The absurdity of nuclear plant safety: The risk of a disasters is "completely negligible", but fly a model plane or drone above a plant and all hell breaks loose.
You can't have it both ways: Either scenarios with attackers flying Cessnas full of fertilizer into your facility etc. are a safety danger and the plants need to be reinforced immediately or drones above your plant are completely harmless and should not be prosecuted anymore than drones flying above the house of a celebrity. And if these plants are not safe, then shooting drones from the sky and imprisoning drone pilots will not change that fact.
Edit: I've added quotes around "completely negligible" to make clear I was citing public opinion rather than presenting my own (@quonn).
Actually, the risk of disasters is not negligible at all, in particular if there is a sufficient number of power plants (431 worldwide currently).
In the last 30 years, we have already seen two incidents that were above the "maximum credible accident", that is the probability of them happening was considered to be negligible.
With that number of plants running, I would expect a major incident _somewhere_ every 20 years and historically we have seen more than that.
Here [0] is a quite recent study by probably the most important german research institute that predicts one incident every 10 to 20 years, based on the number of plants running and data of historical incidents. There is also a nice summary in German [1].
The risk is not completely negligible, no one actually claims that. However, it has to be weighed against concerns such as climate change and fuel security. Moreover, my impression was that in this case it wasn't so much that these drones present a safety risk, but that they are worried that they are being used to gather intelligence.
This is not about nuclear hazard. Bombing a nuclear plant may not cause a fallout, but it will still disrupt its functioning. Power sources are critical sites. Imagine the havoc of a general outage. Now, consider this from a strategic perspective.
Ok, ignore the part about nuclear safety. My point about shooting down drones vs. actual improving safety still stands. If the stability of your power network is important to you, then do something about those attack vectors, i.e. build more redundancies or reinforce the roof yet again or deploy ground to air missiles (that last one sounds utterly crazy, but it still would make more sense). Those reactions remind of companies who had a security vulnerability disclosed, and instead of fixing it they sue the researcher.
Its an unauthorized vehicle over key infrastructure. Wouldn't even result in a loss of lives. So shoot it down & wait for the owner to start bitching (or not).
Uh, seriously? Destroying other people's stuff just because you can't check where it flew from? Do they even know that the drones are a threat to anything or are you just gung-ho on shooting anything you don't like? Is there even a reason why drones shouldn't be flown over a power plant? Is it even illegal in France?
As far as I know, in most EU countries, even the security and police forces can't just destroy other people's stuff without a very good reason (and no, an unarmed piece of electronics it not a good enough threat to use firearm in most EU law systems). Firing a firearm is a serious disciplinary matter for a policeman and he has to prove that other people were in IMMEDIATE and SERIOUS danger before they can even pull a gun out of it's holster. About a year ago, the constitutional court in my country (Slovenia) just released a ruling clearly stating that protection of human life (criminal or otherwise) is the primary objective for the police, so they are NOT ALLOWED to even shoot at criminals unless they're defending their own and life of others. Shooting at flying toys is clearly out of the question under such directive and I'm very happy that is so.
So what if they're buzzing above a nuclear power plant? What is it about a 20kg toy that makes you so afraid of consequences over a powerplant encased in several m thick concrete safety housing that makes so so scared you'd shoot at stuff?!
What's the next step? Issuing shotguns to school security so they'll shoot at children's RC cars that MIGHT carry terrorist explosives?
Carry explosives? No man...cameras. Try running onto an army base or any other strategic asset, randomly photograph things & see how that works out for you.
Last time I was at army base with a camera they didn't shoot me. Or when I was at a nuclear power plant (yes, there are actual tours. No, in last 35 years no terrorists came around... anywhere in EU).
The plans are public anyway, since the plant was paid by public money.
"The plant"? You do realize this happened at 15 plants already? i.e. Someone is systematically doing fly-overs.
