Patriot missile (file image)
Read about cyber terrorism:  "...The attacks were 'the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,' Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. 'The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.'”  At right: Some experts have doubts about the missile shield concept, according to the I-BBC.  Where do really big vegetables fit in to nuclear proliferation?  Stuxnet worm threat?  Bart Simpson: Trifecta of earthquake, tsunami and then nuke? German resolve?  What's up in CT?




IN OUR OWN BACKYARD

The League of Women Voters of Greenwich will sponsor an educational forum, "Nuclear Plant Safety Issues: Should Greenwich Be Concerned?" on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 7:30 p.m. at Greenwich Town Hall in the Meeting Room.

Greenwich is approximately 20 miles from two nuclear reactors at Buchanan, NY on the Hudson River at Indian Point. This facility has been on-line for more than 35 years and the re-licensing process for another 20 years is underway.  Radiation fallout have been detected in Japan at distances greater than 20 miles from the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi that were heavily damaged following the severe earthquake and tsunami that occurred in March. A similar nuclear reactor accident at Indian Point could directly affect the residents of Greenwich.

The public is invited to hear a panel of experts with opposing views address these questions:

1. Can nuclear reactor failures similar to the ones in Japan at Fukushima Daiichi happen here?

2. Is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) doing its job to protect the public?

3. Is Greenwich at risk if the aging reactors at Indian Point are re-licensed?

The panelists are:

Dr. Edwin Lyman, Union of Concerned Scientists, an expert on nuclear plant design and radiation effects; Phillip Musegaas, Hudson River Program Director and Indian Point Policy Analyst for Riverkeeper-New York’s Clean Water Advocate; James F.X. Steets, Director of Communications, Entergy Nuclear -the owner and operator of Indian Point and several other U.S. power plants.

Questions from the audience will follow their presentations. Dr. Stephen A. Myers, a physicist with a long history of involvement in nuclear issues, will moderate. For more information see www.lwvg.org or contact Naomi Schiff Myers at 203-637-3892.

U.N. Watchdog Tentatively Backs Japan’s Nuclear Stress Tests
By HIROKO TABUCHI, NYTIMES
January 31, 2012

TOKYO — A United Nations fact-finding mission on Tuesday tentatively supported new stress tests designed to determine whether Japan’s nuclear plants can withstand another emergency, throwing its weight behind a government push to restart reactors idled in the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant after the earthquake and tsunami in March.

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, were in Japan at the request of the government to review stress tests ordered by the country’s nuclear regulator on reactors across the nation.

The government is eager to dispel public mistrust of nuclear power and restart the reactors, which until recently provided 30 percent of Japan’s electricity needs. But because of heightened local opposition to nuclear power following the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station nearly a year ago, host communities across Japan have blocked reactors from starting after mandatory shutdowns required every year for maintenance.

Only three out of the country’s 54 nuclear reactors are operating, and the rest are likely to be halted in the coming months, raising fears of a power shortage during peak summer months.

In a bid to quell those fears, Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has ordered the country’s nuclear operators to conduct stress tests, or computer simulations that analyze whether a reactor can withstand disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis.  Earlier this month, the agency said it had reviewed stress tests conducted on two reactors at the Ohi Nuclear Power Plant in central Japan, and concluded that the plant would survive a disaster similar to the magnitude-9.0 earthquake that jolted eastern Japan in March and triggered a tsunami. By last July, more than 22,000 people were listed as dead or missing from the disaster.

In its preliminary assessment released on Tuesday, the I.A.E.A. said those checks met the agency’s safety standards. Japanese regulators’ checks of emergency measures at the plant were “appropriate and enhanced confidence” in the reactors’ resilience to disasters, the agency said in a statement.  It also issued a list of recommendations for earthquake-prone Japan, including a more detailed analysis of the risks caused by earthquakes and tsunamis.

“What we saw was a process that we felt comfortable with. But in any process, there is always room for improvement,” said James Lyons, leader of the eight-person team.

The preliminary report yielded few details of the contingency measures the I.A.E.A. had deemed sufficient. Japan’s nuclear operators have promised higher sea walls at their plants to protect against tsunamis, as well as better ways to prevent station blackouts, which can shut off vital cooling systems and cause the reactors’ cores to overheat.  The I.A.E.A. spokesman, Greg Webb, also stressed that the agency was not vouching for the absolute safety of nuclear power plants in Japan, or whether they are a good fit for the nation.

“We could never do that,” Mr. Webb said. “You can never be complacent about nuclear safety.”

It was up to Japan to weigh the risks and benefits of nuclear power to determine whether it should form part of the nation’s energy supply, he said.  Even if it restarts its idled reactors, Japan has said it will eventually phase out nuclear power. That could take a long time: recently proposed legislation could allow some reactors to operate for as long as 60 years.  The I.A.E.A. is scheduled to submit a final report on its findings to the Japanese government by the end of February.


AP IMPACT:  US nuke regulators weaken safety rules
YAHOO
By JEFF DONN, AP National Writer
Mon Jun 20, 2011, 3:38 am ET

LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. – Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation's aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.

Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews.

The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by the NRC are significantly undermining safety — and inching the reactors closer to an accident that could harm the public and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the United States...full story here.




Workers Remove Device From Damaged Japanese Reactor
By KEN BELSON, NYTIMES
June 24, 2011

TOKYO — A 3.3-ton device that bedeviled the troubled Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor for nearly a year was removed on Friday morning, Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency said.

The in-vessel transfer machine that crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel last August had cut off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods and left the reactor in an uncertain state. Engineers had tried several times to retrieve the device, which was apparently jammed inside the reactor.

On Thursday night, the operators of the plant, which is in Fukui Prefecture about 300 miles west of Tokyo, finally removed the device along with a sleeve. The recovery work took more than eight hours, ending at 4:55 a.m. on Friday.

The agency said that it had confirmed that some equipment was damaged, as was expected, and that a more detailed inspection would be conducted when the liquid sodium used to cool the nuclear fuel was removed.

The reactor has been shut down and the spent fuel there is under control, the agency said. But it is unclear when the troubled reactor will be restarted, given the growing concerns about the safety of nuclear power plants in the wake of the troubles at the Daiichi plant in Fukushima.

The Monju reactor was designed to reuse and eventually produce nuclear fuel. But the $12 billion project has been dogged by problems, including a fire in 1995 that forced a shutdown of the plant for 14 years. Prefecture and city officials later found that the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide the scale of the disaster.

A top manager at the plant recently committed suicide, on the day that Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency announced that efforts to recover the device would cost almost $21.9 million. Monju, like several other reactors in Japan, also lies on an active fault.
New Doubts About Turning Plutonium Into a Fuel
NYTIMES
By JO BECKERand WILLIAM J. BROAD
April 10, 2011

On a tract of government land along the Savannah River in South Carolina, an army of workers is building one of the nation’s most ambitious nuclear enterprises in decades: a plant that aims to safeguard at least 43 tons of weapons-grade plutonium by mixing it into fuel for commercial power reactors.

The project grew out of talks with the Russians to shrink nuclear arsenals after the cold war. The plant at the Savannah River Site, once devoted to making plutonium for weapons, would now turn America’s lethal surplus to peaceful ends. Blended with uranium, the usual reactor fuel, the plutonium would be transformed into a new fuel called mixed oxide, or mox.

“We are literally turning swords into plowshares,” one of the project’s biggest boosters, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said at a hearing on Capitol Hill last week.

But 11 years after the government awarded a construction contract, the cost of the project has soared to nearly $5 billion. The vast concrete and steel structure is a half-finished hulk, and the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies.

Now, the nuclear crisis in Japan has intensified a long-running conflict over the project’s rationale.

One of the stricken Japanese reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant uses the mox fuel. And while there has been no evidence of dangerous radiation from plutonium in Japan, the situation there is volatile, and nuclear experts worry that a widespread release of radioactive material could increase cancer deaths.

Against that backdrop, the South Carolina project has been thrown on the defensive, with would-be buyers distancing themselves and critics questioning its health risks and its ability to keep the plutonium out of terrorists’ hands.

The most likely customer, the Tennessee Valley Authority, has been in discussions with the federal Department of Energy about using mox to replace a third of the regular uranium fuel in several reactors — a far greater concentration than at the stricken Japanese reactor, Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit No. 3, where 6 percent of the core is made out of mox. But the T.V.A. now says it will delay any decision until officials can see how the mox performed at Fukushima Daiichi, including how hot the fuel became and how badly it was damaged.

“We are studying the ongoing events in Japan very closely,” said Ray Golden, a spokesman for the utility.

At the same time, opponents of the South Carolina project scored a regulatory victory this month when a federal atomic licensing panel, citing “significant public safety and national security issues,” ordered new hearings on the plans for tracking and safeguarding the plutonium used at the plant.

Obama administration officials say that mox is safe, and they remain confident that the project will attract customers once it is further along and can guarantee a steady fuel supply. Anne Harrington, who oversees nuclear nonproliferation programs for the Energy Department, noted that six countries besides Japan had licensed the routine use of mox fuel. She accused critics of “an opportunistic attempt” to score political points by seizing on Japan’s crisis.

“Mox is nothing new,” she said.

Even so, the critics say there is an increasing likelihood that the South Carolina project will fail to go forward and will become what a leading opponent, Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls a “plant to nowhere.” That would leave the United States without a clear path for the disposal of its surplus plutonium.

A cheaper alternative, encasing it in glass, was canceled in 2002 by President George W. Bush’s administration. The energy secretary at the time, Spencer Abraham, is now the non-executive chairman of the American arm of Areva, a French company that is the world’s largest mox producer and is primarily responsible for building the South Carolina plant.

After the cold war, the United States and Russia were left with stockpiles of plutonium, and the fear was that one or the other would reverse course and use the plutonium to make new weapons, or that, in what the National Academies of Science called a “clear and present danger,” thieves could make off with it.

Plutonium is easy to handle because the radiation it gives off is persistent but relatively weak. The type used in weapons, plutonium 239, has a half-life of 24,000 years and emits alpha rays. They make the plutonium feel warm to the touch but are so feeble that skin easily stops the radiation. If trapped inside the body, though, alpha rays can cause cancer.

At the same time, plutonium is preferred over uranium as nuclear bomb fuel because much less is needed to make a blast of equal size. And while it is difficult to work with, it does not need to undergo the complex process of purification required for uranium.

The 43 tons of surplus plutonium in the American stockpile could fuel up to 10,000 nuclear weapons and even more “dirty bombs” — ordinary explosives that spew radioactive debris. Alternatively, they could fuel 43 large reactors for about a year.

After studying a range of options, the Clinton administration decided to build a mox fuel plant to dispose of a portion of the plutonium, awarding a contract to a consortium now called Shaw Areva Mox Services.

The rest of the plutonium was to be mixed with highly radioactive nuclear waste and immobilized in glass or ceramic blocks, making it difficult and dangerous for any thief to extract. The government judged the mox route to be more expensive, but the dual-track approach was seen as insurance should either fail.

That strategy also helped persuade Jim Hodges, the Democratic governor of South Carolina from 1999 to 2003, to sign off on plutonium shipments to the Savannah River Site. When the Bush administration canceled the glass-block disposal program, Mr. Hodges was furious.

His concern, he said in a recent interview, was that South Carolina would become a dumping ground if the mox program did not work out because of political or technical difficulties. “That site was never designed for long-term plutonium storage,” he said. “We were concerned about health and safety.” Now, he said, that dumping ground is in danger of coming to pass.

Mr. Abraham said that budget cuts had made it necessary to end one of the programs, and that with the Russians favoring mox, the administration had feared that going the other route would discourage Moscow from keeping its end of the bargain. (Only later, Mr. Abraham added, did he decide to join Areva in a largely advisory role.)

“The politics of it — both from a budget standpoint and in terms of the Russian comfort level — both argued for going to the mox-only approach,” he said.

If mox fuel was to be licensed for widespread use, though, Washington first needed to have it tested in reactors. Duke Energy agreed to use French-made mox. The government paid $26 million to prepare a reactor, according to the Energy Department. But a test in 2005 was aborted after the fuel began behaving strangely. Though the problem was ultimately traced to a different material in the fuel assemblies, Duke subsequently said it had no further plans to test or use the mox.

Along the way, the cost of the South Carolina project, originally about $1 billion, nearly quintupled. Energy Department officials said cost increases were to be expected because the original estimates were rough approximations. The sprawling plant, which is just south of Aiken, S.C., is to be bigger in size than eight football fields, and its construction currently employs nearly 2,000 workers.

For other countries, plutonium is seen as an opportunity rather than a problem. Nearly all reactors produce some plutonium as a byproduct of splitting atoms in two, and it can be gathered from spent fuel and mixed with uranium to make mox.

The United States, worried that plutonium recycling would contribute to the global spread of nuclear weapons, gave it up during the Carter administration. President Obama’s panel on America’s nuclear future is considering whether to recommend a return to recycling.

The Japanese government has followed the recycling path, despite citizens’ protests about possible safety risks. In the wake of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, officials at Areva, which supplied the mox fuel for Reactor No. 3 there, are cautioning against drawing hasty conclusions.

“Mox was not the cause of that accident, and the consequences of it have not been impacted by mox,” said David Jones, a vice president at Areva, which has been providing on-the-ground assistance in Japan.

There is no clear evidence that plutonium has been released by the mox-loaded Japanese reactor; small traces found at the site could have come from other sources or from the site’s other reactors. But Reactor No. 3 is one of three at Fukushima Daiichi that are judged to have undergone at least partial meltdowns, and experts are debating whether high radiation readings beneath the reactor vessels indicate that they have begun to leak. It would take full meltdowns, high heat and the rupture of a reactor’s containment vessel to loft substantial plutonium into the air.

The dangers vary depending on the chain of events that led to the accident and the concentration of mox in the reactor core. Even so, studies show that a nuclear meltdown and containment failure in a reactor that holds mox would result in more cancer deaths than one in a reactor fueled only with uranium.

In 2001, Dr. Lyman, a Cornell-trained physicist who has led the battle against mox, published a detailed study in the journal Science & Global Security that concluded the fuel could produce up to 30 percent more cancer deaths.

Energy Department officials do not dispute that there would be additional health consequences, but they see them as less severe than the critics have predicted. In any event, they argue, a major release of plutonium would require an accident so severe that the additional health effects would amount to a “sliver on top of a mountaintop.”

“It’s not that significant — 10 percent or less,” said Kenneth Bromberg, the department’s assistant deputy administrator for fissile materials disposition.

“Proliferation causes a far greater danger to a far greater number of people than highly controlled use of this fuel in a reactor,” said Ms. Harrington, his boss.

But critics say that in its efforts to move the mox program along, the government has undercut the nonproliferation benefits by allowing or entertaining exceptions to a number of its rules for safeguarding plutonium.

Disposing of plutonium by burning it in reactors involves moving and then storing mox fuel at a commercial site. Such a plan, they argue, could make the fuel vulnerable to theft before it is irradiated into something that would be too deadly to steal.

But at the request of Duke Energy, which had agreed to test the fuel, the government decided to exempt nuclear plants that burn mox from special security requirements imposed on other facilities that handled “strategic special nuclear material” like plutonium.

In doing so, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission overruled its own Atomic Safety Licensing Board, which had recommended a middle ground requiring some additional security. But the commissioners reasoned that mox encased in heavy assemblies would not be as attractive to terrorists as pure plutonium, and so did not require the same level of security.

Jeffrey Merrifield, one of the commission members who voted on the matter, now works for the Shaw Group, which is designing the mox plant with Areva. He said in a statement that he had not discussed jobs with the company until after the vote and that he works in a section unrelated to the mox project.

The Shaw Areva Group requested an exception to the government’s material control and accounting standards for plutonium. Though the company subsequently withdrew the request, it led the Atomic Safety Licensing Board to rule that more hearings were needed to determine whether the Savannah River plant was capable of keeping track of the plutonium that is expected to move through it and on to commercial utilities.

In a statement, Shaw Areva said, “We continue to believe that the mox project meets all the regulatory requirements for licensing, and we welcome the opportunity to present our case” in hearings this year.

Ms. Harrington said security at the Savannah River Site was so tight that “I’d defy anyone to walk in and walk out with any of our plutonium.”

Still, Mr. Abraham, the former energy secretary, says that given the crisis in Japan, he understands the hesitation of utilities to embrace mox.

“I can’t imagine any utility would say, ‘Yeah, we are going to ignore Japan,’ ” he said. “I think the dust has to settle here.”


The Obama Administration nixed this.

The spent-fuel crisis: Region's nuclear plants pack pools with waste
CT POST
Bill Cummings, Investigative Reporter
Updated 10:34 p.m., Sunday, March 27, 2011

In an effort to preserve profits, nuclear power-plant operators in New England are stuffing more and more spent nuclear fuel rods into already crowded storage pools that many believe are more dangerous than the reactors.  The spent-fuel pools at New England's oldest plants now hold up to five times more fuel than they were initially designed to handle.  The dramatic increases in the number of rods per pool have been approved by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, partly because a national disposal site for nuclear waste has not been established.

Experts say this federally sanctioned "re-racking" has allowed plant operators to avoid millions of dollars in costs by delaying when the nuclear fuel rods have to be moved to safer but more expensive dry cask storage, which involves sealing the material in giant concrete urns.

Now, though, the operators are running out of time. The NRC estimates that by 2015, many of the nation's spent-fuel pools, particularly in older plants like many in this region, will run out of room. Then, operators will face an unpleasant choice: Move waste into dry casks to free up space in the pools, or shut down their plants.

While the NRC insists the practice is safe, stuffing pools to their limit is inherently dangerous, many scientists and engineers say. They warn that the sheer volume of radioactivity in the pools, often far more than what is in a reactor, could turn an accident or natural disaster into a cataclysm. Also, they worry that the storage pools make tempting targets for terrorists (see accompanying story).

"The New England plants are older, and the issues with older reactors are mostly ignored. These plants are like the canary in the coal mine. They never intended to put lifetime storage into the plans," said David Lochbaum, a former nuclear plant operator and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that has sounded the alarm over nuclear safety.

The still-unfolding Japanese nuclear disaster -- spent fuel rods in pools at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors were exposed to the air and released large amounts of radiation after a tsunami knocked out the cooling system -- is a graphic example of the risks inherent in onsite spent-fuel storage. And the Japanese pools that caught fire held much less waste than many of the New England pools.

A 1997 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island concluded that a pool fire at a plant like Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Connecticut or Pilgrim Nuclear Generating Station in Massachusetts could kill 100 people instantly and another 138,000 people eventually. Some $546 billion in damage would result, the study said, and 2,170 square miles of land could be contaminated.

WASTE PILES UP EVERYWHERE

Nationally, the nation's 104 nuclear power plants are now storing some 63,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods, according to 2010 numbers compiled by the Nuclear Energy Institute.

In New England, the four operating nuclear power plants are storing at least 2,900 metric tons of spent fuel, according to figures provided by two plants and 2002 data available for two others, which is the most recent available. The Indian Point Energy Center in New York state is storing at least 903 metric tons of spent fuel.  New England's plants have re-racked their spent-fuel storage pools many times over the last few decades. In many cases, the stored spent-fuel rods are now packed closer together than ever before -- nearly as close as they were positioned inside the reactor.

The storage pool at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station was originally licensed to hold 600 spent fuel assemblies. There are now 2,935 assemblies in the pool, or 932 metric tons of radioactive waste.

At Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Waterford, the pool at the Unit 3 reactor was originally licensed to hold 756 assemblies. It now holds 1,040 assemblies, or 449 metric tons of waste, and is licensed to handle up to 1,860 assemblies.

Millstone's Unit 2 reactor was originally licensed to hold 677 spent fuel assemblies. It now holds 909 assemblies, or 304 metric tons, and is licensed to hold 1,346 assemblies. The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Generating Station in Massachusetts currently holds 2,918 fuel assemblies. Its original license allowed 880 fuel assemblies, according to NRC documents. The license was later updated to allow for 3,859 assemblies.

The spent fuel pool at Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire, the newest of New England plants (Seabrook came online in 1990) was originally licensed to handle 1,236 fuel assemblies and now has 936 assemblies in its pool. There are also 192 fuel assemblies in dry cask storage.

The Indian Point nuclear plant on the Hudson River in Buchanan, N.Y., has 2,073 spent fuel assemblies at two pools, or 903 metric tons, according to 2002 data compiled by the Department of Energy. NRC records show that Indian Point Unit 2 was originally licensed to hold 478 assemblies. Unit 3 began with a license for 264 assemblies when it came online in 1976 and that was increased to 840 in 1978.

