't fit the neo-hippie agenda.
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Yeah, hippies love coal... wait what?
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The blind hate for anything with "nuclear" in the name overcomes everything else, including the justified hate for coal.
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Interesting how many of the comments on this story immediately look to blame anti-nuclear groups, instantly painting them as foaming at the mouth raving liars.
Why do you jump to that thought instantly? When drones are seen near airports do you think it was probably some rabid anti-aircraft group (they exist) on some mission to discredit air travel?
Sorry, but this is nuclear fanboyism.
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The reasons are:
Observation 1 - 7 power plants - in geographically disparate area. This removes the likelihood of casual thrill seeker wanting to buzz something there weren't meant to. This also points to an individual or group with a particular interest in nuclear facilities. There has been no comment on other powerstations being flown over.
Reasoning: Who would have an interest in doing this? Assuming a group, the obvious thoughts are: someone representing a risk (terrorist, separatists, militia, or fo
Why worry? (Score:1)
Why would you worry about this? We have it on good authority from the last 13 years of countless posters and moderators pushing those views and punishing dissent that there are no terrorists, only "terrorists".... maybe. And they're all FBI plants. And this is probably just a false flag so the bureaucrats in Brussels can get more power. And if any attack were to happen it would be an inside job.
Besides, even if something actually happened, wouldn't another Chernobyl in Western Europe be just a big "teac
Pffft (Score:2)
Bah, it's just the reflection of Venus off of a weather balloon.
Time to equip the nuclear power plants (Score:2)
Let's form squadrons of pilots who will fly their own drones equipped with weapons to take down the unauthorized drones.
Useless regulation (Score:1)
They should have followed the US rules on that. No restriction over nuclear power plants. Not needed. They only hurt normally law abiding citizens. As for the drone - yawn.