Bonus fact: I've been dragged to a police station before for photographing a national key asset - wasn't EU though. All a misunderstand of course... :D
You could make sure your security forces understand exactly where they can shoot, but still, is it worth the risk to have bullets falling somewhere in a nuclear facility?
Presumably they would use shotguns and not regular bullets. I don't know if that's that much less dangerous, but people do shoot at targets and birds like that all the time.
My point is disproportionate response. A drone is nowhere near a security risk that would require a shooting response.
Same as we're not using SAM sites to shoot down Cessnas that accidentaly blunder into no-fly zones over airports, powerplants and other bases just because they MIGHT (and in 99.9999999999999999999999+% cases they're not) cause some damage.
I'm very very concerned just how the terrorist scare is trying to turn our countries into police states ruled by fear.
>is it worth the risk to have bullets falling somewhere in a nuclear facility?
The bullets aren't the issue. Nuclear facilities are usually not built from cardboard & prefab. The size of the drone is more the question - these seem to be smallish ones so it should be reasonably safe to have it drop near the plant.
It doesn't even need a real firearm or explosive to threaten a power plant.
A 32 mm² copper wire with ~3m length is enough to cause a short in the high-voltage section. Two or three RC aircraft at the same time and you can potentially cause something like Fukushima by totally separating the plant from the grid and hoping that its UPS is broken...
edit: every HV installation and even most middle-level (5-50 kV) installation can also be targeted by this. Left-wing radicals are already burning cable trenches of the train service in order to protest against nuclear power (I'm serious, this happened yesterday in East Germany), it's only a matter of time unless one of these fools tries a cable-equipped UAV against a HV distribution station...
I take issue with the statement that depriving a plant of line power and having a UPS failure will "cause something like Fukushima". An important factor in the Fukushima accident was the infeasibility of quickly (within a day or so) providing equipment to the plant due to the catastrophe everywhere around.
If coordinated enough, a sudden and unexpected total load drop on the whole power station may cause total mayhem due to turbine runaway; combined with a total loss of grid energy due to every grid HV connection being blown I am not sure if plant ops may be able to keep cooling up.
These things are very rarely tested in production (esp. turbine containments). Right now we're just sitting there and pretend there are no terrorists or political extremists. We're rather like sitting ducks waiting for potshots.
I worry more about the general safety of French (Swiss, German, ...) nuclear plants than these "drones". I guess it's some environmental group flying quadrocopters with sensors over the plants to make independent measurements.
Why just French, Swiss and German? RC aircraft can be flown over anything, I doubt the US or UK have any better protection from RC Aircraft than the French, Swiss or Germans.
This is not a new idea: the British[1] tried using balloons with trailing wires during World War II (in the hope they'll short power lines). As far as I can recall (I can't find a source right now) the Japanese put lots of copper wires in their fire balloons[2] too, to hopefully cause a short when they explode.
If an unknown drone appears over a nuclear power plant, the plant could launch a UAV to follow it about until it goes home, watch who picks it up after it lands, and then just send in the police.
It is somewhat unclear why they have failed to follow them with helicopters, did they just lose them? It is unclear if these are day or night flights though.
I would imagine that chasing one of these "drones" (which is essentially a toy helicopter) using a real helicopter would be difficult, since the toy helicopter is smaller, more maneuverable, and more difficult to see. Sort of like trying to chase a bird using an airplane.
In addition, the toy helicopter would not be easy to see on radar, especially if it were to fly close to the ground.
Drones can be a serious hazard to larger aircraft. A drone could easily destroy a helicopter, rather like a bird strike can.
When the village of Laerdalsoyri burnt down in Norway in January the emergency services had to ground their own fire fighting helicopters because news drones were a hazard:
> police told Norwegian newspaper VG that a helicopter was being delayed because of suspected media drones taking pictures in the area.
> "It is important for us to stress that if someone is using drones, they must get them out of there," police spokesman Nils Erik Eggen said.
> "This could create a hazardous situation and may pose a danger to helicopters."
> The police could not say how many drones had been operating in the area.