Maine Yankee, which was shut down 14 years ago, is storing 1,434 fuel assemblies, or 542 metric tons, in dry cask storage, while Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts, also shut down years ago, is storing 533 metric tons of waste.

A FAILED PLAN

New England's nuclear power plants, most of which were built in the 1970s, came online with a promise: the government would take the spent fuel rods that result from nuclear fission and safely store the waste at a national site. In 1982, Congress made that promise into law, and the national repository was scheduled to open in 1998.

That plan officially fell apart last year when the Obama administration, under considerable political pressure from opponents, canceled plans for a nuclear disposal facility in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which was to be hollowed out to create a repository. That decision came despite the fact that electric ratepayers have contributed $18 billion toward building the national repository through a special assessment included in their monthly bills, according to a 2010 accounting. (See accompanying story).

Spent fuel pools were originally intended to be temporary storage and as a result were not given the same level of protection as reactors. As the volume of spent fuel grew over the years, scientists began warning the pools could be more dangerous than the reactor because they now held more radioactive material. Without a national storage site, plant operators, with the blessing of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, packed more and more spent fuel rods into the pools.

"There used to be space between them. The assemblies were so far apart they could not go to critical mass. Then they took out the racks. The walls of the pool now have material that prevents a reaction. It's the same size pool with many more rods," Lochbaum said.

Lochbaum said storage pools were reconfigured to handle more fuel rods by redesigning how the rods are placed in the pool, moving them closer together, and adding substances like boron, which restricts nuclear fission.  That closer proximity, however, means rods could heat up much faster if there is a major loss of cooling water, Lochbaum and other experts said.

The alternative to pool storage is a dry cask, which typically is a concrete bunker approximately 20 feet high, 10 feet wide and 20 feet deep, with walls and roof areas up to five feet thick. Spent fuel rods are placed in a steel canister typically capable of holding 32 fuel assemblies and the lid is welded in place. The canisters weigh up to 40 tons fully loaded. The loading procedure occurs under water.  Last summer, Lochbaum testified before the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, formed by the Obama Administration, and said all nuclear waste represents a risk but stressed early transfer to dry casks is the best course.

"From the time it is removed from reactor vessels until the time it is shipped offsite, interim storage of spent fuel at nuclear plant sites represents a risk to public and worker safety. The risk from onsite storage is highest during wet pool storage. The risk drops significantly when the spent fuel is transferred to dry-cask storage onsite," Lochbaum said.

A 2010 statement signed by 170 environmental and activist groups declared that "as the amount of waste generated has increased beyond the designed capacity, the pools have been reorganized so that the concentration of fuel in the pools is nearly the same as that in operating reactor cores." "If water is lost from a densely packed pool as the result of an attack or an accident, cooling by ambient air would likely be insufficient to prevent a fire, resulting in the release of large quantities of radioactivity to the environment," the statement continued.

Such conclusions are actually nothing new.

In a 2002 report, Robert Alvarez, a former top official at the federal Department of Energy and a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that if a fire broke out at the Millstone Reactor Unit 3 spent-fuel pool in Connecticut it would result in a three-fold increase in background exposures. That would trigger the NRC's evacuation requirement and could render about 29,000 square miles of land uninhabitable, severely affecting Connecticut, much of Long Island and even New York City.

"On average, spent fuel ponds hold five to 10 times more long-lived radioactivity than a reactor core," Alvarez wrote in his report.

"Particularly worrisome is the large amount of cesium 137 in fuel ponds, which contain anywhere from 20 to 50 million curies of this dangerous isotope. With a half-life of 30 years, cesium 137 gives off highly penetrating radiation and is absorbed in the food chain as if it were potassium. According to the NRC, as much as 100 percent of a pool's cesium 137 would be released into the environment in a fire," Alvarez wrote.

Cesium-137 is known to cause liver cancer and circulates within the body for years. Other isotopes, the byproducts of nuclear fission, are also extremely dangerous: Iodine-131, strontium- 90 and plutonium-239. Iodine-131 can cause thyroid cancer, strontium-90 gets incorporated into bones and teeth and stays there, irradiating the body and causing leukemia. Plutonium-239 is the worst of all; it can be inhaled and cause lung cancer.

NRC SAYS POOLS ARE SAFE

The NRC's official position is that there is nothing dangerous about more densely packed storage pools.

"Let me begin by saying public health and safety is protected by the safety and security features associated with storage of spent fuel in either pools or casks," said Diane Screnci, an NRC spokeswoman.

"The NRC, after careful study of the safety and security issues, concluded that fuel is safely stored in wet pools or dry storage casks. There is no justification, from a safety or security viewpoint, for removing fuel from pools and loading it into casks in order to return to low density racking," Screnci said.

The details of the NRC's storage-pool studies are not public due to national security concerns.

A nuclear reactor is surrounded by six to nine inches of steel, and sits within a containment dome some three to four feet thick. But a spent-fuel pool at a pressurized water reactor, like the Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Connecticut and the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire, is located outside the containment dome and housed in a steel industrial building. 

At a boiling water reactor, like Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant and the Pilgrim Nuclear Generating Station in Massachusetts, the pool is several stories above ground level, within the containment dome.

In testimony last year before Obama's Blue Ribbon commission, Lochbaum told the panel that "better management of the wet-pool risk is particularly crucial at boiling water reactors with pools located inside secondary containment. A reactor accident at such plants can initiate a wet pool accident and vice-versa."

Nuclear power plants create electricity by placing nuclear fuel rods consisting of uranium pellets close together within a water filled reactor vessel. A controlled atomic fission is created as the uranium atoms split and their mass is converted to energy. The resulting heat is used to turn liquid water into steam, which then turns turbines connected to electric generators to make electricity.

About every 18 months, one third of the reactor core is spent and the fuel rods are removed and placed in a nearby storage pool. Although no longer efficient for heating water within the reactor, the rods remain highly radioactive and very hot. Over time, they cool while resting in the pool and the radioactivity lessens.

THE COST FACTOR

Clay Turnbull, director of the New England Coalition on Nuclear Power, said it costs plant owners about $1 million per dry cask and that's why the fuel remains in pools. Other estimates place the price tag per-cask at about $1.5 million.

"It's a lot of money to move them around. If you need 50 casks, that's $50 million at least," Turnbull said, adding that nuclear plants operate on a tight profit margin so any additional costs are a disincentive.

"The plants are resisting this, going to dry casks," Lochbaum said. "When the space in the pool is filled, then they go to dry cask. They move it only when needed. By doing this, the risk to the pool is as high as it can be."

Power plant officials disagreed and insisted that economics has nothing to do with fuel remaining in wet storage for so long.

"When we opened, the expectation was the fuel would be taken in 25 years and reprocessed," said Holt, the Millstone spokesman.

"We never thought we would have to contain fuel for the full life of the plant," Holt said.

Still, Holt acknowledged cost is an issue. "Both are safe. But there is a cost element to dry cask and it is a fairly heavy cost and a major factor in why we have not pulled fuel sooner. It's true that dry casks use a passive storage system that is not dependent on pumps and mechanical systems."

Larry Smith, a spokesman for Vermont Yankee, acknowledged there are hefty costs involved in moving fuel from pools to casks.

"We believe pools are perfectly safe. It was designed to be safe and there are redundant systems so there is never a loss of coolant," Smith said.

Tom Kaufman, spokesman for the pro-nuclear Nuclear Energy Institute, said operators would not put residents or workers at risk just to save money.

"No [operator] would jeopardize safety for cost, if that's what the implication is. That's wrong. All of the pools meet the requirements of the NRC and have to have the right procedures in place," Kaufman said.

"The individual operators have held up their end but the federal government has not come through with a disposal regime," Kaufman said "The fact is it's a matter of science. There are materials that absorb the neutrons and control this. When they run out of storage space, they will have to move it to dry cask," Kaufman said.

At Maine Yankee, activists have recently called on the federal government to finally remove the dry casks stored there since the plant was shut down in 1996. The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, formed by the Obama Administration, is studying what to do with the nuclear waste and recently visited Maine Yankee to look over its cask storage.

Scientists worry that pools present inviting terror target
Bill Cummings, Investigative Reporter, CT POST
Updated 10:35 p.m., Sunday, March 27, 2011

A nuclear disaster in New England would truly be the sum of all fears. Studies project that thousands would be killed and huge areas rendered uninhabitable, potentially displacing one-sixth of the nation's population.

As such, it is the very definition of a terrorist objective.

Some scientists worry that the high concentration of spent fuel in the region's waste-storage pools dramatically increases the risk of such an outcome.

Thomas Cochran, a nuclear physicist with the National Resource Defense Council, said that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks a variety of groups began raising concerns about the safety of pools and whether they are vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Those groups urged regulators to mandate that rods be taken out of the pools as soon as possible and placed in dry cask storage.

Such terrorist attacks, scientists, engineers and activists warn, could include flying an airplane into a pool, blowing up the intake ports where a nuclear plant sucks water for cooling the reactor and the pools, or firing some type of explosive device into the pool buildings. A number of academic reports assert that a standard commercial airliner could easily disable a spent-fuel pool.

"The plants should move the rods to dry cask storage sooner," said David Lochbaum, a former nuclear plant operator and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that has sounded the alarm over nuclear safety. "You lessen the risk ... You can't take shampoo on an airplane, but we can have 400 metric tons of waste in a pool at a nuclear plant."

A 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service noted that the National Academy of Sciences in April 2005 found that "successful terrorist attacks on spent-fuel pools, though difficult, are possible," and said that "an attack ... could result in the release of large amounts of radioactive material." The report urged the NRC to do more analysis and consider moving the spent fuel rods to dry cask storage as soon as possible.

In 2010, CRS noted that "deliberate aircraft crashes (have) been a major concern since 9/11. Most existing nuclear power plants were not specifically designed to withstand crashes from large jetliners."

Since 9/11, Greenpeace USA has warned that the federal government is not doing enough to ensure that nuclear plants are safe from terrorist attack.

"It's outrageous that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has allowed the nuclear industry to put its profits ahead of safety ... for so long," said Greenpeace Nuclear Campaigner Jarred Cobb.

Since 9/11, the NRC has issued a series of new rules to safeguard plants from terrorism, including adding guards and holding drills to practice defending the plants. The NRC also required greater screening and background checks for plant employees.

The regulatory agency rejected proposals that would have forced operators to harden existing buildings that house spent fuel pools and reactors. The NRC did adopt a rule requiring that new plants be built to withstand an airplane attack.

Kenneth Holt, a spokesman for Dominion, which owns Millstone in Connecticut, said a pilot would have to be very skilled to hit the storage pool building attached to reactors within Millstone's large campus.

"To pinpoint a crash like that would be difficult. And there are concrete buildings and steel reinforced buildings. Even if the cooling went wrong, we have the ability to put water back in," Holt said.

Despite what happened in Japan, he said Dominion does not officially acknowledge that a pool fire is a realistic possibility.

Nancy Burton, director of the Connecticut Coalition to Mothball Millstone, scoffed at Holt's response. She pointed out that air traffic controllers at the nearby Groton airport use Millstone's big red and white smokestack as a marker for planes approaching the airport.

"It's a big plant that's wide open right on Niantic Bay. There is nothing around it. ... It would be easy to hit one of those buildings," Burton said.

Germany set to abandon nuclear power for good
YAHOO
By JUERGEN BAETZ, Associated Press
23 March 2011

BERLIN – Germany is determined to show the world how abandoning nuclear energy can be done.

The world's fourth-largest economy stands alone among leading industrialized nations in its decision to stop using nuclear energy because of its inherent risks. It is betting billions on expanding the use of renewable energy to meet power demands instead.

The transition was supposed to happen slowly over the next 25 years, but is now being accelerated in the wake of Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant disaster, which Chancellor Angela Merkel has called a "catastrophe of apocalyptic dimensions."

Berlin's decision to take seven of its 17 reactors offline for three months for new safety checks has provided a glimpse into how Germany might wean itself from getting nearly a quarter of its power from atomic energy to none.

And experts say Germany's phase-out provides a good map that countries such as the United States, which use a similar amount of nuclear power, could follow. The German model would not work, however, in countries like France, which relies on nuclear energy for more than 70 percent of its power and has no intention of shifting.

"If we had the winds of Texas or the sun of California, the task here would be even easier," said Felix Matthes of Germany's renowned Institute for Applied Ecology. "Given the great potential in the U.S., it would be feasible there in the long run too, even though it would necessitate huge infrastructure investments."

Nuclear power has been very unpopular in Germany ever since radioactivity from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster drifted across the country. A center-left government a decade ago penned a plan to abandon the technology for good by 2021, but Merkel's government last year amended it to extend the plants' lifetime by an average of 12 years. That plan was put on hold after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami compromised nuclear power plants in Japan, and is being re-evaluated as the safety of all of Germany's nuclear reactors is being rechecked.

Germany currently gets 23 percent of its energy from nuclear power — about as much as the U.S. Its ambitious plan to shut down its reactors will require at least euro150 billion ($210 billion) investment in alternative energy sources, which experts say will likely lead to higher electricity prices.

Germany now gets 17 percent of its electricity from renewable energies, 13 percent from natural gas and more than 40 percent from coal. The Environment Ministry says in 10 years renewable energy will contribute 40 percent of the country's overall electricity production.

The government has been vague on a total price tag for the transition, but it said last year about euro20 billion ($28 billion) a year will be needed, acknowledging that euro75 billion ($107 billion) alone will be required through 2030 to install offshore wind farms.

The president of Germany's Renewable Energy Association, Dietmar Schuetz, said the government should create a more favorable regulatory environment to help in bringing forward some euro150 billion investment in alternative energy sources this decade by businesses and homeowners.

Last year, German investment in renewable energy topped euro26 billion ($37 billion) and secured 370,000 jobs, the government said.

After taking seven reactors off the grid last week, officials hinted the oldest of them may remain switched off for good, but assured consumers there are no worries about electricity shortages as the country is a net exporter.

"We can guarantee that the lights won't go off in Germany," Environment Ministry spokeswoman Christiane Schwarte said.

Most of the country's leaders now seem determined to swiftly abolish nuclear power, possibly by 2020, and several conservative politicians, including the chancellor, have made a complete U-turn on the issue.

Vice Chancellor Guido Westerwelle said Wednesday "we must learn from Japan" and check the safety of the country's reactors but also make sure viable alternatives are in place.

"It would be the wrong consequence if we turn off the safest atomic reactors in the world, and then buy electricity from less-safe reactors in foreign countries," he told the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper.

But Schuetz insists that "we can replace nuclear energy even before 2020 with renewable energies, producing affordable and ecologically sound electricity."

But someone will have to foot the bill.

"Consumers must be prepared for significantly higher electricity prices in the future," said Wolfgang Franz, head of the government's independent economic advisory body. Merkel last week also warned that tougher safety rules for the remaining nuclear power plants "would certainly mean that electricity gets more expensive."

The German utilities' BDEW lobby group said long-term price effects could not be determined until the government spells out its nuclear reduction plans. Matthes' institute says phasing out nuclear power by 2020 is feasible by better capacity management and investment that would only lead to a price increase of 0.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

In Germany, the producers of renewable energy — be it solar panels on a homeowner's rooftop or a farm of wind mills — are paid above-market prices to make sure their investment breaks even, financed by a 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour tax paid by all electricity customers.

For a typical German family of four who pay about euro1,000 ($1,420) a year to use about 4,500 kilowatt-hours, the tax amounts to euro157 ($223).

The tax produced euro8.2 billion ($11.7 billion) in Germany in 2010 and it is expected to top euro13.5 billion ($19.2 billion) this year. The program — which has been copied by other countries and several U.S. states such as California — is the backbone of the country's transition toward renewable energies.

"Our ideas work. Exiting the nuclear age would also be possible in a country like the U.S.," Schuetz said.

Another factor likely to drive up electricity prices is that relying on renewable energies requires a huge investment in the electricity grid to cope with more decentralized and less reliable sources of power. Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle just announced legislation to speed up grid construction but gave no cost estimate.

And even if non-nuclear power is more expensive, Germans seeing images daily of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear complex seem willing to pay the higher price.

Ralph Kampwirth, spokesman for Lichtblick AG, Germany's biggest utility offering electricity exclusively from renewable sources, said since the Fukushima disaster it has been getting nearly three times more new clients than normal, up from 300 to more than 800 per day, despite prices slightly above average.

Sticking with nuclear power would also have its costs and require public funds.

The only two new nuclear reactors currently under construction in Europe, in France and in Finland, both have been plagued by long delays and seen costs virtually doubling, to around euro4 billion ($5.7 billion) and euro5.3 billion ($7.5 billion) respectively.

The disposal of spent nuclear fuel is also a costly problem, but it has no set price tag in Germany because the government has failed to find a sustainable solution.

Many decades-old reactors are highly profitable as their initial cost has been written off, but they now face higher costs as regulators push for safety upgrades in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. One of the most pressing — and costly — requirements is likely to be a mandatory upgrade to reinforce all nuclear power plants' outer shell to withstand a crash of a commercial airliner.

Utility EnBW pulled the plug for good on one reactor temporarily shut down by the government because the new requirements made operating it "no longer economically viable."

But even if Germany abandons nuclear energy, some of Europe's 143 nuclear reactors will still sit right on its borders.

Since France and other nations are firmly committed to nuclear power, shutting down all reactors across Europe won't happen, but Merkel is now pushing for common safety standards. The topic will be discussed at the European Union summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.

Merkel said the 27-nation bloc, which has standardized "the size of apples or the shape of bananas," needs joint standards for nuclear power plants.

"Everybody in Europe would be equally affected by an accident at a nuclear power plant in Europe," Merkel said.


Nancy Burton, (r) anti-nuclear activist previously from Redding Ridge, asked about moving spent fuel rods to dry cask storage.  Closing Millstone.

NRC audit faults Dominion on Millstone safety changes;  Audit says Dominion did not have approval before altering systems
By Lee Howard Day Staff Writer
Article published Dec 30, 2011

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission audit has concluded that Dominion, owner and operator of the Millstone Power Station, failed over the past two years to receive approvals before making changes to systems important to safety at the two operating nuclear plants in Waterford.

The audit, conducted last month and released publicly Thursday, found that Virginia-based Dominion had, for instance, made repairs to a system that takes in water from Long Island Sound to indirectly cool Millstone 2 and 3's steam generators but had not gone through the proper process to gain final approvals from regulators. It is not clear from the audit when the repairs were made, though it appears from the report that the fixes were made sometime this year.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said there is no indication that Millstone's actions posed a danger to the public. But he said the audit findings are unusual and that most other plants show a "cleaner bill of health."

Dominion announced earlier this month that Millstone site vice president A.J. "Skip" Jordan was being replaced by Stephen E. Scace, a former Millstone official who had been in charge of the Kewaunee plant in Carlton, Wis. The Wisconsin plant is in the process of being sold.

The NRC audit, conducted by the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation every three years, said Millstone officials had an appropriate system for managing commitments made to the agency, but that the system often had not been followed. In 10 cases Dominion had "misused" the process to treat NRC requirements as if they had been minor commitments, the audit found.

"(Dominion) has taken no action ... to correct this issue," the audit stated.

The audit went on to fault Dominion for failing to track regulatory commitments, inadequate reporting to the NRC and ineffectively managing changes made to its commitments.

Millstone spokesman Ken Holt said Dominion is taking corrective actions to address problems outlined in the audit.

"That's not the way we do business," he said.

Holt characterized the deficiencies as minor and said the main issue revolves around the failure to file paperwork documenting changes at the two nuclear power plants, including a year-end report for 2010.

Sheehan, the NRC spokesman, said Dominion will have to follow up with on-site inspectors at Millstone to show that they are making strides toward complying with the agency's requirements, as outlined in the audit. Holt said the audit gave no specific timeline for coming into compliance with NRC procedures.

The audit was conducted by the same NRC office that licenses nuclear plants, Sheehan said, and audit results are considered in the re-licensing process.
Millstone 2 is currently licensed through 2035. Millstone 3's license is set to expire in 2045.
Nuclear generation tax draws broad opposition
Arielle Levin Becker, CT MIRROR
April 13, 2011

A legislative plan to tax the state's two active nuclear power plants could threaten jobs, send the wrong message to businesses and lead to higher electricity rates, lawmakers, municipal officials, business and labor leaders and the operators of the plants warned Wednesday.

"This targeted, seemingly vindictive initiative would undermine and destabilize an entire region of our state," Sen. Andrea L. Stillman, D-Waterford, said during a press conference. The two power plants are in Waterford. "Senate bill 1176 would send our entire state in absolutely the wrong direction with regard to economic development."

