Securing Britain’s nuclear future and lessons from Fukushima; by Tony Burton, pictured, Critical Infrastructure Protection Business Lead at Thales UK.
In March 2011 the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan was party to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, suffering a catastrophic triple meltdown. Almost three years later and the Fukushima fallout continues to contaminate Japan’s air, land and water, with continued global concern over the radioactive ocean plume.
Whilst natural disaster of this magnitude hasn’t typically ranked as a major threat facing plants here in Britain, Naomi Hirose, president of the Tokyo Electric Power Company which runs the Fukushima plant, has been swift to warn the UK that ‘all worst case scenarios’ should be considered when crafting future nuclear security and resilience policies. This is particularly pertinent now as the UK government looks to build the next generation of power plants. In 2012, British ministers agreed a commercial deal with energy company EDF to build the UK’s first new nuclear reactor in a generation at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Now undergoing its final approval process, the plant will aim to provide 7% of the UK’s electricity. But awareness of the resilience weaknesses exposed at Fukushima have presented project managers with a new set of challenges for this £16bn project, to ensure that all the necessary responses are in place to ensure such new sites are adequately protected.
In the aftermath of Fukushima, regulatory authorities from 23 countries, along with 4 regional and 3 international organisations, were instructed to contribute information on national response activities and conduct numerous stress test reports on existing nuclear plants. In the UK specifically, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change tasked the chief inspector for the UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation, Mike Weightman, to produce a report exploring the implications and lessons learnt from Japan for the UK nuclear industry. Whilst no “fundamental safety weaknesses” were found, the concluding report detailed 38 areas where lessons could be applied. These included a reliance on off-site infrastructure, such as the electrical grid supply in extreme events, emergency response arrangements, and the effects of risks such as extreme weather and flooding.
What is clear from Fukushima is that, however remote the possibility, beyond design basis events do happen, and in a similar vein the uncomfortable truth around security breaches or emergency management of accidents must also be considered. The consideration of security, resilience and emergency management must therefore be collectively included in any discussion of nuclear sites to ensure safe operation in any condition that the plant may experience. This holistic approach requires consideration of threat assessment, penetration testing and vulnerability assessment in all conditions of the site, to identify the nature and degree of security and safety risks. This process and the resulting holistic view then provides the blueprint for the introduction of security capability on New Builds or the further bolstering of security capability on existing sites. The interconnectivity of the modern world demands that the cyber threat considers additional measures such as the implementation of a Cyber-Security Maturity Model to ensure that the operators/licensees are prepared, but also that their supply chains include the necessary resilience and defences to prevent the introduction of security vulnerabilities through those links. As ever, building in resilience across all potential physical, process, people and cyber vulnerabilities is far easier if it’s done in an integrated fashion from day one.
In addition to applying stringent security policies to new builds, important considerations should be factored in to safely extending the life of older plants too. Built in the 1960s, the previous generation of nuclear power stations faced very different threats, and so security capabilities will need to be equipped to meet modern-day demands. Technology now plays a central role in the generation and distribution of nuclear energy. These interconnected systems present an attractive target for those with malicious intentions regarding critical infrastructure. A thorough and regular risk assessment can highlight potential vulnerabilities in the system. Another consideration in extending the lives of existing plants is knowledge management. Many of the employees involved in the development of older plants and with a good working knowledge of their design have retired from the workforce. Existing service providers with long experience of the plants and their operations can help to address these potential knowledge gaps.
Holistic security and the imminent cyber threat
Cyber security is a rapidly evolving threat – it’s potential to cause serious damage was highlighted in 2010 when a computer worm named Stuxnet was created to target Iran’s nuclear facilities and contaminate uranium fuel production. The GCHQ chief has since warned of an ‘exponential rise’ in cyber-attacks on UK government departments and industry, with a report published late last year revealing that around 63% of energy companies are “very concerned” about the prospects of cyber or network attacks.
In a bid to help combat this threat the government announced its investment of £650m in cyber security defences, but has since been heavily criticised for not doing enough to deal with the magnitude of the present threat. For cyber to be an effective line of defence, cyber-defences should be tightly integrated with processes, people and physical measures in a process of constant, iterative improvement, working in consort with the resilience and emergency management capabilities. As identified by the chief inspector at the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), the UK nuclear industry is well prepared for events beyond design basis. However, it is important to understand that security, emergency management and resilience to natural events must all be taken into consideration as part of the protection of nuclear infrastructure, and they cannot be considered as independent challenges.
Future of nuclear
According to government calculations, the country will require 60 gigawatts (GW) of new generating capacity by 2025. Renewable energy sources are expected to provide 35 GW of this, while nuclear power accounts for a significant proportion of the remaining 25 GW – so the need for new plants is clear. But a combination of upgrades of old power stations and new builds along with proposed changes to the European Commission’s nuclear safety directive makes securing these projects a highly complex task. SCADA systems that were never designed to be connected to other networks now need to be linked to other systems but in a secure and controlled manner.
Continued vigilance, transparency and co-operation by all countries and organisations must be maintained on issues of safety and security to ensure the nuclear industry is equipped for the future. The potential scale of a disaster means that, despite the fact that incidents are rare, traditional methods of assessing the risk should be supplemented with contingency plans to deal with all conceivable eventualities. As the UK braces itself for major investment in the nuclear industry to secure the country’s energy supply for the next generation, the government, developers, regulators and security experts must work together to ensure the highest level of knowledge, expertise, innovation, and most of all a holistic approach to security and resilience, are employed to avoid a repeat of the Fukushima disaster.
About the writer
Tony Burton is the Critical Infrastructure Protection Business Lead at Thales UK. Thales UK has over 30 years’ experience in protecting UK critical infrastructure, and play a role in maintaining the control systems for British Energy plants in the UK, working with providers British Energy and EDF.