So one could imagine a movie plot terrorist attack where unarmed drones fly over an airport and cause a total shutdown, or in the blockbuster version actually try and intercept a landing airliner.
This was a silly, unprepared answer anyway, just like the order to shoot them down. They've probably setup radio scanners and possibly jammers in order to intercept the video/command stream.
With radio triangulation that should be able to pinpoint the controller. I know most of the newer control equipment is using spread spectrum and frequency hopping, but I imagine that is a solvable issue.
And they have to proceed to that point quickly enough to find the fellow operating it still there. Also, if I wished to avoid detection, I'd set up a transceiver linked to a data GSM connection and leave it in a random place in the middle of nowhere. Maybe even I'd have a few of those to confuse direction finding attempts (not sure how feasible that is).
Well, I would hope every nuclear power station has a rapid reaction security force on hand 24/7 the could respond to these 'threats'.
As for the misdirection, using cellular relay devices is something most wouldn't do and even if they did it would provide a lead that could be followed.
The drones are likely small and fly comparatively fast - I don't think following them in a chopper would be easy, certainly not if the person piloting the drone is skilled enough.
These RC Aircraft will be almost impossible to track if set up correctly. Using Jamming devices would be stupid as it would block out mobile phone frequencys and you would need a strong enough jammer to block high flying aircraft. Even if the vehicle was jammed it would just fly home, but who says that home is where the controllers are, some of these aircraft can do 80km+ flights...It's not an easy issue to fix.
How much damage could you do by loading a drone with aluminium foil stripes and dropping this onto the electrical equipment? Would it just evaporate before causing much harm? Are the distances you have to short to large for bringing the needed material with drones? Of course this is neither limited to nuclear plants nor to drones.
This is scary! What if the drone carried an explosive, landed on the nuclear plants and detonated? I shudder at the thought. There should be a camera with 360 vision that constantly monitors the surrounding area for incoming projectiles and drones and shoot laser or bullets at it.
1) that's an absurd proposal, would be very expensive, and incredibly dangerous if it malfunctioned. Imagine it detects a car or airplane as a projectile and starts shooting at it.
2) drones don't make anything new possible. They could just as easily use homemade rockets, mortars, old fashioned RC planes, etc. I don't know why people are so afraid of possible abuses of new technology. There are so many old technologies which are also abusable in similar ways, but we don't generally worry about it because it's just not a significant problem.
The new electric quadcopters are like the first iPhone - people think it's an all new invention, when in fact we've had marvelous gas-powered RC helicopters for a long time.
Quadcopters seem to be the platform that drove the highly advanced flight computers that allow anyone to fly the things. When I take my FCs out of acro mode even my 4 year old can fly them and not crash. They are being used on more platforms now, but the quads seems to be in the news as the front runners.
The worst you could do is cause the plant to shut down, it wouldn't go any further than that.
Gnat vs Elephant. Landing a 747 on one would be a different matter (but they're supposedly prepared against that eventuality too, though I really hope nobody will ever try to see if that really holds up or not).
I believe I've heard something to the effect of if a plane was flown into a nuclear power plant there's no real chance of catastrophic nuclear-related damage (of course the loss of human life and some structural damage will happen)
In design terminology I saw, missile equals tree uprooted by tornado (not chemically explosive). They've not been designed for a plane strike (most were designed in the 60s and 70s). NPPs in the US had to undergo an analysis of the results of an aircraft impact, which may or may not have resulted in retrofits (the results are security sensitive).
You can't have it both ways: Either scenarios with attackers flying Cessnas full of fertilizer into your facility etc. are a safety danger and the plants need to be reinforced immediately or drones above your plant are completely harmless and should not be prosecuted anymore than drones flying above the house of a celebrity. And if these plants are not safe, then shooting drones from the sky and imprisoning drone pilots will not change that fact.
Edit: I've added quotes around "completely negligible" to make clear I was citing public opinion rather than presenting my own (@quonn).