The proposal, which passed out of the legislature's Energy and Technology Committee by a 12 to 9 vote, would create a tax on nuclear, oil-fueled and coal-fired electric generation, with nuclear plants paying a far higher rate than the other facilities. According to the legislature's nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis, the tax would raise $342.6 million a year, $335 million of which would come from nuclear generation.

The money would be used to pay off bonds authorized last year that would otherwise be paid for by a surcharge on electric consumers and a raid on energy conservation funds. After that, the money would be used to fund clean and renewable energy projects and to provide ratepayer relief.  On Wednesday, critics of the proposal called it vindictive, targeted at one business and unfairly aimed at nuclear power.

David Christian, CEO of Dominion Generation, which owns and operates the Millstone power plants in Waterford, said there are two possibilities if the tax were enacted.

"One would be that rates would go up due to the fact that the higher cost would be passed on to the consumers through higher electric rates," he said. "Or the plant would become uneconomic to operate and it would be forced into closure, following which electric rates would increase as well."

But Dominion officials signaled that they would be open to alternatives to help close the state's budget deficit. When asked about a separate proposal by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to increase the tax on electricity generation, Christian said, "The concept of temporary shared sacrifice to help the governor in his goal would be a matter for discussion."

Daniel A. Weekley, Dominion's vice president for government affairs, said the company opposes Malloy's tax proposal, which would tax all generation sources and raise about $58.4 million. But he noted that the company "is a strong supporter of Governor Malloy" and has been trying to work with him on alternatives.

"There are a number of different options on the table," Weekley said in response to questions about Christian's comment on temporary shared sacrifice. "I don't think we want to limit it to exclusively a temporary tax, but certainly that is one of the avenues that could be pursued."

The energy committee's bill would replace Malloy's proposal. When asked about the legislative bill, Juliet Manalan, Malloy's press secretary, said the governor still supports his own proposal.

The committee bill has drawn support from House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan, D-Meriden; the state Office of Consumer Counsel; Environment Connecticut, a nonprofit conservation advocacy group; and ConnPIRG. Rep. Vickie Nardello, D-Prospect, who co-chairs the committee, has said it would provide relief to ratepayers and protect clean energy.

In testimony on the bill, Consumer Counsel Mary J. Healey said the tax would lead Millstone to "simply earn less profit" and would not lead to higher electric rates for consumers. It would not lead the company to produce less power at the facility, she said, because technical and regulatory constraints would keep nuclear power plants from ramping up and down rapidly.

Christian said it would be unwise to operate a nuclear power plant on thin margins. He and others, including legislators from both parties, representatives of business groups and organized labor, described the economic impact of the plants, which employ nearly 1,100 people. Dominion commissioned a study that suggested that the plant provides $1.2 billion in economic value to the state and is linked to 4,200 jobs in the region.

Waterford First Selectman Dan Steward said Millstone represents 30 percent of the town's tax base, paying $22 million a year, and has provided fields for the towns and donations to local charities. The proposed bill has already affected the town's bond rating, he said.

Dominion currently pays about $35 million in state and local taxes, Weekley said.
Residents question safety at Millstone;  Spent-fuel issue, whistleblower allegations dominate meeting
By Patricia Daddona Day Staff Writer
Article published Apr 12, 2011

Waterford - The owner of Millstone Power Station sought to reassure concerned residents Monday night that it is working to put potentially vulnerable spent fuel from one closed reactor into safe, dry storage on site.

A crowd of more than 150 people at Waterford Town Hall included an unidentified woman who said she wasn't convinced by Millstone owner Dominion executives' premise that the two operating Unit 2 and 3 reactors and the closed Unit 1 reactor could withstand a natural catastrophe like the earthquake and tsunami that wrecked still-troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors in Japan.

And later, a former contractor with Dominion criticized company management for not protecting him when he reported an employee was abusing prescription drugs. The contractor said he was the unjustly fired, he said.

Skip Jordan, site vice president, and Dan Weekley, Dominion vice president of governmental affairs, spent an hour discussing safety and a proposed tax on electric production at Millstone before fielding questions in the Town Hall auditorium. The meeting was still going on late Monday night.

Jordan and Weekley started by discussing the used fuel that sits in Unit 1, a boiling water reactor not unlike those at the Fukushima station. Millstone's two operating reactors, which are pressurized water reactors, are safer, Jordan said, because they have primary and secondary cooling systems to keep the plants cool.

But Nancy Burton, a Mystic resident speaking on her own behalf and not in her role as director of the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, wanted to know why Dominion isn't moving the spent fuel from Unit 1 immediately into an alternate type of storage known as dry cask storage. She lives outside the 10-mile radius that would be evacuated in event of a major calamity at Millstone, she said.

The crowd at times attacked her for trying to ask five questions instead of one, but John Markowicz, executive director of the Southeastern Connecticut Enterprise Region and a Waterford resident, echoed her concern.

"What's the chance of the spent fuel being moved" if the bill to tax Millstone goes through, he asked.

A proposed state tax on nuclear electricity production would charge 2 cents a kilowatt hour to Dominion, or about $335 million a year, Weekley said.

Jordan said the company is evaluating moving that fuel so that it is no longer housed above the reactor, where it is more vulnerable, but he and Weekley noted that if the tax is approved it will make it more difficult to invest in safety improvements like that.

State legislators including Sen. Andrea Stillman, Rep. Betsey Ritter and Rep. Ed Jutila said they and the entire delegation were opposed to the tax and fighting it.

The woman concerned for her family's safety in the event of a disaster by "Mother Nature," which is "damn good at creating catastrophes," wanted to know, "How do I protect my boys?"

Jordan said he has the same concern for his family and friends, many of whom live in nearby Groton, and his employees share those concerns also.

Steven Lavoie, the contractor and apparent whistleblower, said he was fired after reporting a co-worker's abuse of prescription medication.

"What is Dominion going to do about the liars in your company?" he asked. "There's corruption going on in upper management and all I was obligated to do was report it … I've had a target on my back. I want to know what you people are going to do to restructure management because people are crooked."

Jordan said the company's practice is to go through "multiple channels … (and) fully and thoroughly investigate that.

He told Lavoie his "commitment tonight is to go back and take another look at that."

One woman, Monica Rourke of Bristol, who said she was familiar with Millstone from when she worked in concrete repair in 2000, defended the nuclear complex as a well-run facility.
Millstone ''shutdown'' seen as doubtful
By Patricia Daddona Day Staff Writer
Article published Apr 7, 2011

Dominion is going on the offensive with arguments that it would have to shut down Millstone Power Station to avoid a proposed $330 million state tax, but the state's consumer advocate remains skeptical.

Dominion is running full-page ads in newspapers and setting up a public meeting for Monday in Waterford on the proposed legislation and other nuclear issues. But on Wednesday, the state's Office of Consumer Counsel, which supports the proposed Senate Bill 1176, insisted that the nuclear complex owner can afford to absorb the tax.

Lawmakers are proposing to tax the electric output of nuclear, oil and coal plants, putting the highest rate of 2 cents a kilowatt hour on Millstone. Dominion counters that if the tax passes, it would need to close one or both of its reactors indefinitely and lay off or furlough most of its 1,080-person work force until the economic climate changes.
Some 350 independent contractors would also be affected, the company said.

Since Millstone is no longer a publicly regulated utility in Connecticut, the attorney general's office could not compel its owners to keep it running, said Susan Kinsman, a spokeswoman for Attorney General George C. Jepsen.

Joe Rosenthal, a principal analyst for the Office of Consumer Counsel, insists that the high-flying electricity market in Connecticut is too attractive for Dominion to abandon. In his analysis, he relied on earnings reports, knowledge of the electric markets and the price of uranium fuel.

"The bottom line is, (Dominion) is going to remain profitable at the 2-cent (tax) level," Rosenthal argued. "They'll just keep doing what they're doing and make less money. And they're not going to fire people. I don't know if you can willy-nilly let go of nuclear expertise and then get it back later."

'Incredible burden'

Dominion spokesman Ken Holt disputed that assessment. "Apparently, the Office of Consumer Counsel doesn't believe we're serious," Holt said. "We're in the business of making money, not in the business of playing games. This tax represents an incredible burden on Millstone, and if passed, Millstone will no longer be economically viable."

Dominion has commitments to provide power from Millstone through 2014, said Marcia Blomberg, a spokesperson for ISO New England, which manages the region's wholesale electric market. Millstone's two reactors generate 2,100 megawatts of electricity - enough to supply nearly 50 percent of the power needs of the state. ISO-New England must have adequate resources to operate its grid reliably, but if Millstone withdrew, the agency would look to other energy sources, Blomberg said.

Dominion, meanwhile, launched an attack against the proposed legislation in full-page ads in newspapers on Wednesday, including The Day and The Hartford Courant. The ad says Connecticut consumers pay 20 percent more for their electricity than neighboring New England states and asks citizens to fight a "bad idea" because the proposed tax will drive up electric rates, cost jobs and hurt the economy.

Consumer Counsel Mary Healey disputed that in testimony at the Capitol last month, saying the tax has been "carefully calibrated so as to avoid 'pass-through' (to consumers) of the tax by generators. ... The difference between the ISO New England market clearing price and Millstone's estimated costs of operations easily exceeds 2 cents per kilowatt hour" for most of the year.

Dan Weekley, vice president of government affairs at Dominion, said earlier this week that if Millstone reactors were shut down, the company would not need most of its employees to maintain the plants in a safe, shutdown mode.

Even if the reactors stop operating, Dominion has ways to meet its obligations for contracts it has already signed for power, which is sold into the wholesale market, he said.
For instance, Dominion could rely on electric output from its nuclear reactors in Wisconsin and Virginia and buy electricity on the open market to meet its contractual obligations, Weekley said.

Too risky?

"They're not going to take all of these risks," insisted Rosenthal. "And if they even tried to play this game, we would go to (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) and seek to have their market-based rate authority taken."

That market-based authority allows Dominion to operate as a "merchant plant" in a competitive, deregulated market.  At least one analyst was also unsure Dominion would close the reactors if the tax is enacted.

St. Louis-based Edward Jones analyst Andrew C. Pusateri said the market "doesn't seem too concerned" with the political battle under way in Connecticut. Dominion stock has been up this week, and closed Wednesday 26 cents higher, at $45.03. Pusateri said both sides appeared to be relying on rhetoric to make their case.

"There's some truth both ways," Pusateri said. "The fact the tax is directed almost entirely at Dominion seems a bit unfair. Dominion's reaction (to close), they know their company better than analysts, it's a decision that takes some time to make. I wouldn't be surprised, long term, if they wouldn't be able to keep those plants running even with the tax. Or maybe it won't come to fruition, and they won't have to pay a tax that large."

A New York-based analyst noted, however, that after costs to operate Millstone and the proposed tax are added together, the company would do only a little better than break even in annual revenue, justifying its call to shutter two reactors if lawmakers' proposal passes.

"You end up with almost nothing to cover associated costs for running the plant, so the threat that Dominion is voicing is justified by the economics of power generation from the plant," said Angie Storozynski, an analyst with the investment bank Macquarie Capital Inc.

Dominion plans to make its case publicly Monday at a 7 p.m. meeting at Waterford Town Hall. Other topics on the agenda include Dominion's routine shutdown this week of Millstone's Unit 2 reactor for refueling and the company's response to the Fukushima nuclear troubles in Japan.

Dominion weighs removing waste from closed reactor
Activist had urged action be taken at Millstone plant
By Patricia Daddona Day Staff Writer
Article published Mar 19, 2011

A nuclear activist said Friday that the owner of Millstone Power Station should remove radioactive waste from the pool atop its closed reactor, a step the company said is already under review.

Paul Gunter, director of reactor oversight for the activist group Beyond Nuclear of Takoma, Md., said Friday that Millstone owner Dominion should remove the waste from Unit 1 and put it in some of the dry-cask storage available on site, since the pool could be vulnerable if ever exposed in a catastrophe like that occurring in Japan.

Dominion spokesman Ken Holt said Friday, however, that the company had been evaluating the possibility of moving spent fuel into dry storage before the events still unfolding in Japan took place.
Japan's situation "is a factor in making our decision and will be considered when we make our decision," Holt said.

"While wet storage of fuel is safe and the way it's being stored now is safe, dry storage has some benefits to it," Holt said. "Mainly, it's a passive system. It doesn't require pumps or motors. It uses natural air circulation to keep the fuel cool."

The spent fuel pool at Unit 1, which was permanently closed in 1998, sits atop the reactor building, which is a boiling-water reactor design similar to the plants at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan. Two of the Fukushima reactors have experienced fire or explosions in their pools in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that battered the nation's northeast coastal area last week.

The Millstone nuclear complex on Long Island Sound has two other operating reactors, Units 2 and 3, in addition to the one that's shut down. Units 2 and 3 are pressurized water reactors whose spent fuel pools are in concrete buildings adjacent to the reactors.

Twenty-three reactors in the United States are Mark 1 boiling-water reactors like those in Fukushima. Unit 1 at Millstone is a Mark 3 reactor with Mark 1 containment, Holt said.

The risk to the public involves the release of radiation during a catastrophe. Millstone Unit 1's reactor pool is covered by a vented, fire-retardant metal roof and surrounded by walls made of reinforced concrete, Holt said. But the roof could be torn off in an explosion or calamity and expose the fuel.

Dry-cask storage at Millstone today includes 19 concrete bunkers the size of one-car garages lined up hundreds of yards away from the reactors. Fourteen of those bunkers house one cannister each filled with 32 fuel assemblies from the Unit 2 reactor. Each Unit 2 assembly holds 176 used, 14-foot-long fuel rods.

Inventory needed

Gunter says President Barack Obama's call for a comprehensive review of safety issues at the country's 104 reactors should include the inventory of nuclear waste still sitting in these nuclear-waste storage pools.
"It's not just the seismic event that one needs to be concerned about; it could be an accident initiated by any kind of event," Gunter said.

Nancy Burton, an anti-nuclear activist from Redding Ridge and Mystic who called Friday for the Millstone complex to be completely closed, also noted Unit 1's vulnerability in extreme circumstances.

Moving spent fuel to dry-cask storage is complex, said Holt.

Dominion now has permission to build up to 49 bunkers but is only allowed to move waste from Units 2 or 3 into them, Holt said. The company would have to return to the Connecticut Siting Council to add more bunkers and move Unit 1 waste into the new ones, he said, adding that the NRC would also have to grant permission to move the Unit 1 fuel.

"It's a process to do it safely and right," he said.

Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which Obama has ordered to conduct a review, said in an e-mail it is too early to say whether that national review would include moving spent fuel into dry storage. The NRC plans to meet early next week on Obama's directive, he said.

"The NRC certainly intends to carefully study the Japanese events for implications for U.S. reactors," Sheehan wrote. "However, the immediate focus is on providing technical assistance to the Japanese and monitoring any developments there."

The Nuclear Energy Institute has also asked reactor owners to examine their safety systems in connection with fires, aircraft impact, explosions and loss of power.

On Wednesday, Dominion put together a team of engineers, operators, maintenance personnel and other key workers to look at the kinds of safety issues the Japan incident has raised and "to ensure we are prepared as we can be in the event of an event like this," Holt said.

"We're doing our own investigations," Holt said. "We want to do what we can to increase the safety of our reactors. They're safe now, but we feel we can make them safer."

p.daddona@theday.com
Day staff writer Karin Crompton contributed to this report.
Dominion: Japan scenario unlikely at Millstone
By Patricia Daddona, Day Staff writer
Article published Mar 15, 2011

Waterford - The Millstone nuclear complex has equipment in place to prevent power loss and partial meltdowns like those occurring at reactors in Japan, plant owner Dominion said Monday.  Friday's earthquake and tsunami knocked out power that caused cooling systems to fail at three separate reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The threat to the public includes the continued melting of the core, the part of the reactor where fission occurs, radiation sickness and contamination.

"This is a very extraordinary situation Japan is in - it's unprecedented," said Ken Holt, a spokesman for Dominion. "We're trying to learn as many lessons as we can about this event."

The Millstone complex sits on the edge of Long Island Sound. Its older Unit 2, which began operating in 1975 and generates 884 megawatts of electricity, is licensed through 2035.  The site's Unit 3, built in 1986, generates 1,227 megawatts of electricity and has been relicensed through 2045. Millstone 1 is permanently shut down.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and director of the Nuclear Safety Program with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a media conference call Monday that many of the United States' 104 reactors could be similarly vulnerable.

"Any reactor design currently operating today that had been faced with an earthquake followed by a tsunami would likely be in similar situation," he said.

But here in Connecticut, U.S. Geologic Surveys show a low risk of earthquakes, though the state and southeastern Connecticut are prone to hurricanes. Millstone's two operating reactors have a few things going for them - should what Lochbaum calls "the bad day" ever occur.  Both Units 2 and 3 have two backup diesel generators each. Unlike some of the generators reportedly flooded in basements at the Japan sites, Millstone's generators are protected from possible floodwaters. Flood barriers in a concrete bunker protect the Unit 3 generators, while concrete structures with flood barriers inside are in the Unit 2 turbine building, according to Holt, the Dominion spokesman.

In addition, Units 2 and 3 are not on a list of 27 reactors that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing for risk to seismic activity, said NRC Spokesman Neil Sheehan. Despite that, Holt said the company is reviewing its earthquake preparations and "watching for news coming out that we could apply to our own operations here."

Unlike some other reactors in the United States, Millstone Units 2 and 3 have pressurized water designs. The Japanese reactors are boiling water reactors.  The pressurized water reactors have cooling water not only in the reactor core, but in a secondary water system in the steam generator, which creates steam that spins the turbine to make electricity. The reactors also have steam-driven auxiliary feedwater pumps, which can help cool the reactor.  The pumps circulate cooling water as long as the reactor is hot enough to generate steam, so electrical power is not essential, though it is normally in use, said Holt.

Millstone also has extra battery-powered backup that can be charged while in use with an additional generator reserved for serious blackouts. The batteries would "bridge the gap" if power goes out, Holt said. Unit 2 has two eight-hour safety batteries and Unit 3 has four two-hour batteries, he said.

Japan's reactors had eight-hour batteries but they ran out, the Union of Concerned Scientists' Lochbaum said.

When the Millstone complex was built, then-owner Northeast Utilities assessed the plants for earthquake risk and flood risks and the possible loss of offsite power, said the NRC's Sheehan.

"So we'll see whether any revisions are warranted" as Japan's situation plays out, Sheehan said, as well as evaluate the lessons learned and plan accordingly.

PLEASE SEE THE NYTIMES WEBSITE TO UPDATE (OR RETRIEVE) INFORMATION


Radioactivity rises in sea off Japan nuclear plant
YAHOO
By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press
16 April 2011

TOKYO – Levels of radioactivity have risen sharply in seawater near a tsunami-crippled nuclear plant in northern Japan, signaling the possibility of new leaks at the facility, the government said Saturday.

The announcement came after a magnitude-5.9 earthquake jolted Japan on Saturday morning, hours after the country's nuclear safety agency ordered plant operators to beef up their quake preparedness systems to prevent a recurrence of the nuclear crisis.

There were no reports of damage from the earthquake, and there was no risk of a tsunami similar to the one that struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant March 11 after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake, causing Japan's worst-ever nuclear plant disaster.

Since the tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling systems, workers have been spraying massive amounts of water on the overheated reactors. Some of that water, contaminated with radiation, leaked into the Pacific. Plant officials said they plugged that leak on April 5 and radiation levels in the sea dropped.

But the government said Saturday that radioactivity in the seawater has risen again in recent days. The level of radioactive iodine-131 spiked to 6,500 times the legal limit, according to samples taken Friday, up from 1,100 times the limit in samples taken the day before. Levels of cesium-134 and cesium-137 rose nearly fourfold. The increased levels are still far below those recorded earlier this month before the initial leak was plugged.

The new rise in radioactivity could have been caused by the installation Friday of steel panels intended to contain radiation that may have temporarily stirred up stagnant waste in the area, Hidehiko Nishiyama of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told reporters. However, the increase in iodine-131, which has a relatively short eight-day half life, could signal the possibility of a new leak, he said.

"We want to determine the origin and contain the leak, but I must admit that tracking it down is difficult," he said.

Authorities have insisted the radioactivity will dissipate and poses no immediate threat to sea creatures or people who might eat them. Most experts agree.

Regardless, plant workers on Saturday began dumping sandbags filled with zeolite, a mineral that absorbs radioactive cesium, into the sea to combat the radiation leaks.

Meanwhile, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported, without citing its sources, that a secret plan to dismantle Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the radiation-leaking Fukushima plant, was circulating within the government. The proposal calls for putting TEPCO, the world's largest private electricity company, under close government supervision before putting it into bankruptcy and thoroughly restructuring its assets. Most government offices were closed Saturday, and the report could not be immediately confirmed.

In the wake of the nuclear crisis, the government ordered 13 nuclear plant operators to check and improve outside power links to avoid earthquake-related outages that could cause safety systems to fail as they did at the Fukushima plant, Nishiyama told reporters late Friday. The operators, including TEPCO, are to report back by May 16.

Power outages during a strong aftershock on April 7 drove home the need to ensure that plants are able to continue to operate crucial cooling systems and other equipment despite earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters, Nishiyama said.

Utility companies were ordered to reinforce the quake resistance of power lines connected to each reactor or to rebuild them. They also must store all electrical equipment in watertight structures. Earlier, the nuclear agency ordered plant operators to store at least two emergency backup generators per reactor and to install fire pumps and power supply vehicles as further precautions.

The massive 46-foot (14-meter) wave that swamped Fukushima Dai-ichi last month knocked out emergency generators meant to power cooling systems. Since then, explosions, fires and other malfunctions have compounded efforts by TEPCO to repair the plant and stem radiation leaks.

TEPCO said Saturday it had moved power sources for some of the reactors at the stricken plant to higher ground by Friday evening in order to avoid another disastrous failure in the event of a tsunami.

Goshi Hosono, an adviser to the prime minister and member of the nuclear crisis management task force, said the damaged reactors were much more stable than they had been earlier in the crisis and TEPCO was preparing to unveil a plan for restoring cooling capacity to the ailing reactors "soon."

"Problems are still piled up and we are far from the end of crisis," he told a TV news program, citing radioactive water as one of the biggest headaches. "I expect there will be more mountains that we have to climb over."

The crisis at the Fukushima plant has forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate the area, while radiation leaks have contaminated crops and left fishermen unable to sell their catches, adding to the suffering of communities already devastated by earthquake and tsunami damage.

Government officials fanned out across the affected areas to explain their decisions and calm nerves.

Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Tetsuro Fukuyama apologized for the uncertainty and confusion to residents in Iitate village, parts of which the government recommended be evacuated because of the nuclear crisis.

"Everyone in the village must be extremely troubled, uncertain and worried," he said, promising to provide temporary housing and financial support for the residents, many of them farmers.

In the city of Inawashiro, Hiroshima University Professor Kenji Kamiya, who has been appointed a health risk adviser to Fukushima prefecture, met with about 250 education officials to explain that radiation levels in the area do not pose an immediate or significant threat to the public.

"I hope people understand that the levels we are seeing are fairly low. Even in the most impacted areas, we have screened more than 1,000 children for radiation abnormalities in their thyroids and have found none at all," he said.

Kamiya has been giving almost daily lectures in an effort to prevent people from overreacting to the possible danger.

"People fear things that they don't understand. We were even afraid before of the rain, because we just didn't know if it was safe," said Takaaki Kobayashi, a father of two grade school children. "I feel more comfortable now about sending kids to school. It helps to understand."
12 April 2011 Last updated at 05:21 ET
Japan: Nuclear crisis raised to Chernobyl level;  Japanese authorities have raised the severity rating of their nuclear crisis to the highest level, seven.

The decision reflects the total release of radiation at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which is ongoing, rather than a sudden deterioration.  Level seven previously only applied to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, where 10 times as much radiation was emitted.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said radiation leaks at the plant were declining.  The Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the operator of the plant, would soon provide a schedule for getting it under control, he said at a news conference.

"Step by step, the reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi power plant are moving toward stability," he said.

There have been no fatalities resulting from the leaks at Fukushima, and risks to human health are thought to be low.  Meanwhile a 6.0-magnitude earthquake on Tuesday prompted the plant's operator to evacuate its staff.  Tepco said it was checking the status of the plant after the quake, the second to hit in as many days, but said there had been no reports of problems with external power.  The aftershocks come a month after a huge quake and tsunami hit north-east Japan, leaving 13,228 people dead and 14,529 missing. More than 150,000 people have been made homeless.
Impact of leaks

The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan announced in a statement that the crisis level at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was being raised, adding that it was a preliminary assessment which required further technical evaluation by specialists. 

The level seven signifies a "major accident" with "wider consequences" than the previous level, officials say.

"We have upgraded the severity level to seven as the impact of radiation leaks has been widespread from the air, vegetables, tap water and the ocean," said Minoru Oogoda of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (Nisa), the government's nuclear watchdog.

Reporting the commission's decision, the IAEA said previous level five ratings had been provided separately for accidents at Reactors 1, 2 and 3 but had now been combined as a single event. Another affected unit, Reactor 4, has retained its level three rating, it said.  One official from Tepco said that radiation leaks had not stopped completely and could eventually exceed those at Chernobyl, Reuters news agency reported.

However, a nuclear safety agency spokesman told reporters the leaks were still small compared to those at the plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.

"In terms of volume of radioactive materials released, our estimate shows it is about 10% of what was released by Chernobyl," he said.

The decision to raise the threat level was made after radiation of a total up to 630,000 terabequerels had been estimated at the stricken plant.  That would classify the crisis at level seven on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (Ines).  It was not clear when that level had been reached. The level has subsequently dropped to less than one terabequerel an hour, reports said.

In comparison the Japanese government said the release from Chernobyl was 5.2 million terabecquerels.

Evacuations extended

The severity level of Japan's nuclear crisis had previously been set at five, the same as that of the accident at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979.

Japan has also said it is extending the evacuation zone around the crippled nuclear plant because of radiation concerns.  The zone will be widened to encompass five communities beyond the existing 20-km (12-mile) radius, following new data about accumulated radiation levels, officials said.

Japan's nuclear commission said that according to preliminary results, the cumulative level of external radiation exceeded the yearly limit of 1 millisievert in areas extending more than 60km (36 miles) to the north-west of the plant and about 40km to the south-southwest.

On Monday, a 7.1-magnitude quake hit north-east Japan, leaving three people dead. It also triggered a brief tsunami warning, and forced workers to evacuate the Fukushima Daiichi plant.  Tuesday's quake rocked buildings in the capital, Tokyo.

There were no immediate reports of fresh damage, though Japan's Narita international airport temporarily closed its runways, and metro and train services were interrupted.  The cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were damaged in last month's disaster and workers have been struggling to prevent several reactors from overheating.  Officials have warned it will be several months before the situation at the nuclear facility is brought fully under control.

Tepco said on Tuesday that a fire had broken out briefly at Reactor 4, before being extinguished.
Power partially back at damaged plant
By THOMAS H. MAUGH II Los Angeles Times
Publication: The Day
Published 03/20/2011 12:00 AM
Updated 03/20/2011 05:26 AM

Los Angeles - Working overnight into this morning, engineers have successfully restored power to cooling pumps in two reactors at the disabled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, the first genuinely hopeful sign in the weeklong battle to prevent a meltdown at any of the six reactors at the site.

Although power has so far been restored only at reactor buildings 5 and 6, which were not considered a particular threat, that success suggests that workers are finally beginning to make some headway in their effort to prevent more radiation from escaping the plant.

The two reactors had been shut down at the time the magnitude 9 earthquake struck a week ago, but spent fuel rods in an upper level of the reactor buildings were still generating heat and required cooling. When electricity at the site was lost and the tsunami damaged backup generators, the pools holding the fuel rods began to grow warmer.

Officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the plant, said water in the No. 5 pool had already cooled by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit since the cooling pumps had started working.

Engineers said they hoped to have the power connected to the remaining reactor buildings sometime today or early Monday.

Meanwhile, workers had jury-rigged an unmanned device that could spray seawater on the No. 3 reactor for up to seven hours at a time and they hoped to install similar devices at other buildings. Police and military were also spraying water manually on the other buildings at the site in an effort to keep the reactor cores and the spent fuel pools cooled and prevent a meltdown that would release large amounts of radiation into the environment.

The most recent reports suggest that the heavy spraying is working and has reduced radiation levels at the plant.

Engineers had run a power line to the Fukushima Daiichi plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo, from the country's electrical grid Friday night, but connecting it to the buildings at the facility has been a bigger problem than anticipated. Workers have been able to spend only limited amounts of time in the facility to make the connections, and engineers have had to laboriously go through and check all the circuitry before power is turned on to ensure that a surge of current does not create more problems than it solves.

Officials of the company had said they hoped to get power restored to all of the six buildings at the facility by today, but that estimate now seems overly optimistic. Engineers have been focusing their efforts on reactors No. 2 and 3 and the building housing reactor No. 4, which also houses a damaged spent fuel pool, but the need to build shelters to protect workers and equipment from the water that was being sprayed, as well as the radiation, delayed efforts.

Reactor No. 2 is thought to have a cracked containment vessel and is thus believed to be potentially the

most problematic reactor. Reactor No. 3 is not known to be damaged, but its fuel rods contain a mixture of uranium and plutonium. Plutonium is highly carcinogenic in even very small quantities, and a leak of the material would be considered disastrous.

The pool at reactor No. 4 has the hottest spent fuel and is thought to have either holes in the walls of the pool or some other type of leak that is allowing water to run out. It is thus imperative to cool those heat sources first.

Even if electricity is restored, it is not clear how much benefit that will provide. It will certainly bring power to valves and controls in the reactor buildings, but most experts believe the cooling pumps in reactors No. 1, 2 and 3 were damaged, both by the hydrogen explosions that occurred in the first four days after the earthquake and by corrosion from the seawater and boron that have been pumped into the reactor.

Experts do not believe the cooling pumps at reactors No. 4, 5 and 6 had been damaged, and the success in restoring power at No. 5 and 6 suggests that assessment was correct. Many U.S. experts think that bringing power back online at Fukushima will mark a major turning point in the effort to bring the situation back under control.

The seawater that authorities are pumping into the plant is laced with boron, which serves to absorb neutrons released during the fissioning, or splitting, of uranium atoms, and thus serves to tamp down chain reactions and reduce heat production. But Japan is running short of the crucial element. South Korea and France said Friday that they would ship 150 tons of boron to Japan to assist in the battle.


Japan nuclean plant in distress.

17 March 2011 Last updated at 17:54 ET
Cable reaches Japan nuclear plant

Engineers at Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant have successfully connected a power line to reactor 2, the UN's nuclear watchdog reports.  Restoring power should enable engineers to restart the pumps which send coolant over the reactor.  Workers at Fukushima have been battling to prevent fuel in the reactors from overheating since Friday's magnitude 9.0 quake and subsequent tsunami.

The confirmed death toll from the disaster has risen above 5,600.  More than 9,500 people are missing and tens of thousands of people are living in temporary shelters.

US President Barack Obama has said he is confident the "strong, resilient" people of Japan will recover from the crisis and that the country will emerge stronger than before.

The atomic crisis was triggered when the power supply to Fukushima was damaged by the natural disaster and back-up generators failed.  The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which runs the plant, has been attempting to connect it to the main grid via a 1-km (0.6-mile) electricity cable.  Once power is restored, engineers should be able to re-activate the pumps which send coolant through the reactors and the pools where spent fuel rods are stored.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the cable had reached the site by 1730 local time (0830 GMT) on Thursday, and that engineers planned to reconnect power to the reactor once workers have finished spraying seawater over reactor 3.

Tepco warned the process of reconnecting power could take up to 15 hours.  Helicopters and water cannon have been dumping seawater over the Fukushima reactors, to try to prevent fuel rods melting.  Video footage had suggested most of the water had been falling outside the target buildings, but a Tepco spokesman said it appeared the operation had had some success.

"When we poured water, we monitored steam rising from the facility. By pouring water, we believe the water turned down the heat. We believe that there was a certain effect," he said.

Another spokesman said on Thursday that aerial observations of reactor 4 indicated it did contain some water.

"We have not confirmed how much water was left inside but we have not had information that spent fuel rods are exposed," he said.

Earlier, senior IAEA official Andrew Graham said the situation at Fukushima had not deteriorated, but could yet do so. He described the situation at "reasonably stable".

The head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, is heading to Tokyo to be briefed by Japanese officials.

Survivors' misery

Japan has imposed a 20-km (12-mile) exclusion zone around Fukushima and has urged people living up to 30km away to stay indoors. Some countries have advised their nationals in Japan to stay up to 50km away.
Tens of thousands of people are still struggling with the after effects of last Friday's massive quake, which triggered a tsunami that swept away whole towns in minutes.

In areas of the north-east badly hit by the tsunami, bitter winter weather has added to the misery of survivors, though more supplies are now reported to be reaching them.

Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted rescuers as saying that the search for victims had expanded over a wider area as access had improved with the clearance of debris.  The number of people now known to have died in the twin disaster stands at 5,692 with 9,506 people listed as missing.

But Kyodo reports that the official toll is based on names registered with police, and that the true figure could be in the tens of thousands.

About 380,000 people are currently still in temporary shelters, many sleeping on the floor of school gymnasiums.  Many foreign countries are evacuating their nationals from northeast Japan, or advising them to leave the country entirely.

The crisis has also continued to affect the markets - the benchmark Nikkei index fell 3.6% in early Thursday trading in Tokyo, shortly after the yen briefly hit the highest level against the US dollar since World War II.

Three Mile Island

Japan official: Disasters overwhelmed government
YAHOO
By ERIC TALMADGE and MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press
18 March 2011

TOKYO – The Japanese government acknowledged Friday that it was overwhelmed by the scale of last week's twin natural disasters, slowing the response to the nuclear crisis that was triggered by the earthquake and tsunami that left at least 10,000 people dead.

The admission came as Japan welcomed U.S. help in stabilizing its overheated, radiation-leaking nuclear complex, and reclassified the rating of the nuclear accident from Level 4 to Level 5 on a seven-level international scale, putting it on a par with the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.  Nuclear experts have been saying for days that Japan was underplaying the severity of the nuclear crisis, which later Friday the prime minister called "very grave."

The International Nuclear Event Scale defines a Level 4 incident as having local consequences and a Level 5 as having wider consequences.  Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan's nuclear safety agency said the rating was raised when officials realized that at least 3 percent of the fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant had been severely damaged, suggesting those reactor cores have partially melted down and thrown radioactivity into the environment.

"The unprecedented scale of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, frankly speaking, were among many things that happened that had not been anticipated under our disaster management contingency plans," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, admitting that information had not been shared quickly enough.

"In hindsight, we could have moved a little quicker in assessing the situation and coordinating all that information and provided it faster," he said.

Later, Prime Minister Naoto Kan urged the nation to unite.

"We will rebuild Japan from scratch. We must all share this resolve," he said in a nationally televised address, calling the crises a "great test for the Japanese people."

At the stricken complex, military fire trucks sprayed the reactor units for a second day, with tons of water arcing over the facility in desperate attempts to prevent the fuel from overheating and spewing dangerous levels of radiation.

"The whole world, not just Japan, is depending on them," Tokyo office worker Norie Igarashi, 44, said of the emergency teams working amid heightened radiation levels at the complex.

Last week's 9.0 quake and tsunami set off the nuclear problems by knocking out power to cooling systems at the Fukushima plant on the northeast coast. Since then, four of its six reactor units have seen fires, explosions or partial meltdowns.  The unfolding crises have led to power shortages in Japan, forced factories to close, sent shockwaves through global manufacturing and triggered a plunge in Japanese stock prices.

"We see it as an extremely serious accident," Yukiya Amano, the head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters Friday in Tokyo. "This is not something that just Japan should deal with, and people of the entire world should cooperate with Japan and the people in the disaster areas."

"I think they are racing against the clock," he said of the efforts to cool the complex.

One week after the twin disasters — which has officially left more than 6,900 dead and more than 10,700 missing — emergency crews are facing two challenges in the nuclear crisis: cooling the reactors where energy is generated, and cooling the adjacent pools where used nuclear fuel rods are stored in water.  Both need water to stop their uranium from heating up and emitting radiation, but with radiation levels inside the complex already limiting where workers can go and how long they can remain, it's been difficult to get enough water inside.

Water in at least one fuel pool — in the complex's Unit 3 — is believed to be dangerously low. Without enough water, the rods may heat further and spew out radiation.

"Dealing with Unit 3 is our utmost priority," Edano told reporters.

Edano said Tokyo is asking the U.S. government for help and that the two are discussing the specifics. "We are coordinating with the U.S. government as to what the U.S. can provide and what people really need," Edano said.  While Tokyo quickly welcomed international help for the natural disasters, the government initially balked at assistance with the nuclear crisis. That reluctance softened as the problems at Fukushima multiplied. Washington says its technical experts are now exchanging information with officials from Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the plant, and with government agencies.

A U.S. military fire truck was also used to help spray water into Unit 3, according to air force Chief of Staff Shigeru Iwasaki, though the vehicle was apparently driven by Japanese workers.  The U.S. vehicle was used alongside six Japanese military fire trucks normally used to extinguish fires at plane crashes.  The fire trucks allowed emergency workers to stay a relatively safe distance from the radiation, firing the water with high-pressure cannons. The firefighters also are able to direct the cannons from inside the vehicle.

Officials shared few details about Friday's operation, which lasted nearly 40 minutes, though Iwasaki said he believed some water had reached its target.

The U.S. has also now conducted overflights of the reactor site, strapping sophisticated pods onto aircraft to measure airborne radiation, U.S. officials said. Two tests conducted Thursday gave readings that U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel B. Poneman said reinforced the U.S. recommendation that people keep away from a 50-mile (80-kilometer) radius around the Fukushima plant.

Tsunami survivors observed a minute of silence Friday afternoon to mark one week since the quake, which struck at 2:46 p.m. on March 11. Many were bundled up against the cold in the disaster zone, pressing their hands together in prayer.

Low levels of radiation have been detected well beyond Tokyo, which is 140 miles (220 kilometers) south of the plant, but hazardous levels have been limited to the plant itself. Still, the crisis has forced thousands to evacuate and drained Tokyo's normally vibrant streets of life, its residents either leaving town or hunkering down in their homes.

The Japanese government has been slow in releasing information on the crisis, even as the troubles have multiplied. In a country where the nuclear industry has a long history of hiding its safety problems, this has left many people, in Japan and among governments overseas, confused and anxious.

After meeting with Kan and other senior officials, the U.N.'s Amano complained that his agency had not been receiving critical information. He said, for instance, the IAEA wanted to know what kind of radioactive elements were being released but could not get the data.

"This kind of information is needed in a timely way, and we hope the Japanese government will provide it. We hope everything will be better," Amano told reporters.

At times, Japan and the U.S. — two very close allies — have offered starkly differing assessments over the dangers at Fukushima. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jazcko said Thursday that it could take days and "possibly weeks" to get the complex under control. He defended the U.S. decision to recommend a 50-mile (80-kilometer) evacuation zone for its citizens, wider than the 12-mile (20-kilometer) band Japan has ordered.

Crucial to the effort to regain control over the Fukushima plant is laying a new power line to the plant, allowing operators to restore cooling systems. The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., missed a deadline late Thursday but hoped to completed the effort late Friday, said nuclear safety agency spokesman Minoru Ohgoda.

But even once the power is reconnected, it was not clear if the cooling systems were intact and will still work.

Workers were completing laying cables around Units 1 and 2 on Friday, a power company official said, and hoped to reach more units Saturday. Even so, experts will have to check for anything volatile to avoid an explosion when the electricity is turned on.

"There may be sparks, so I can't deny the risk," said Teruaki Kobayashi.

President Barack Obama assured Americans that officials do not expect harmful amounts of radiation to reach the U.S. or its territories. He also said the U.S. was offering Japan any help it could provide.

Police said more than 452,000 people made homeless by the quake and tsunami were staying in schools and other shelters, as supplies of fuel, medicine and other necessities ran short. Both victims and aid workers appealed for more help, as the chances of finding more survivors dwindled.

About 343,000 Japanese households still do not have electricity, and about 1 million have no water.

At the Fukushima plant, a core team of 180 emergency workers has been rotating out of the complex to minimize radiation exposure.

The storage pools need a constant source of cooling water. Even when removed from reactors, uranium rods are still extremely hot and must be cooled for months, possibly longer, to prevent them from heating up again and emitting radioactivity.

The actions authorities are taking to cool the reactors are the best ones available, experts say. Eventually, the plant may be entombed in concrete, as was done hastily after the 1986 Chernobyl reactor accident.

But pressures and temperatures must be controlled before then, said Mario V. Bonaca, an adviser to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Otherwise, he said, overheated nuclear fuel will melt or burst through the sand, cement or other covering and release more radiation.



A future requirement of all future businesspeople's brief cases?

U.S. Nuclear Industry Faces New Uncertainty
NYTIMES
By JOHN M. BRODER
March 13, 2011

WASHINGTON — The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America’s energy and global warming challenges may have evaporated as quickly as confidence in Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors.

Until this weekend, President Obama, mainstream environmental groups and large numbers of Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed that nuclear power offered a steady energy source and part of the solution to climate change, even as they disagreed on virtually every other aspect of energy policy. Mr. Obama is seeking tens of billions of dollars in government insurance for new nuclear construction, and the nuclear industry in the United States, all but paralyzed for decades after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, was poised for a comeback.

Now, that is all in question as the world watches the unfolding crisis in Japan’s nuclear reactors and the widespread terror it has spawned.

“I think it calls on us here in the U.S., naturally, not to stop building nuclear power plants but to put the brakes on right now until we understand the ramifications of what’s happened in Japan,” Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut and one of the Senate’s leading voices on energy, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Nuclear power, which still suffers from huge economic uncertainties and local concerns about safety, had been growing in acceptance as what appeared to many to be a relatively benign, proven and (if safe and permanent storage for wastes could be arranged) nonpolluting source of energy for the United States’ future growth.

But even staunch supporters of nuclear power are now advocating a pause in licensing and building new reactors in the United States to make sure that proper safety and evacuation measures are in place. Environmental groups are reassessing their willingness to see nuclear power as a linchpin of any future climate change legislation. Mr. Obama still sees nuclear power as a major element of future American energy policy, but he is injecting a new tone of caution into his endorsement.

“The president believes that meeting our energy needs means relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes renewables like wind and solar, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power,” said Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman. “Information is still coming in about the events unfolding in Japan, but the administration is committed to learning from them and ensuring that nuclear energy is produced safely and responsibly here in the U.S.”

Three of the world’s chief sources of large-scale energy production — coal, oil and nuclear power — have all experienced eye-popping accidents in just the past year. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan have dramatized the dangers of conventional power generation at a time when the world has no workable alternatives able to operate at sufficient scale.

The policy implications for the United States are vexing. “It’s not possible to achieve a climate solution based on existing technology without a significant reliance on nuclear power,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an energy and climate change adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign. “It’s early to reach many conclusions about what happened in Japan and the relevance of what happened to the United States. But the safety of nuclear power will certainly be high on the list of questions for the next several months.”

“The world is fundamentally a set of relative risks,” Mr. Grumet added, noting the confluence of disasters in coal mining, oil drilling and nuclear plant operations. “The accident certainly has diminished what had been a growing impetus in the environmental community to support nuclear power as part of a broad bargain on energy and climate policy.”

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said that the United States should not overreact to the Japanese nuclear crisis by clamping down on the domestic industry indefinitely. Republicans have loudly complained that the Obama administration did just that after the BP oil spill last spring when it imposed a moratorium on deepwater oil drilling until new safety and environmental rules were written.

“I don’t think right after a major environmental catastrophe is a very good time to be making American domestic policy,” Mr. McConnell said on “Fox News Sunday.”

He said that the American public and politicians had recoiled after Three Mile Island, rejecting permits for the construction of dozens of nuclear plants on the “not in my backyard” impulse.

“My thought about it is, we ought not to make American and domestic policy based upon an event that happened in Japan,” Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. Obama has been as supportive of nuclear power as any recent president as he has tried to devise a political and technical strategy for ensuring energy supplies and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear power, along with expanded offshore oil drilling, “clean coal” development and extensive support for renewable energy, are part of his “all-of-the-above energy strategy,” an approach and terminology borrowed from Republicans. But his support for coal and oil as part of a grand compromise on energy were set back by last year’s mining and drilling disasters, and today’s problems with nuclear in Japan cannot help.

Concerns about earthquakes and nuclear power have been around for a long time; new questions might also be raised now about tsunamis and coastal reactors.

In Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address and in his budget, he proposed an expansion of nuclear energy technology and $36 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees for the construction of as many as 20 new nuclear plants.

That policy will be on the table at a hearing of the Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, when Steven Chu, the energy secretary, and Gregory B. Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, are scheduled to testify.

“We will use that opportunity to explore what is known in the early aftermath of the damage to Japanese nuclear facilities,” said Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, the committee chairman, “as well as to reiterate our unwavering commitment to the safety of U.S. nuclear sites.”

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and a skeptic of nuclear power who nonetheless supported expansion of nuclear power as part of the House energy and climate legislation he co-sponsored, said the United States needed tougher standards for siting and operating nuclear plants.

He said regulators should consider a moratorium on locating nuclear plants in seismically active areas, require stronger containment vessels in earthquake-prone regions and thoroughly review the 31 plants in the United States that use similar technology to the crippled Japanese reactors. “The unfolding disaster in Japan must produce a seismic shift in how we address nuclear safety here in America,” Mr. Markey said.




Stricken Japan nuclear plant rocked by 2nd blast
YAHOO
By ERIC TALMADGE and SHINO YUASA, Associated Press
14 March 2011

SOMA, Japan – The second hydrogen explosion in three days rocked a Japanese nuclear plant Monday, sending a massive cloud of smoke into the air and injuring 11 workers. The blast was felt 25 miles (40 kilometers) away, but the plant's operator said the radiation levels at the affected unit were still within legal limits.

Later Monday, fuel rods at a separate reactor in the plant were fully exposed after it lost its ability to cool down, officials said. The exposure raises the risk of the unit overheating and adds to fears of a potential third explosion at the plant.

The morning blast occurred in Unit 3, which authorities have been trying to cool with sea water after a system failure in the wake of Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami, triggered an order for hundreds of people to stay indoors, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano. The two disasters left at least 10,000 people dead.

Operators knew the sea water flooding would cause a pressure buildup in the reactor containment vessel — and potentially lead to an explosion — but felt they had no choice if they wanted to avoid a complete meltdown. In the end, the hydrogen in the released steam mixed with oxygen in the atmosphere and set off the blast.

The inner containment shell surrounding the Unit 3 reactor was intact, Edano said, allaying some fears of the risk to the environment and public. But the outer building around the reactor appeared to have been devastated, with only a skeletal frame remaining.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant, said radiation levels at Unit 3 were well under the levels where a nuclear operator must file a report to the government.

A similar explosion occurred Saturday at the plant's Unit 1, injuring four workers, causing mass evacuations and destroying much of the outer building.

Shortly after Monday's explosion, Tokyo Electric warned it had lost the ability to cool Unit 2. Hours later, the company said fuel rods in that unit were fully exposed, at least temporarily.

The company was trying to channel sea water into the reactor to cover the rods, cool them down and prevent another explosion at the stricken plant.

More than 180,000 people have evacuated the area in recent days, and up to 160 may have been exposed to radiation — pouring misery onto those already devastated by the twin disasters.

Japan's meteorological agency reported the prevailing wind in the area of the stricken nuclear plant was heading east — to the Pacific.

Seventeen U.S. military personnel involved in helicopter relief missions were found to have been exposed to low levels of radiation upon returning to the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier about 100 miles (160 kilometers) offshore.

U.S. officials said the exposure level was roughly equal to one month's normal exposure to natural background radiation in the environment, and after scrubbing with soap and water, the 17 were declared contamination-free.

But as a precaution, the U.S. said the carrier and other U.S. 7th Fleet ships involved in relief efforts had shifted to another area.

While Japan has aggressively prepared for years for major earthquakes, reinforcing buildings and running drills, the impact of the tsunami — which came so quickly that not many people managed to flee to higher ground — was immense.

By Monday, officials were clearly overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, with millions of people having spent three nights without electricity, water, food or heat in near-freezing temperatures.

Officials in one devastated town said they were running out of body bags.

Officials have declared states of emergency at six Fukushima reactors, where Friday's twin disasters knocked out the main cooling systems and backup generators. Three are at Dai-ichi and three at the nearby Fukushima Daini complex.

Most attention, though, has been focused on Dai-ichi units 1 and 3, where operators have been funneling in sea water in a last-ditch measure to cool the reactors. A complete meltdown — the melting of the radioactive core — could release radioactive contaminants into the environment and pose major, widespread health risks.

Edano said no Fukushima reactor was near that point, and he was confident of escaping the worst scenarios.

International scientists say there are serious dangers but little risk of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe. Chernobyl, they note, had no containment shell around the reactor.

"The likelihood there will be a huge fire like at Chernobyl or a major environmental release like at Chernobyl, I think that's basically impossible," said James F. Stubbins, a nuclear energy professor at the University of Illinois.

And, some analysts noted, the length of time since the nuclear crisis began indicates that the chemical reactions inside the reactor were not moving quickly toward a complete meltdown.

"We're now into the fourth day. Whatever is happening in that core is taking a long time to unfold," said Mark Hibbs, a senior associate at the nuclear policy program for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They've succeeded in prolonging the timeline of the accident sequence."

But despite official assurances, many residents expressed fear over the situation.

"First I was worried about the quake," said Kenji Koshiba, a construction worker who lives near the plant. "Now I'm worried about radiation." He spoke at an emergency center in Koriyama, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) from the most troubled reactors.

Overall, more than 1,500 people had been scanned for radiation exposure in the area, officials said.

The U.N. nuclear agency said a state of emergency was also declared Sunday at another complex, the Onagawa power plant, after higher-than-permitted levels of radiation were measured there. It said Japan informed it that all three of those reactors there were under control.

Four nuclear complexes in northeastern Japan have reported some damage from the quake or the tsunami.
Nuclear plant operators in Japan working frantically to avoid meltdowns
New London DAY
By ERIC TALMADGE and YURI KAGEYAMA Associated Press
Article published Mar 13, 2011

Iwaki, Japan - A partial meltdown was likely under way at a second nuclear reactor, a top Japanese official said Sunday, as operators frantically tried to prevent a similar threat from a nearby unit at the same facility following a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that may have killed 1,000 people.

Some 170,000 people have been ordered to evacuate the area covering a radius of 12 miles (20 kilometers) around the plant in Fukushima near Iwaki. A meltdown refers to a very serious collapse of a power plant's systems and its ability to manage temperatures. A complete meltdown would release uranium and dangerous byproducts into the environment that can pose serious health risks.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters that a partial meltdown in Unit 3 of the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant is "highly possible."

"Because it's inside the reactor, we cannot directly check it but we are taking measures on the assumption of the possible partial meltdown," he said.

Japan dealt with the nuclear threat as it struggled to determine the scope of the twin disasters Friday, when an 8.9-magnitude earthquake, the most powerful in its recorded history, was followed by a tsunami that ravaged its northeastern coast with breathtaking speed and power.

The official count of the dead was 763, but the government said the figure could far exceed 1,000. Media reports said some 10,000 people were missing or unaccounted for.

Unit 3 is one of the three working reactors at the Fukushima plant that were damaged, losing the cooling functions necessary to keep the fuel rods working properly. The other unit in trouble is called Unit 1. The facility's Unit 2 has not been affected.

On Saturday, an explosion destroyed the walls of Unit 1 as operators desperately tried to prevent it from overheating and melting down.

Edano said cooling operation at Unit 1 was going smoothly after sea water was pumped in. He expressed hope that it would keep the plant under control.

Operators released slightly radioactive air from Unit 3 Sunday, while injecting water into it as an effort to reduce pressure and temperature to save the reactor from a possible meltdown, Edano said.

He said radiation levels briefly rose above legal limits, but that it has since declined significantly. Also, fuel rods were exposed briefly, he said, indicating that coolant water didn't cover the rods for some time. That would contribute further to raising the temperature in the reactor vessel.

Meanwhile, the government doubled the number of troops pressed into rescue and recovery operations to about 100,000 from 51,000.

Teams searched for the missing along hundreds of miles (kilometers) of the Japanese coast, and thousands of hungry survivors huddled in darkened emergency centers that were cut off from rescuers and aid. At least a million households had gone without water since the quake struck. Large areas of the countryside were surrounded by water and unreachable. Some 2.5 million households were without electricity.

Powerful aftershocks continued to rock the country, including one Sunday with a magnitude of 6.2 that originated in the sea, about 111 miles (179 kilometers) east of Tokyo. It swayed buildings in the capital, but there were no reports of injuries or damage.
For battered Japan, a new threat: nuclear meltdown
YAHOO
By ERIC TALMADGE and YURI KAGEYAMA, Associated Press
12 March 2011

IWAKI, Japan – An explosion at a nuclear power plant on Japan's devastated coast destroyed a building Saturday and made leaking radiation, or even outright meltdown, the central threat menacing a nation just beginning to grasp the scale of a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami.

The Japanese government said radiation emanating from the plant appeared to have decreased after the blast, which produced a cloud of white smoke that obscured the complex. But the danger was grave enough that officials pumped seawater into the reactor to avoid disaster and moved 170,000 people from the area.

Japan dealt with the nuclear threat as it struggled to determine the scope of the earthquake, the most powerful in its recorded history, and the tsunami that ravaged its northeast Friday with breathtaking speed and power. The official count of the dead was 686, but the government said the figure could far exceed 1,000.

Teams searched for the missing along hundreds of miles of the Japanese coast, and thousands of hungry survivors huddled in darkened emergency centers that were cut off from rescuers and aid. At least a million households had gone without water since the quake struck. Large areas of the countryside were surrounded by water and unreachable.

The explosion at the nuclear plant, Fukushima Dai-ichi, 170 miles northeast of Tokyo, appeared to be a consequence of steps taken to prevent a meltdown after the quake and tsunami knocked out power to the plant, crippling the system used to cool fuel rods there.

The blast destroyed the building housing the reactor, but not the reactor itself, which is enveloped by stainless steel 6 inches thick.

Inside that superheated steel vessel, water being poured over the fuel rods to cool them formed hydrogen. When officials released some of the hydrogen gas to relieve pressure inside the reactor, the hydrogen apparently reacted with oxygen, either in the air or the cooling water, and caused the explosion.

"They are working furiously to find a solution to cool the core," said Mark Hibbs, a senior associate at the Nuclear Policy Program for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Nuclear agency officials said Japan was injecting seawater into the core — an indication, Hibbs said, of "how serious the problem is and how the Japanese had to resort to unusual and improvised solutions to cool the reactor core."

Officials declined to say what the temperature was inside the troubled reactor, Unit 1. At 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, the zirconium casings of the fuel rods can react with the cooling water and create hydrogen. At 4,000 degrees, the uranium fuel pellets inside the rods start to melt, the beginning of a meltdown.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said radiation around the plant had fallen, not risen, after the blast but did not offer an explanation. Virtually any increase in dispersed radiation can raise the risk of cancer, and authorities were planning to distribute iodine, which helps protect against thyroid cancer. Authorities moved 170,000 people out of the area within 12 miles of the reactor, said the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, citing information from Japanese officials.

It was the first time Japan had confronted the threat of a significant spread of radiation since the greatest nightmare in its history, a catastrophe exponentially worse: the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States, which resulted in more than 200,000 deaths from the explosions, fallout and radiation sickness.

Officials have said that radiation levels at Fukushima were elevated before the blast: At one point, the plant was releasing each hour the amount of radiation a person normally absorbs from the environment each year.

The Japanese utility that runs the plant said four workers suffered fractures and bruises and were being treated at a hospital.

As Japan entered its second night since the magnitude-8.9 quake, there were grim signs that the death toll could soar. One report said no one could find four whole trains. Others said 9,500 people in one coastal town were unaccounted for and that at least 200 bodies had washed ashore elsewhere.

The government said 642 people were missing and 1,426 injured.

Atsushi Ito, an official in Miyagi prefecture, among the worst hit states, could not confirm the figures, noting that with so little access to the area, thousands of people in scores of towns could not yet be reached.

"Our estimates based on reported cases alone suggest that more than 1,000 people have lost their lives in the disaster," Edano said. "Unfortunately, the actual damage could far exceed that number considering the difficulty assessing the full extent of damage."

Japan, among the most technologically advanced countries in the world, is well-prepared for earthquakes. Its buildings are made to withstand strong jolts — even Friday's, the strongest in Japan since official records began in the late 1800s. The tsunami that followed was beyond human control.

With waves 23 feet high and the speed of a jumbo jet, it raced inland as far as six miles, swallowing homes, cars, trees, people and anything else in its path.

"The tsunami was unbelievably fast," said Koichi Takairin, a 34-year-old truck driver who was inside his sturdy, four-ton rig when the wave hit the port town of Sendai. "Smaller cars were being swept around me. All I could do was sit in my truck."

His rig ruined, he joined the steady flow of survivors who walked along the road away from the sea and back into the city Saturday.

Smashed cars and small airplanes were jumbled against buildings near the local airport, several miles from the shore. Felled trees and wooden debris lay everywhere as rescue workers in boats nosed through murky waters and around flooded structures.

The tsunami set off warnings across the Pacific Ocean, and waves sent boats crashing into one another and demolished docs on the U.S. West Coast. In Crescent City, Calif., near the Oregon state line, one person was swept out to sea and had not been found Saturday.

In Japan early Sunday, firefighters had yet to contain a large blaze at the Cosmo Oil refinery in the city of Ichihara. Four million households remained without power. The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported that Japan had asked for additional energy supplies from Russia.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said 50,000 troops had joined the rescue and recovery efforts, helped by boats and helicopters. Dozens of countries offered to pitch in. President Barack Obama said one American aircraft carrier was already off Japan and a second on its way.

Aid had just begun to trickle into many areas. More than 215,000 people were living in 1,350 temporary shelters in five prefectures, the Japanese national police agency said.

"All we have to eat are biscuits and rice balls," said Noboru Uehara, 24, a delivery truck driver who was wrapped in a blanket against the cold at a shelter in Iwake. "I'm worried that we will run out of food."

The transport ministry said all highways from Tokyo leading to quake-stricken areas were closed, except for emergency vehicles. Mobile communications were spotty and calls to the devastated areas were going unanswered.

One hospital in Miyagi prefecture was seen surrounded by water, and the staff had painted "SOS," in English, on its rooftop and were waving white flags.

Around the nuclear plant, where 51,000 people had previously been urged to leave, others struggled to get away.

"Everyone wants to get out of the town. But the roads are terrible," said Reiko Takagi, a middle-aged woman, standing outside a taxi company. "It is too dangerous to go anywhere. But we are afraid that winds may change and bring radiation toward us."

Although the government played down fears of radiation leak, Japanese nuclear agency spokesman Shinji Kinjo acknowledged there were still fears of a meltdown — the collapse of a power plant's systems, rendering it unable regulate temperatures and keep the reactor fuel cool.

Yaroslov Shtrombakh, a Russian nuclear expert, said it was unlikely that the Japanese plant would suffer a meltdown like the one in 1986 at Chernobyl, when a reactor exploded and sent a cloud of radiation over much of Europe. That reactor, unlike the reactor at Fukushima, was not housed in a sealed container.



Israel Tests on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay
NYTIMES
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID E. SANGER
January 15, 2011

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.

“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”

Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.

In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton separately announced that they believed Iran’s efforts had been set back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited American-led sanctions, which have hurt Iran’s ability to buy components and do business around the world.

The gruff Mr. Dagan, whose organization has been accused by Iran of being behind the deaths of several Iranian scientists, told the Israeli Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into technological difficulties that could delay a bomb until 2015. That represented a sharp reversal from Israel’s long-held argument that Iran was on the cusp of success.

The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.

In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex — and ingenious — than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.

In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.

Seimens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable.

Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any role in designing it.

But Israeli officials grin widely when asked about its effects. Mr. Obama’s chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction, Gary Samore, sidestepped a Stuxnet question at a recent conference about Iran, but added with a smile: “I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.”

In recent days, American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity have said in interviews that they believe Iran’s setbacks have been underreported. That may explain why Mrs. Clinton provided her public assessment while traveling in the Middle East last week.

By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.

The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.

Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.

For years, Washington’s approach to Tehran’s program has been one of attempting “to put time on the clock,” a senior administration official said, even while refusing to discuss Stuxnet. “And now, we have a bit more.”

Finding Weaknesses

Paranoia helped, as it turns out.

Years before the worm hit Iran, Washington had become deeply worried about the vulnerability of the millions of computers that run everything in the United States from bank transactions to the power grid.

Computers known as controllers run all kinds of industrial machinery. By early 2008, the Department of Homeland Security had teamed up with the Idaho National Laboratory to study a widely used Siemens controller known as P.C.S.-7, for Process Control System 7. Its complex software, called Step 7, can run whole symphonies of industrial instruments, sensors and machines.

The vulnerability of the controller to cyberattack was an open secret. In July 2008, the Idaho lab and Siemens teamed up on a PowerPoint presentation on the controller’s vulnerabilities that was made to a conference in Chicago at Navy Pier, a top tourist attraction.

“Goal is for attacker to gain control,” the July paper said in describing the many kinds of maneuvers that could exploit system holes. The paper was 62 pages long, including pictures of the controllers as they were examined and tested in Idaho.

In a statement on Friday, the Idaho National Laboratory confirmed that it formed a partnership with Siemens but said it was one of many with manufacturers to identify cybervulnerabilities. It argued that the report did not detail specific flaws that attackers could exploit. But it also said it could not comment on the laboratory’s classified missions, leaving unanswered the question of whether it passed what it learned about the Siemens systems to other parts of the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

The presentation at the Chicago conference, which recently disappeared from a Siemens Web site, never discussed specific places where the machines were used.

But Washington knew. The controllers were critical to operations at Natanz, a sprawling enrichment site in the desert. “If you look for the weak links in the system,” said one former American official, “this one jumps out.”

Controllers, and the electrical regulators they run, became a focus of sanctions efforts. The trove of State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks describes urgent efforts in April 2009 to stop a shipment of Siemens controllers, contained in 111 boxes at the port of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. They were headed for Iran, one cable said, and were meant to control “uranium enrichment cascades” — the term for groups of spinning centrifuges.

Subsequent cables showed that the United Arab Emirates blocked the transfer of the Siemens computers across the Strait of Hormuz to Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port.

Only months later, in June, Stuxnet began to pop up around the globe. The Symantec Corporation, a maker of computer security software and services based in Silicon Valley, snared it in a global malware collection system. The worm hit primarily inside Iran, Symantec reported, but also in time appeared in India, Indonesia and other countries.

But unlike most malware, it seemed to be doing little harm. It did not slow computer networks or wreak general havoc.

That deepened the mystery.

A ‘Dual Warhead’

No one was more intrigued than Mr. Langner, a former psychologist who runs a small computer security company in a suburb of Hamburg. Eager to design protective software for his clients, he had his five employees focus on picking apart the code and running it on the series of Siemens controllers neatly stacked in racks, their lights blinking.

He quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”

For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.

Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.

But as Mr. Langner kept peeling back the layers, he found more — what he calls the “dual warhead.” One part of the program is designed to lie dormant for long periods, then speed up the machines so that the spinning rotors in the centrifuges wobble and then destroy themselves. Another part, called a “man in the middle” in the computer world, sends out those false sensor signals to make the system believe everything is running smoothly. That prevents a safety system from kicking in, which would shut down the plant before it could self-destruct.

“Code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a message or proving a concept,” Mr. Langner later wrote. “It is about destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.”

This was not the work of hackers, he quickly concluded. It had to be the work of someone who knew his way around the specific quirks of the Siemens controllers and had an intimate understanding of exactly how the Iranians had designed their enrichment operations.

In fact, the Americans and the Israelis had a pretty good idea.

Testing the Worm

Perhaps the most secretive part of the Stuxnet story centers on how the theory of cyberdestruction was tested on enrichment machines to make sure the malicious software did its intended job.

The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well known, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch, stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.

The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally sold P-1’s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.

How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.

“They’ve long been an important part of the complex,” said Avner Cohen, author of “The Worst-Kept Secret” (2010), a book about the Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He added that Israeli intelligence had asked retired senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian issue, and that some apparently came from the enrichment program.

“I have no specific knowledge,” Dr. Cohen said of Israel and the Stuxnet worm. “But I see a strong Israeli signature and think that the centrifuge knowledge was critical.”

Another clue involves the United States. It obtained a cache of P-1’s after Libya gave up its nuclear program in late 2003, and the machines were sent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, another arm of the Energy Department.

By early 2004, a variety of federal and private nuclear experts assembled by the Central Intelligence Agency were calling for the United States to build a secret plant where scientists could set up the P-1’s and study their vulnerabilities. “The notion of a test bed was really pushed,” a participant at the C.I.A. meeting recalled.

The resulting plant, nuclear experts said last week, may also have played a role in Stuxnet testing.

But the United States and its allies ran into the same problem the Iranians have grappled with: the P-1 is a balky, badly designed machine. When the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its P-1’s to England, in hopes of working with the British on a program of general P-1 testing, they stumbled, according to nuclear experts.

“They failed hopelessly,” one recalled, saying that the machines proved too crude and temperamental to spin properly.

Dr. Cohen said his sources told him that Israel succeeded — with great difficulty — in mastering the centrifuge technology. And the American expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Israelis used machines of the P-1 style to test the effectiveness of Stuxnet.

The expert added that Israel worked in collaboration with the United States in targeting Iran, but that Washington was eager for “plausible deniability.”

In November, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, broke the country’s silence about the worm’s impact on its enrichment program, saying a cyberattack had caused “minor problems with some of our centrifuges.” Fortunately, he added, “our experts discovered it.”

The most detailed portrait of the damage comes from the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington. Last month, it issued a lengthy Stuxnet report that said Iran’s P-1 machines at Natanz suffered a series of failures in mid- to late 2009 that culminated in technicians taking 984 machines out of action.

The report called the failures “a major problem” and identified Stuxnet as the likely culprit.

Stuxnet is not the only blow to Iran. Sanctions have hurt its effort to build more advanced (and less temperamental) centrifuges. And last January, and again in November, two scientists who were believed to be central to the nuclear program were killed in Tehran.

The man widely believed to be responsible for much of Iran’s program, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a college professor, has been hidden away by the Iranians, who know he is high on the target list.

Publicly, Israeli officials make no explicit ties between Stuxnet and Iran’s problems. But in recent weeks, they have given revised and surprisingly upbeat assessments of Tehran’s nuclear status.

“A number of technological challenges and difficulties” have beset Iran’s program, Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, told Israeli public radio late last month.

The troubles, he added, “have postponed the timetable.”


More on fires in Russia here.

Chernobyl, Fires and Radiation
NYTIMES
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
August 11, 2010, 11:27 am

There are some heated headlines out there as fires spring up in the zone contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster. The reality, according to specialists in environmental risk from fires and radiation, is that any radiation contained in the resulting smoke and other emissions is very unlikely to pose a significant health risk.

This very question came up two years ago when forest experts grew concerned that the rise of uncontrollable wildfires in the region was growing, mainly because foresters could not operate there. In May 2000, hundreds of firefighters fought a big peat fire in the region. Belarus officials concluded there was no rise in radiation levels. In an e-mail exchange at the time, Robert Barish, a health physicist and radiation consultant, sent the following input on radiation risk from forest fires:

With respect to your question, in the case of forest fires, there is remobilization of radioactive materials that have been deposited into the plant material. The risks however, depend strongly on two factors:

First is how much of the deposited material has actually been taken up by the trees/plants themselves. Some studies have shown that there is a competing pathway for other minerals like potassium that lower the concentration of cesium and strontium in the plant material to levels that are significantly lower than they might be otherwise. Also some of the material is leached back into the soil.

The second is the dispersal pattern. It is the latter that leads to a very significant dilution of any radioactivity as it is spread through huge volumes of air, thus significantly reducing its concentration.

A paper from the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology showed an estimated inhalation dose of 1/10,000 to 1/100,000 of background levels to firefighters confronting a wildfire near the Chernobyl site:
Forest fires in the territory contaminated as a result of the Chernobyl accident: radioactive aerosol resuspension and exposure of fire-fighters

V. A. Kashparov, S. M. Lundina, A. M. Kadygriba, V. P. Protsaka, S. E. Levtchuka, V. I. Yoschenkoa, V. A. Kashpurb and N. M. Talerko

Journal of Environmental Radioactivity Volume 51, Issue 3, December 2000, Pages 281-298

I’ve sent a fresh query to a group of forest, fire and health researchers to get more input on this question.

Page last updated at 09:44 GMT, Sunday, 5 April 2009 10:44 UK
Global map of nuclear arsenals
Map: Members/Non-members of the NNPT

• All numbers are estimates because exact numbers are top secret.

• Strategic nuclear warheads are designed to target cities, missile locations and military headquarters as part of a strategic plan.

ISRAEL

Israeli authorities have never confirmed or denied the country has nuclear weapons.

NORTH KOREA

The highly secretive state claims it has nuclear weapons, but there is no information in the public domain that proves this.

IRAN

The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in 2003 there had been covert nuclear activity to make fissile material and continues to monitor Tehran's nuclear program.

SYRIA

US officials have claimed it is covertly seeking nuclear weapons.


DEP will require Millstone to study new cooling, discharge methods
DAY
Patricia Daddona
Article published Feb 17, 2010

A hearing officer with the state Department of Environmental Protection today recommended renewing a water discharge permit for Millstone Power Station that requires the owner to take several steps to protect marine life in Long Island Sound.

Under the proposed permit, Dominion Nuclear Connecticut would be allowed to discharge approximately 2.28 billion gallons of water a day into the Sound, according to DEP hearing officer Janice Deshais. The outdated, 12-year-old permit that the company is seeking to renew allows up to 2.7 billion gallons a day. The two reactors typically use about 2.2 billion gallons a day.

Millstone's plants discharge heated water into the Sound as they generate electricity. They also trap and kill marine life at intakes when they suck millions of gallons of water into the plants for cooling.
The new terms of the proposal call for installation by Jan. 1, 2011 of new technology shown to reduce the intake of cooling water by about 40 percent during the spawning season for winter flounder, which typically runs from early April to mid-May.

The permit also requires a detailed assessment by late summer of 2012 of all available technologies,known in a related federal court case as the best technologies available to minimize harm to the environment. Dominion also must study the feasibility of installing fine mesh screens to help prevent the death of winter flounder larvae.

According to DEP, the permit would not be issued unless the company also conducts a detailed study of how to improve the natural reproduction of winter flounder in the Niantic River and actively participates in the Nitrogen Work Group DEP has set up. That group is examining the effects of nitrogen loading on aquatic life and the river.

The terms reached by Deshais are based on an agreement reached in September 2008 between DEP staff, Dominion, and two environmental groups, Connecticut Fund for the Environment, Inc. and Soundkeeper, Inc.

This permit proposal represents the proposed final decision following public hearings in December 2008 on the matter, said DEP Spokesman Dennis Schain.

The commissioner typically makes the final decision, but since former commissioner Gina McCarthy was leaving her post and current Commissioner Amey Marrella had been involved in working out permit provisions as deputy, Marrella cannot be final decision maker, said Schain. Susan Frechette, now deputy commissioner, is charged with making that final decision, he said.

There's no required timetable for the decision, Schain said.


Yucca Mountain’s death just a few steps away - Steve Marcus / FILE

AP IMPACT: US spent-fuel storage sites are packed
YAHOO
By JONATHAN FAHEY and RAY HENRY, The Associated Press
22 March 2011

The nuclear crisis in Japan has laid bare an ever-growing problem for the United States — the enormous amounts of still-hot radioactive waste accumulating at commercial nuclear reactors in more than 30 states.

The U.S. has 71,862 tons of the waste, according to state-by-state numbers obtained by The Associated Press. But the nation has no place to permanently store the material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years.  Plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain have been abandoned, but even if a facility had been built there, America already has more waste than it could have handled.

Three-quarters of the waste sits in water-filled cooling pools like those at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Japan, outside the thick concrete-and-steel barriers meant to guard against a radioactive release from a nuclear reactor.  Spent fuel at Dai-ichi overheated, possibly melting fuel-rod casings and spewing radiation into the air, after Japan's tsunami knocked out power to cooling systems at the plant.

The rest of the spent fuel from commercial U.S. reactors has been put into dry cask storage, but regulators only envision those as a solution for about a century and the waste would eventually have to be deposited into a Yucca-like facility.  The U.S. nuclear industry says the waste is being stored safely at power-plant sites, though it has long pushed for a long-term storage facility. Meanwhile, the industry's collective pile of waste is growing by about 2,200 tons a year; experts say some of the pools in the United States contain four times the amount of spent fuel that they were designed to handle.

The AP analyzed a state-by-state summary of spent fuel data based on information that nuclear power plants voluntarily report every year to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry and lobbying group. The NEI would not make available the amount of spent fuel at individual power plants.  While the U.S. Department of Energy previously reported figures on overall spent fuel storage, it no longer has updated information available. A spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees nuclear power plant safety, said the agency was still searching for a compilation of spent fuel data.

The U.S. has 104 operating nuclear reactors, situated on 65 sites in 31 states. There are another 15 permanently shut reactors that also house spent fuel.

Four states have spent fuel even though they don't have operating commercial plants. Reactors in Colorado, Oregon and Maine are permanently shut; spent fuel from all three is stored in dry casks. Idaho never had a commercial reactor, but waste from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania is being stored at a federal facility there.  Illinois has 9,301 tons of spent nuclear fuel at its power plants, the most of any state in the country, according to industry figures. It is followed by Pennsylvania with 6,446 tons; 4,290 in South Carolina and roughly 3,780 tons each for New York and North Carolina.

Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent are other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239, best known as fuel for nuclear weapons. Each has an extremely long half-life — some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency. The rest, about 4 percent, is a cocktail of byproducts of fission that break down over much shorter time periods, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, which break down completely in about 300 years.

How dangerous these elements are depends on how easily can find their way into the body. Plutonium and uranium are heavy, and don't spread through the air well, but there is a concern that plutonium could leach into water supplies over thousands of years.  Cesium-137 is easily transported by air. It is cesium-137 that can still be detected in a New Jersey-sized patch of land around the Chernobyl reactor that exploded in the Ukraine in 1986.

Typically, waste must sit in pools at least five years before being moved to a cask or permanent storage, but much of the material in the pools of U.S. plants has been stored there far longer than that.

Safety advocates have long urged the NRC to force utility operators to reduce the amount of spent fuel in their pools. The more tightly packed they are, the more quickly they can overheat and spew radiation into the environment in case of an accident, a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.  Industry leaders say new technology has made fuel pools safer, and regulators have taken some steps since the 9/11 terror attacks to reduce fuel pool risks. Kevin Crowley, who directs the nuclear and radiation studies board at the National Academy of Sciences, says lessons will be learned from the crisis in Japan. And NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko says his agency will review how spent fuel is stored in the U.S.

A 2004 report by the academy suggested that fresh spent fuel, which is radioactively hotter, be spread among older, cooler assemblies in the spent fuel pool. "You're buying yourself time, basically," says Crowley. "The cooler ones can act as a thermal buffer."

First Energy, which runs two nuclear power stations in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, was able to reconfigure the spent fuel rods in its pools to make more room. Still, the company is now running out of space, says spokesman Todd Schneider. Ohio has 1,136 tons of spent fuel in pools and 37 tons in dry casks.  The casks in the U.S. are kept outdoors, generally on concrete pads, but industry officials insist they are safe. Unlike the pools, the casks don't need electricity; they are cooled by air circulation.

One cask model, selling for $1.5 million, places spent fuel inside a stainless steel canister, which is placed inside an "overpack" — an outside shell composed of a layer of carbon steel, 27 inches of concrete and another layer of carbon steel. When in place, the system stands 20 feet tall and weighs 190,000 pounds, said Joy Russell, said spokeswoman for manufacturer Holtec International of Florida.  Russell said engineers have designed the system to withstand a crash from an F-16 fighter jet and survive the resulting jet fuel fire.

Plant operators in some states have moved aggressively to dry cask storage. Virginia has 1,533 tons of nuclear waste in dry storage and 1,105 tons in spent fuel pools. Maryland has 844 tons in dry storage and 588 tons in spent fuel pools.

Utilities in Texas, though, have not. There are 2,178 tons kept in spent fuel pools at reactor sites there, and zero in dry casks. In New York, 3,345 tons are in spent fuel pools while only 454 tons are in dry storage.

No cask is totally invulnerable, but the academy report found that radioactive releases from casks would be relatively low.

"If you attacked a fuel cask and managed to put a hole in it, anything that came out, the consequences would be very local," Crowley said.

Casks can be licensed for 20 years, with renewals, said Carrie Phillips, spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based Southern Co., which has a dozen such casks at its two-reactor Joseph M. Farley plant near Columbia, Ala. She said officials have "every expectation" the casks could last "in excess of 100 years by design."

But not the needed tens of thousands of years. For long-term storage, the government had looked to Yucca Mountain. It was designed to hold 77,160 tons — 69,444 tons designated for commercial waste and 7,716 for military waste. That means the current inventory already exceeds Yucca's original planned capacity.

A 1982 law gave the federal government responsibility for the long-term storage of nuclear waste and promised to start accepting waste in 1998. After 20 years of study, Congress passed a law in 2002 to build a nuclear waste repository deep in Yucca Mountain.  The federal government spent $9 billion developing the project, but the Obama administration has cut funding and recalled the license application to build it. Nevadans have fiercely opposed Yucca Mountain, though a collection of state governments and others are taking legal action to reverse the decision.

Despite his Yucca Mountain decision, President Barack Obama wants to expand nuclear power. He created a commission last year to come up with a long-term nuclear waste plan. Initial findings are expected this summer, with a final plan expected in January.

"They are 13 years late," says Terry Pickens, Director of Nuclear Policy at Xcel Energy, the Minneapolis-based utility that operates three reactors in Minnesota. Xcel is building steel-and-concrete cask containers to hold old waste on site, and suing the government periodically to pay for them. "We would like them to get done with what they said they would get done."

Some countries — such as France, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom — reprocess their spent fuel into new nuclear fuel to help reduce the amount of waste.

The remaining waste is solidified into a glass. It needs to be stored in a long-term waste repository, but reprocessing reduces the volume of waste by three-quarters.

Because reprocessing isolates plutonium, which can be used to make a nuclear weapon, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter put a stop to it in the U.S. The ban was later overturned, but the country still does not reprocess.

France produces 1,300 tons of nuclear waste per year, and reprocesses 940 tons. Still, fuel is only reprocessed once and then it, too, needs to be stored. France is expecting that engineers will eventually succeed in building a new type of nuclear reactor called a fast reactor that will use the waste it can't reprocess as fuel.

"They've kicked the can down the road," says Frank von Hippel, a director of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.

Other countries, such as Germany, store spent fuel in casks. Finland is building a repository it says will store waste safely for 100,000 years.

Even though there is no long-term storage in the U.S., utility customers and taxpayers have been paying for it — twice.

Customers have paid $24 billion into a fund Congress established in 1982 to pay for such storage. The charge — a penny for every 10 kilowatt-hours — would typically add up to about $11 a year for a household that received all its electricity from nuclear plants.

Users pay as taxpayers, too — for dry storage. Utilities that have run out of storage space in pools successfully sued the federal government for breach of contract, because it failed to keep to the 1998 deadline to establish long-term storage. By law, the money for dry casks cannot come from the nuclear waste fund, and must come from the federal budget.
Rell to feds: Stop plan dismantling Yucca Mountain
By Patricia Daddona Day Staff Writer
Article published Sep 14, 2010

Gov. M. Jodi Rell urged the Obama administration and the Connecticut congressional delegation this week to halt plans for dismantling operations at Yucca Mountain until a request to withdraw its license application is resolved.

Yucca Mountain, the country's proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada, has been in the works for decades, but most recently the U.S. Department of Energy withdrew its application - a move countered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's quasi-judicial arm, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board.

As the NRC considers the board's appeal of the withdrawal, and President Barack Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future undertakes a review of the country's alternatives for dealing with high-level radioactive waste, Rell has joined other U.S. political leaders in urging that the Yucca Mountain project not be abandoned.

Sept. 30 is the date Yucca Mountain is slated to be shut down because Obama eliminated the funding for it in the federal budget, so Rell felt a sense of urgency in asking lawmakers and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu to act when she wrote to them two weeks ago, her spokesman, Adam Liegeot, said Monday.

Rell released the letters Sunday.

"DOE … determined in 2002 that Yucca Mountain was a suitable location, and even now concedes that its Yucca Mountain application is neither flawed nor the site unsafe," Rell wrote. "To now reverse developing Yucca Mountain as a permanent storage site as a matter of policy is a disservice to Connecticut ratepayers, who continue to be burdened by DOE's delay in proceeding with its license application."

The country's electric ratepayers continue to pay fees that go toward the development of a permanent repository for spent fuel, which is used up in the fission process at the nation's 104 nuclear power plants. By federal law, a repository was supposed to be available to move the spent fuel from reactor spent fuel pools and dry cask storage sites by 1998.

In Connecticut alone, fees total $8 million a year, Liegeot said.

The decommissioned Connecticut Yankee reactor site in Haddam Neck continues to house spent fuel, while Dominion's Millstone Power Station in Waterford has spent fuel in two operating reactor spent fuel pools, the pool for the closed Unit 1 reactor, and in dry cask storage, which was first loaded with fuel in 2005.

Reached by phone Monday, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, said he agrees with the governor on this issue and had already called for the steps she urges.

"Part of the problem with this issue in terms of getting critical mass is, it's 'out of sight, out of mind,' if it's not in your district," Courtney said. "The governor's pushing this out because it really is a state issue."

Dominion spokesman Ken Holt said Dominion favors a single, central, national repository and the possibility of studying technologies for reprocessing of high-level radioactive waste, which is done in other countries but not in the U.S. because of the fear of the material falling into the hands of terrorists.

"We agree with the governor that the federal government has an obligation to the American public to accept high-level commercial nuclear waste permanently," Holt said.

The Millstone Unit 2 and Unit 3 reactors have been relicensed through 2035 and 2045, respectively.

The dry storage casks are licensed for 20 years, and can be renewed for an additional 40 years, said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the NRC.
Administration Cannot Drop Bid for Nuclear Waste Dump in Nevada, Panel Finds
NYTIMES
By MATTHEW L. WALD
June 29, 2010

WASHINGTON — In a setback for the Obama administration, a panel of judges at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled on Tuesday that the Energy Department could not withdraw its application to open a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Making good on a campaign pledge by President Obama, the Energy Department had formally sought to drop its plan for Yucca Mountain, a volcanic structure about 100 miles from Las Vegas. But states with major accumulations of waste from nuclear weapons production had petitioned to prevent the department from doing so.

In a 47-page decision, the three-member panel of administrative judges said the Energy Department lacked the authority to drop the petition because it would flout a law passed by Congress.

In the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, Congress directed the Energy Department to file the application and the commission to consider it and “issue a final, merits-based decision approving or disapproving the construction,” the judges said. “Unless Congress directs otherwise, D.O.E. may not single-handedly derail the legislated decision-making process.”

The effect of the decision is unclear for now. Congress would have to appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the Energy Department to pursue the application. But the president’s budget for next year proposes no money at all; and while some members of the House are eager to appropriate funds, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, is adamantly opposed to the project.

Yet the decision could keep the application alive long enough for the politics to change.

That would not end the debate over scientific and engineering issues related to the project, which is markedly different from the waste burial strategy being pursued in other countries. Some experts say the geology of the Nevada site, selected by Congress in 1987, is unsuitable. The Energy Department would have to convince the commission that the repository could contain the waste for hundreds of thousands of years.

The three-judge panel noted that the Energy Department was not claiming that Yucca was unsafe or that there was anything wrong with the 86,000-page application, but was saying only that the site was “not a workable option.”

The decision on Tuesday could be overruled by the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself. The commission is studying the order, said a commission spokesman, Eliot Brenner.

President Obama had promised in his election campaign to drop the Yucca Mountain plans if he were elected. But the states of Washington and South Carolina, with major stores of waste, had petitioned to prevent the Energy Department from withdrawing the application. So did the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association; several counties in Nevada; and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, made up of state officials who sit on public service commissions.

The state officials are concerned because the Energy Department’s waste program has been mostly financed by electricity consumers, who pay one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour into a nuclear waste fund. The state commissioners have also asked that payments to the fund be suspended because there is now effectively no program to find a burial spot. About $10 billion has been spent so far.

In announcing his intention to give up on the Yucca Mountain plan, Mr. Obama said he would establish a commission to seek solutions to nuclear waste. But the commission, which began meeting this year, is not looking for alternative sites but considering ways of recycling and reusing some of the waste.

That could reduce the number of repositories needed, but at least one would still be required; national policy still dictates that the waste should eventually be buried.

Stephanie Mueller, an Energy Department spokeswoman, said the agency was “confident that we have the legal authority to withdraw the application for the Yucca Mountain repository.”

“We believe the administrative board’s decision is wrong and believe that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will reverse that decision,” Ms. Mueller said.

But Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the ruling signaled that the Yucca Mountain licensing effort would continue.
The Obama administration promised Monday it would withdraw the application to open a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
Yucca Mountain Sun coverage
By Lisa Mascaro (contact), Stephanie Tavares (contact)
Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Washington — The long and tortured effort to build a national burial ground at Yucca Mountain for highly radioactive waste will be halted once and for all, the Obama administration promised Monday, saying it would withdraw the application to build the project and starve it of funds.

And the coup de grace, maybe many years from now: plugging the tunnel into the mountain and sealing inside, forever, not nuclear waste but a giant boring machine that became an icon for the vexed project.

The government has poured $38 billion into the effort, claiming it had found the perfect place to house the Earth’s most dangerous garbage but failing in its effort to prove its case. Now that search will be renewed.

“The administration has determined that Yucca Mountain, Nevada, is not a workable option for a nuclear waste repository and will discontinue its program to construct a repository at the mountain in 2010,” White House in budget documents said.

Marty Malsch, an attorney who has fought the project for years on behalf of Nevada, said if the application withdrawal is approved, “It would mean, effectively, that’s the end of it.”

“Yucca, as Yucca, is dead.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu emphasized that he will seek the withdrawal “with prejudice” — a legal definition that prohibits the project from being resubmitted later, ending speculation that the project could be revived when a more dump-friendly administration inhabits the White House.

Nevadans who have opposed Yucca Mountain repository since Congress singled it out more than 20 years ago think the endgame is set.

“This is the day we put the Champagne on ice — we’ll pop the cork after the motion is heard and decided,” said Richard Bryan, former Democratic governor and senator who led efforts to stop the dump.

“It’s a great day for the state and a great testament to the state hanging tough and staying the course.”

Former Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn said, “It has been a long time coming.”

But before the Champagne begins to flow, several steps must be taken.

• First, the Energy Department must, within 30 days, submit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s three-judge panel its request to withdraw the application with prejudice.

The panel is reviewing the application to license the waste dump, a painstaking process that began in 2008 and could take at least four years to complete. Citing Obama’s intent pull the plug, the Energy Department asked the panel Monday for a stay in those hearings, “to avoid the unnecessary expenditure of resources,” according to the legal papers.

In a sign of the possible debate, White Pine County indicated in a legal filing it will oppose the motion for the stay. Several other Nevada counties remain neutral or are supportive, according to legal documents.

• Next, the three-judge panel will consider the withdrawal application — a key document that would outline the terms of withdrawal and whether the site could be reconsidered in the future.

The nuclear industry has been the primary champions of the dump, and the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s main lobby, would not say if it plans to challenge the withdrawal application. A spokesman said the withdrawal language will be “of paramount importance,” hinting at the industry’s desire to keep a dump at Yucca Mountain on the back burner.

“The industry does not support the termination of this program, but believes that, if it is going to happen, it should occur in an orderly manner to permit the licensing process to be restarted if ever warranted,” said Marvin Fertel, the institute’s CEO.

• Finally, the panel would issue a ruling that could be appealed, and any decision would be reviewed by the full Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The commission is made up of political appointees — three Democrats, two Republicans — and is headed by Gregory Jaczko, who specialized in nuclear energy issues on the staff of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid before being tapped for the job.

Yet even with these final, potentially arduous, steps still to come, those who have fought the dump are confident that if the Obama administration continues on the course it has outlined, a Yucca repository will never exist.

By withdrawing the application, the administration would take the legal action necessary to halt the project — a move with even more teeth than if the energy secretary were to declare the site unsuitable, which had always been an option.

Malsch said that if the energy secretary were to declare the site unsuitable but then fail to pull the license, “you always would have wondered. This makes it clear that changing the mind is out of the question.”

A Yucca dump’s obituary has been written before, but Monday’s developments provided the strongest indications yet that the project is ending.

The Obama administration’s decision was not a complete surprise. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign told the Las Vegas Sun he would withdraw the application if elected.

Yet the administration did not do so after taking office last year, even as Obama severely cut the Yucca Mountain budget. The federal government appeared hesitant to pull the plug because it faces mounting legal liability for failing to take the waste off nuclear power companies’ hands, as required by law. Already several utilities have successfully sued the government for failing to open a Yucca repository in 1998 as promised.

But over the past several days, Obama sought to assure the nuclear industry he is on its side even as he prepared to deliver a devastating blow to its long-promised dump.

In his State of the Union address last week, Obama welcomed “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” And Friday the administration announced the formation of a new commission headed by Lee Hamilton and Brent Scowcroft that will come up with Plan B — alternatives to a dump at Yucca Mountain. Also, Obama’s new budget triples to $54 billion the federal loan guarantees available for financing new nuclear power plants.

With so many sweeteners, the industry’s opposition to a Yucca dump’s demise may be muted.

Reid, who has worked closely with Obama and Chu on Yucca, on Monday thanked Obama “for keeping his word to Nevadans.”

Although the 2011 budget would eliminate the project, it provides at least $55 million for a newly merged office to close the site. Yucca’s staff has been slashed from 1,400 last year to 625 today, with just 127 working in Las Vegas.

The tunnel into the repository has long been closed, with a chain-link fence across the openings.

Bruce Breslow, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, which has fought the dump, said the site needs to be remediated and returned to its original condition, as required by law.

The buildings need to be removed, the boring holes that have made Swiss cheese of the mountain top need to be patched up and the entrance tunnels need to be filled “with two giant corks, or however they’re going to do it,” Breslow said.

Eventually, the state also would need to untangle its many lawsuits against the federal government.

Yet while a Yucca dump may be done, Nevada may not be safe from the nation’s nuclear waste.

The new commission promises it will not consider Yucca Mountain as it seeks alternatives, but the rest of Nevada’s desert could be open ground for waste storage or a waste reprocessing facility.

Some members of the Republican political establishment in Nevada have long envisioned a nuclear waste facility in the desert, and several candidates hoping to unseat Reid in the fall election, including Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian, want to explore waste reprocessing ideas.

Yet Yucca Mountain as the end destination for the waste would be no more. Even though Yucca Mountain remains in law as the chosen site for the nation’s nuclear waste, without a project application the law is moot, legal experts said.

Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley said that if the president follows through and pulls the application, it will be “all but impossible for this threat to one day return from the grave.”

We first heard another version of this old saying from former First Selectman Jim Daniel - "the good is the enemy of the better."

In Asia, Obama, Medvedev see nuclear pact progress
YAHOO
By CHARLES HUTZLER, Associated Press Writer
November 15, 2009

SINGAPORE – President Barack Obama said Sunday the United States and Russia would have a replacement treaty on reducing nuclear arms ready for approval by year's end, an announcement designed as an upbeat ending to a summit with Asia-Pacific leaders.

While publicizing progress with Russia on arms control — part of Obama's agenda to advance nuclear disarmament — the president and other leaders bowed to the obvious on climate change. They discussed a compromise agreement for a 192-nation gathering next month in Copenhagen, indirectly admitting that the meeting would not produce a new global treaty to reduce the heat-trapping carbon emissions that are warming the planet.

Nearing the end of his two days in Singapore, Obama also attended a second summit with leaders of the 10 southeast Asian countries that make up the ASEAN group. Obama was the first U.S. president to sit in on the meetings, that included a senior leader of Myanmar — part of a shift in U.S. policy away from isolating the repressive Myanmar military government.

Afterward, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama told the gathering, Myanmar Gen. Thein Sein included, that his government must free long-detained democracy leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners.

Obama "brought that up directly with that government," Gibbs said.  While Myanmar ranks high among nations that suppress human rights, a joint statement by the United States and the ASEAN group made no mention of Suu Kyi.

The whirlwind of summitry is part of Obama's first presidential trip to the region. Its emphasis on big issues like climate change, disarmament and the economic crisis is part of Obama's approach to persuade new emerging powers like China — where he headed later Sunday — to share in the burden of managing global challenges.  The change in emphasis has helped Obama shift relations to a more positive footing, away from disputes over human rights and the Chinese military buildup that have unsteadied ties. In Shanghai on Monday, Obama will address an audience of students from several universities and field questions from them and from submissions to the U.S. Embassy's Web site.

Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific summit of APEC nations to announced good progress in negotiations on an updated pact to replace the START nuclear arms agreement that expires on Dec. 5.

Sitting, gesturing and leaning toward his Russian counterpart, Obama said the pair discussed a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and described "excellent progress over the last several months."

"I'm confident that if we work hard and with a sense of urgency, we'll be able to get that done," Obama said, adding technical issues remain.

Medvedev said he hoped negotiators would "finalize the text of the document by December."

Obama and Medvedev agreed in April to reach a new nuclear arms reduction pact to replace and expand upon the one that was signed by former President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev. 
During a July summit in Moscow, Obama and Medvedev further agreed to cut the number of nuclear warheads each nation possesses to between 1,500 and 1,675 within seven years.  U.S. officials say the two nations now have agreed on the broad outlines of a new treaty, which could be signed during Obama's travels to Europe in early December to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

It still was not clear if Obama would use that same trip to attend the Copenhagen climate summit, given that any agreement reached on cutting greenhouse gas emissions would serve only as an interim, political document.

"There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen which starts in 22 days," said Michael Froman, Obama's deputy national security adviser for international economic matters.

The prime minister of Denmark, Lars Loekke Rasmussen, the U.N.-sponsored climate conference's chairman, flew overnight to Singapore to present a proposal shifting the goal of the meeting to a "politically binding" agreement, in hopes of breathing life into the struggling process.  A fully binding legal agreement would be left to a second meeting next year in Mexico City, Froman said.

Obama backed the approach, cautioning the group not to let the "perfect be the enemy of the good," Froman said.

A major bill dealing with energy and climate in the U.S. Senate, a domestic priority of Obama's, is bogged down with scant hope of completion by next month. That would leave Obama little to show in Copenhagen.

During his Asia trip, which continued later Sunday to China, Obama also pushed for continued pressure on Iran and its nuclear program. Appearing with Medvedev, Obama said "we are now running out of time."

"Unfortunately, so far it appears Iran has been unable to say yes," to the proposal on uranium reprocessing, Obama said.

Medvedev continued: "We are prepared to work further and I hope our joint work will reach a positive result. In case we fail, other options remain on the table." He has said further sanctions against Iran were possible if it did not open its nuclear program to inspections to prove it was not trying to build a bomb.

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China — along with Germany have engaged Iran on its nuclear program, most recently with a deal for it to ship enriched uranium to Russia for further processing as fuel for an aging reactor used for medical treatments.  The United States and its allies believe Iran is using it's nuclear program as a cover for building a bomb. Tehran says it only wants to build nuclear reactors to generate electricity.

Obama wrapped his official schedule in Singapore late Sunday afternoon by meeting with Indonesia's Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of the world's largest Muslim nation and Obama's home as a boy. Obama said he was excited about the prospect of improving relations with Indonesia and repeated his plan to visit next year.

He said, however, the schedule would depend on his family; he wanted to plan a trip with "Michelle and the girls so they can take a look at some of my old haunts."

Page last updated at 16:39 GMT, Thursday, 17 September 2009 17:39 UK
US missile rethink a huge shift
By Paul Reynolds, World affairs correspondent BBC News website

The decision by the Obama administration to drop plans to base an anti-ballistic missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic is a huge shift in American foreign and defence policy.

There are several immediate implications. First, it is a major signal, which has followed a number of others, that the United States is adopting a far more cautious and flexible foreign policy under President Obama than it did under President Bush.

President Bush was determined on the European-based system and agreements had been reached with Poland to base 10 anti-missile interceptors there and with the Czechs for them to house the system's radar.

President Obama ordered a review when he came into office. He has now been told that Iran is concentrating less on long-range ballistic missiles that might one day reach the United States and more on shorter range one that could reach parts of Europe.

This has given him a technological reason to change and he will use this to fend off criticism that he has given in to Moscow. He was careful to say that his military chiefs agreed with him.

Relations with Moscow

The second effect will be on US relations with Russia. Here the picture will be mixed. The Russians will be pleased and therefore relations will be eased. The Russians had claimed the system might be a threat to them, though the US said it would not. The US felt that the Russians were simply making an excuse to meddle in the affairs of their near neighbours.

But the Russians might also feel triumphant and conclude that their tough approach is one that brings respect and results.

The US might hope for spin-offs from more relaxed relations - in that the Russians might be more willing to agree to increased sanctions against Iran and might show greater flexibility in nuclear weapons and anti missile talks. But neither is certain.

Third, this indicates that the Obama team is looking closely at the claims for technology. The experts have been having some doubts about the whole shield system.

Shorter range anti-missiles have proved promising. Perhaps this means he will also be looking sceptically at claims that Iran is developing an actual nuclear weapon. That could mean a reluctance to attack Iranian nuclear plants without rock-solid information, though this would not necessarily stop the Israelis from doing so.

Not that the president wishes to be seen as soft on Iran. He states that his new proposals will be smarter and better in countering any threat from Iranian missiles.

Hardliners 'let down'

Fourth, the Polish and Czech governments might have mixed feelings. They had invested considerable capital in agreeing to the system. Some hardliners in Eastern Europe might feel let down.

Others might be relieved. There will be debates about the long-term US commitment to Europe. That is why the president mentioned Nato's article 5 in his announcement - an attack on one will still be an attack on all.

Fifth, on the military side, this heralds a shift of emphasis in the whole US anti-missile defence strategy. It is not an end to it but it is a change to it.

The emphasis will now be on regional and shorter-range defence. The Israeli example might be a good one. The US is co-operating with the Israelis on the Arrow anti-missile missile and on a shorter range missile interceptor known as David's Sling.

Such methods will now come to the fore. And the existing Aegis ship-based defence, already deployed near Japan, will also have renewed importance.




Are we really? 
Bart works at nuclear plant, if I recall correctly. 

Thieves Found Citigroup Site an Easy Entry
NYTIMES
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and ERIC DASH
June 13, 2011

Think of it as a mansion with a high-tech security system — but the front door wasn’t locked tight.

Using the Citigroup customer Web site as a gateway to bypass traditional safeguards and impersonate actual credit card holders, a team of sophisticated thieves cracked into the bank’s vast reservoir of personal financial data, until they were detected in a routine check in early May.

That allowed them to capture the names, account numbers, e-mail addresses and transaction histories of more than 200,000 Citi customers, security experts said, revealing for the first time details of one of the most brazen bank hacking attacks in recent years.

The case illustrates the threat posed by the rising demand for private financial information from the world of foreign hackers.

In the Citi breach, the data thieves were able to penetrate the bank’s defenses by first logging on to the site reserved for its credit card customers.

Once inside, they leapfrogged between the accounts of different Citi customers by inserting vari-ous account numbers into a string of text located in the browser’s address bar. The hackers’ code systems automatically repeated this exercise tens of thousands of times — allowing them to capture the confidential private data.

The method is seemingly simple, but the fact that the thieves knew to focus on this particular vulnerability marks the Citigroup attack as especially ingenious, security experts said.

One security expert familiar with the investigation wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser. “It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability,” he said. The security expert insisted on anonymity because the inquiry was at an early stage.

The financial damage to Citigroup and its customers is not yet clear. Sean Kevelighan, a bank spokesman, declined to comment on the details of the breach, citing the ongoing criminal investigation. In a statement, he said that Citigroup discovered the breach in early May and the problem was “rectified immediately.” He added that the bank had initiated internal fraud alerts and stepped up its account monitoring.

The expertise behind the attack, according to law enforcement officials and security experts, is a sign of what is likely to be a wave of more and more sophisticated breaches by high-tech thieves hungry for credit card numbers and other confidential information.

That is because demand for the data is on the rise. In 2008, the underground market for the data was flooded with more than 360 million stolen personal records, most of them credit and debit files. That compared with 3.8 million records stolen in 2010, according to a report by Verizon and the Secret Service, which investigates credit card fraud along with other law enforcement agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Now, as credit cards that were compromised in the vast 2008 thefts expire, thieves are stepping up efforts to find new accounts.

As a result, prices for basic credit card information could rise to several dollars from their current level of only pennies.

“If you think financially motivated breaches are huge now, just wait another year,” said Bryan Sartin, who conducts forensic investigations for Verizon’s consulting arm.

The kind of information the thieves are able to glean is shared in online forums that are a veritable marketplace for criminals. Networks that three years ago numbered several thousands users have expanded to include tens of thousands of hackers.

“These are online bazaars,” said Pablo Martinez, deputy special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s criminal investigation division. “They are growing exponentially and we have seen the entire process become more professional.”

For example, some hackers specialize in prying out customer names, account numbers and other confidential information, Mr. Martinez said. Brokers then sell that information in the Internet bazaars. Criminals use it to impersonate customers and buy merchandise. Finally, “money mules” wire home the profits through outlets like Western Union or MoneyGram.

“It’s like ‘Mission Impossible’ when they select the teams,” said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor who is now with CSC, an information technology services firm. “And they don’t know each other, except by hacker handle and reputation.”

In the Citi attack, the hackers did not obtain expiration dates or the three-digit security code on the back of the card, which will make it harder for thieves to use the information to commit fraud.

Not every breach results in a crime. But identity theft has ranked first among complaints to the Federal Trade Commission for 11 consecutive years, with 1.34 million in 2010, twice as many as the next category, which is debt collection.

Many of these attacks have their origins in Eastern Europe, including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Romania. In fact, the security expert familiar with the Citi breach said it originated in the region, though he would not specify the country.

In Russia, Xakep.ru, is one of the larger forums for Eastern European hackers today, with nearly 13,300 registered members, according to Cyveillance. HackZone.ru is larger, and has more than 58,000 members. In addition, attacks by Romanian hackers have grown noticeably more advanced recently, according to security experts.

On HackZone, one seller who called himself “zoloto” promised “all cards valid 100%” and that they would be sold only one time.

Underscoring the multinational nature of these rings, American law-enforcement agencies have also been putting more investigators overseas.

“The only way to address a global issue is to address it globally with your partners,” said Gordon M. Snow, assistant director of the F.B.I.’s Cyber Division.

The Secret Service established a presence in Tallinn, Estonia, last month, and has embedded agents with Ukrainian authorities since the beginning of the year. The F.B.I. has embedded agents in the Netherlands, Estonia, Ukraine and Romania, and works closely with its counterparts in Australia, Germany and Britain.

But even officials at these agencies acknowledge that as fast as they move, the hackers’ strategies are evolving at Silicon Valley speed.

“With every takedown, they regroup,” said J. Keith Mularski, a supervisory special agent with the F.B.I.

Riva Richmond contributed reporting.

U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors
NYTIMES
By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF
June 12, 2011

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.

The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”

Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.

“The implication is that this disempowers central authorities from infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate,” Mr. Meinrath added.

The Invisible Web

In an anonymous office building on L Street in Washington, four unlikely State Department contractors sat around a table. Josh King, sporting multiple ear piercings and a studded leather wristband, taught himself programming while working as a barista. Thomas Gideon was an accomplished hacker. Dan Meredith, a bicycle polo enthusiast, helped companies protect their digital secrets.

Then there was Mr. Meinrath, wearing a tie as the dean of the group at age 37. He has a master’s degree in psychology and helped set up wireless networks in underserved communities in Detroit and Philadelphia.

The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.

Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.

The project will also rely on the innovations of independent Internet and telecommunications developers.

“The cool thing in this political context is that you cannot easily control it,” said Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cybersecurity expert whose work will be used in the suitcase project. Mr. Kaplan has set up a functioning mesh network in Vienna and says related systems have operated in Venezuela, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Mr. Meinrath said his team was focused on fitting the system into the bland-looking suitcase and making it simple to implement — by, say, using “pictograms” in the how-to manual.

In addition to the Obama administration’s initiatives, there are almost a dozen independent ventures that also aim to make it possible for unskilled users to employ existing devices like laptops or smartphones to build a wireless network. One mesh network was created around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as early as five years ago, using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Creating simple lines of communication outside official ones is crucial, said Collin Anderson, a 26-year-old liberation-technology researcher from North Dakota who specializes in Iran, where the government all but shut down the Internet during protests in 2009. The slowdown made most “circumvention” technologies — the software legerdemain that helps dissidents sneak data along the state-controlled networks — nearly useless, he said.

“No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.”

That need is so urgent, citizens are finding their own ways to set up rudimentary networks. Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian expatriate and technology developer who co-founded a popular Persian-language Web site, estimates that nearly half the people who visit the site from inside Iran share files using Bluetooth — which is best known in the West for running wireless headsets and the like. In more closed societies, however, Bluetooth is used to discreetly beam information — a video, an electronic business card — directly from one cellphone to another.

Mr. Yahyanejad said he and his research colleagues were also slated to receive State Department financing for a project that would modify Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being beaten, could automatically jump from phone to phone within a “trusted network” of citizens. The system would be more limited than the suitcase but would only require the software modification on ordinary phones.

By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention efforts and related technologies, according to department figures.

Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.

That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.

He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.

Shadow Cellphone System

In February 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke and Lt. Gen. John R. Allen were taking a helicopter tour over southern Afghanistan and getting a panoramic view of the cellphone towers dotting the remote countryside, according to two officials on the flight. By then, millions of Afghans were using cellphones, compared with a few thousand after the 2001 invasion. Towers built by private companies had sprung up across the country. The United States had promoted the network as a way to cultivate good will and encourage local businesses in a country that in other ways looked as if it had not changed much in centuries.

There was just one problem, General Allen told Mr. Holbrooke, who only weeks before had been appointed special envoy to the region. With a combination of threats to phone company officials and attacks on the towers, the Taliban was able to shut down the main network in the countryside virtually at will. Local residents report that the networks are often out from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., presumably to enable the Taliban to carry out operations without being reported to security forces.

The Pentagon and State Department were soon collaborating on the project to build a “shadow” cellphone system in a country where repressive forces exert control over the official network.

Details of the network, which the military named the Palisades project, are scarce, but current and former military and civilian officials said it relied in part on cell towers placed on protected American bases. A large tower on the Kandahar air base serves as a base station or data collection point for the network, officials said.

A senior United States official said the towers were close to being up and running in the south and described the effort as a kind of 911 system that would be available to anyone with a cellphone.

By shutting down cellphone service, the Taliban had found a potent strategic tool in its asymmetric battle with American and Afghan security forces.

The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering. And the ability to silence the network was also a powerful reminder to the local populace that the Taliban retained control over some of the most vital organs of the nation.

When asked about the system, Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the American-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, would only confirm the existence of a project to create what he called an “expeditionary cellular communication service” in Afghanistan. He said the project was being carried out in collaboration with the Afghan government in order to “restore 24/7 cellular access.”

“As of yet the program is not fully operational, so it would be premature to go into details,” Colonel Dorrian said.

Colonel Dorrian declined to release cost figures. Estimates by United States military and civilian officials ranged widely, from $50 million to $250 million. A senior official said that Afghan officials, who anticipate taking over American bases when troops pull out, have insisted on an elaborate system. “The Afghans wanted the Cadillac plan, which is pretty expensive,” the official said.

Broad Subversive Effort

In May 2009, a North Korean defector named Kim met with officials at the American Consulate in Shenyang, a Chinese city about 120 miles from North Korea, according to a diplomatic cable. Officials wanted to know how Mr. Kim, who was active in smuggling others out of the country, communicated across the border. “Kim would not go into much detail,” the cable says, but did mention the burying of Chinese cellphones “on hillsides for people to dig up at night.” Mr. Kim said Dandong, China, and the surrounding Jilin Province “were natural gathering points for cross-border cellphone communication and for meeting sources.” The cellphones are able to pick up signals from towers in China, said Libby Liu, head of Radio Free Asia, the United States-financed broadcaster, who confirmed their existence and said her organization uses the calls to collect information for broadcasts as well.

The effort, in what is perhaps the world’s most closed nation, suggests just how many independent actors are involved in the subversive efforts. From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at the craving for open communication.

In a chat with a Times reporter via Facebook, Malik Ibrahim Sahad, the son of Libyan dissidents who largely grew up in suburban Virginia, said he was tapping into the Internet using a commercial satellite connection in Benghazi. “Internet is in dire need here. The people are cut off in that respect,” wrote Mr. Sahad, who had never been to Libya before the uprising and is now working in support of rebel authorities. Even so, he said, “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the existence of the World Wide Web.”
Homemade cyberweapon worries federal officials
Capable of crippling key industrial controls
The Washington Times
By Shaun Waterman
8:45 p.m., Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Two security researchers, working at home in their spare time, have created a cyberweapon similar to the sophisticated Stuxnet computer worm that was discovered last year to have disrupted computer systems running Iran's nuclear program.

The private efforts by Dillon Beresford and Brian Meixell are raising concerns among U.S. government officials that hackers will launch copycat cyber-attacks that could cripple computer controls at industrial sites such as refineries, dams and power plants.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security were so distressed by the researchers' findings that they asked the two men to cancel a planned presentation at a computer security conference in Dallas last week called TakeDownCon.

"They requested that I not share the data, but it was absolutely my decision to cancel," Mr. Beresford told The Washington Times. Homeland Security "in no way tried to censor the presentation, and the conference organizers were very supportive. ... We did the right thing."

Initial analysis of the 2009 Stuxnet attack on Iran suggested that replicating it would require the resources of a nation-state or large organization and detailed information on how the target computer system was set up. The origin of Stuxnet has not been discovered.

But Mr. Beresford said he developed the cyberweapon "in my bedroom, on my laptop" in 2 1/2 months. The malicious software, or malware, was tested on equipment made by Siemens, the German-based industrial giant that makes the system that was attacked by the Stuxnet worm.

Siemens products - known as industrial control systems - are used in thousands of power stations, chemical plants and other industrial settings worldwide. Stuxnet was designed to make the machinery controlled by an industrial control system destroy itself.

Once Siemens saw Mr. Beresford's presentation, the company renewed laboratory work on software patches for controllers that were developed after Stuxnet, Mr. Beresford said. He said he worked last week with officials from a special Homeland Security unit in charge of protecting industrial computer programs but was becoming impatient with Siemens' response.

"This is another egregious example of a vendor trying to minimize the impact of multiple security vulnerabilities in their products and being somewhat evasive about the truth," he said, noting that the company tried to downplay concern in its public statements and had yet to publish a fix for the flaws he had found.

"The clock is ticking, and time is of the essence. I expect more from a company worth $80 billion, and so do [their] customers," Mr. Beresford said.

Siemens spokesman Robert Bartels told The Times that the company is testing fixes and expects to release them "within the next few weeks."

Homeland Security Department officials asked the researchers to delay their presentation until special repair measures aimed at patching security holes they identified are fully developed. They praised the researchers for postponing public release of data that hackers could use to attack computers that control critical infrastructure around the world.

"Responsible disclosure ... does not encourage the release of sensitive vulnerability information without also validating and releasing a solution," a Homeland Security official said in an email.

The disclosure that independent researchers could replicate Stuxnet - which security specialists said at the time likely required a large design team to produce and an industrial plant for testing - will increase concerns about the proliferation of advanced cyberweapons that could cause large-scale death and destruction if unleashed by terrorist groups, criminal gangs or foreign governments.
Cyber raids 'threaten British, US stock markets'
YAHOO
31 January 2011

LONDON (AFP) – Stock exchanges in Britain and the United States have enlisted the help of the security services after finding out they were the victims of cyber attacks, The Times newspaper reported on Monday.

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) is investigating a terrorist cyber-attack on its headquarters last year while US officials have traced an attack on one of its exchanges to Russia, according to the British newspaper.

Officials suspect the attacks were designed to spread panic among markets and destabilise western financial institutions.

Cyber attacks on governments and companies increased more than 500 percent over the last two years and a raid on the European Emissions Trading Scheme ten days ago shut down the carbon market.

A leading UK cyber security expert told the newspaper: "Make no mistake, the UK?s critical infrastructure is under attack. The threat is advanced and persistent."
Special report: The Pentagon's new cyber warriors
YAHOO
By Jim Wolf
5 October 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Guarding water wells and granaries from enemy raids is as old as war itself. In the Middle Ages, vital resources were hoarded behind castle walls, protected by moats, drawbridges and knights with double-edged swords.  Today, U.S. national security planners are proposing that the 21st century's critical infrastructure -- power grids, communications, water utilities, financial networks -- be similarly shielded from cyber marauders and other foes.

The ramparts would be virtual, their perimeters policed by the Pentagon and backed by digital weapons capable of circling the globe in milliseconds to knock out targets.

An examination by Reuters, including dozens of interviews with military officers, government officials and outside experts, shows that the U.S. military is preparing for digital combat even more extensively than has been made public. And how to keep the nation's lifeblood industries safe is a big, if controversial, aspect of it.

"The best-laid defenses on military networks will matter little unless our civilian critical infrastructure is also able to withstand attacks," says Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary William Lynn, who has been reshaping military capabilities for an emerging digital battlefield.  Any major future conflict, he says, inevitably will involve cyber warfare that could knock out power, transport and banks, causing "massive" economic disruption.

But not everyone agrees that the military should or even can take on the job of shielding such networks. In fact, some in the private sector fear that shifting responsibility to the Pentagon is technologically difficult -- and could prove counterproductive.  For the moment, however, proponents of the change seem to have the upper hand. Their case has been helped by the recent emergence of Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm of unknown origin that attacks command modules for industrial equipment.

Experts describe the code as a first-of-its-kind guided cyber missile. Stuxnet has hit Iran especially hard, possibly slowing progress on Tehran's nuclear program, as well as causing problems elsewhere.

Stuxnet was a cyber shot heard around the world. Russia, China, Israel and other nations are racing to plug network gaps. They also are building digital arsenals of bits, bytes and logic bombs -- code designed to interfere with a computer's operation if a specific condition is met, according to experts inside and outside the U.S. government.

THE WORMS ARE COMING!

In some ways, the U.S. military-industrial complex -- as President Dwight Eisenhower called ties among policymakers, the armed forces and arms makers -- is turning into more of a military-cyber-intelligence mash-up.  The Pentagon's biggest suppliers -- including Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co , Northrop Grumman Corp, BAE Systems Plc and Raytheon Co -- each have big and growing cyber-related product and service lines for a market that has been estimated at $80 billion to $140 billion a year worldwide, depending on how broadly it is defined.

U.S. officials have shown increasing concern about alleged Chinese and Russian penetrations of the electricity grid, which depends on the Internet to function. Beijing, at odds with the United States over Taiwan arms sales and other thorny issues, has "laced U.S. infrastructure with logic bombs," former National Security Council official Richard Clarke writes in his 2010 book "Cyber War," a charge China denies.

Such concerns explain the Pentagon's push to put civilian infrastructure under its wing by creating a cyber realm walled off from the rest of the Internet. It would feature "active" perimeter defenses, including intrusion monitoring and scanning technology, at its interface with the public Internet, much like the Pentagon's "dot.mil" domain with its more than 15,000 Defense Department networks.

The head of the military's new Cyber Command, Army General Keith Alexander, says setting it up would be straightforward technically. He calls it a "secure zone, a protected zone." Others have dubbed the idea "dot.secure."

"The hard part is now working through and ensuring everybody's satisfied with what we're going to do," Alexander, 58, told reporters gathered recently near his headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Alexander also heads the National Security Agency, or NSA, the super-secretive Defense Department arm that shields national security information and networks, and intercepts foreign communications.  The Pentagon is already putting in place a pilot program to boost its suppliers' network defenses after break-ins that have compromised weapons blueprints, among other things. Lynn told Alexander to submit plans, in his NSA role, for guarding the so-called defense industrial base, or DIB, that sells the Pentagon $400 billion in goods and services a year.

"The DIB represents a growing repository of government information and intellectual property on unclassified networks," Lynn said in a June 4 memo obtained by Reuters.

He gave the general 60 days to develop the plan, with the Homeland Security Department, to provide "active perimeter" defenses to an undisclosed number of Pentagon contractors.

"We must develop additional initiatives that will rapidly increase the level of cybersecurity protection for the DIB to a level equivalent to the (Department of Defense's) unclassified network," Lynn wrote.

The Pentagon, along with the Homeland Security department, is now consulting volunteer "industry partners" on the challenges private sector companies envision, said Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Rene White, a Pentagon spokeswoman, in a status report.

THROWBACK?

Some see the Pentagon's proposed new ring around certain critical services as a throwback almost to the dark ages.

"Dot.secure becomes new Target One," says Richard Bejtlich, General Electric Co's director of incident response. "I can't think of an easier way to help an adversary target the most critical information on industry computers."

Bejtlich and others say such an arrangement would only be as strong as its weakest link, vulnerable to compromise in many ways. "I guarantee users will want to and need to transfer information between their normal company Internet-connected computers and 'dot.secure'," he says. "Separation is a fool's goal."

Utilities already use encrypted, password-controlled systems to handle communication between power plants and large-scale distribution systems.  Trying to move that traffic off the existing Internet onto an independent computer network would be expensive, and would not necessarily guarantee security.

"Even a private network is only so secure," said Dan Sheflin, a vice president at Honeywell International Inc who works on grid-control technology. "A big threat is employees walk in, unknowingly or knowingly, with (an infected) thumb drive, plug it in, put their kids' pictures on their PC and, oh boy, something's on the network. Those are things that even a private network could be subject to."

Rather than building a new network, a more practical solution could be improving the security of existing systems.

"The real issue is not letting people in and having layers of defense if they do get in to isolate them and eradicate them," said Sheflin, of Honeywell, which makes grid components ranging from home thermostats to automation systems to run power plants. "This is a very difficult problem. We are up against well-funded groups who can employ many people who spend their time trying to do this."

Greg Neichin of San Francisco-based Cleantech Group LLC, a research firm, says utility companies already are well aware of the need to guard their infrastructure, which can represent billions of dollars of investment. "Private industry is throwing huge sums at this already," he says. "What is the gain from government involvement?"

Companies ranging from Honeywell to General Electric Co -- whose chief executive, Jeff Immelt, called the U.S. energy grid a relic last month -- are pushing the drive toward a "smart grid."

That model would permit two-way communication between power producers and consumers, so a utility could avoid a blackout during a peak demand time by sending a signal to users' thermostats to turn down air conditioning, for instance. Such a system could also allow variable pricing -- lowering prices during off-peak demand times, which would encourage homeowners to run major appliances like dishwashers and washing machines in the evenings, when industrial demand declines.

Neichin is worried that efforts to wall off grid-related communication could stifle that kind of innovation.

But even Sheflin of Honeywell argues that private companies are not likely to solve a problem of this magnitude on their own. "The government needs to be involved in this," he said. "There is going to have to be someone that says, 'Wait a minute, this is of paramount importance.' I don't think it's going to be private industry that will raise the red flag."

A Pentagon spokesman said he could not address industry concerns right now, but the Defense Department would do so before long. Still, the military's proposal faces other complications.

WHO'S IN CHARGE?

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security now leads efforts to secure federal non-military systems, often described as the Internet's "dot.gov" domain. It also has the lead in protecting critical infrastructure. NSA and Cyber Command lend a hand when asked to do so, including by U.S. companies seeking to button up their networks.

The idea of letting the Defense Department wall off certain private-sector networks is highly tricky for policymakers, industry and Pentagon planners. Among the issues: what to protect, who should be in charge, how to respond to any attack and whether the advent of a military gateway could hurt U.S. business's dealings overseas, for instance for fear of Pentagon snooping.

In addition, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act generally bars federal military personnel from acting in a law-enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Congress.

Alexander says the White House is considering whether to ask Congress for new authorities as part of a revised team approach to cyber threats that would also involve the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department.

There are persistent signs of strains between Cyber Command and the Homeland Security Department over how to enhance the U.S. cybersecurity posture.

"To achieve this, we have to depart from the romantic notion of cyberspace as the Wild Wild West," Homeland Deputy Secretary Jane Lute told the annual Black Hat computer hackers' conference in Las Vegas in July. "Or the scary notion of cyberspace as a combat zone. The goal here is not control, it's confidence."

Alexander made a reference to tensions during certain meetings ahead of Cyber Storm III, a three-day exercise mounted by U.S. Homeland Security last week with 12 other countries plus thousands of participants across government and industry. It simulated a major cyber attack on critical infrastructure.

"Defense Department issues versus Homeland Security issues," he told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on September 23. "And that's probably where you'll see more friction. So how much of each do you play? How radical do you make the exercise?"

President Barack Obama's cybersecurity coordinator, Howard Schmidt, is working with Congress and within the administration to develop policies and programs to improve U.S. cybersecurity, says a White House spokesman, Nicholas Shapiro.

Obama, proclaiming October National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, said protecting digital infrastructure is a "national security priority."

"We must continue to work closely with a broad array of partners -- from federal, state, local and tribal governments to foreign governments, academia, law enforcement and the private sector -- to reduce risk and build resilience in our shared critical information and communications infrastructure," he said.

VIRTUAL CASTLE WALLS

Active defenses of the type the military would use to shield a "dot.secure" zone represent a fundamental shift in the U.S. approach to network defense, Lynn says. They depend on warnings from communications intercepts gathered by U.S. intelligence.

Establishing this link was a key reasons for the creation of Cyber Command, ordered in June 2009 by Defense Secretary Robert Gates after he concluded that the cyber threat had outgrown the military's existing structures.

"Policymakers need to consider, among other things, applying the National Security Agency's defense capabilities beyond the ".gov" domain, such as to domains that undergird the commercial defense industry," Lynn wrote in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.

"The Pentagon is therefore working with the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector to look for innovative ways to use the military's cyber defense capabilities to protect the defense industry," he said.

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who led a Senate Intelligence Committee cyber task force that submitted a classified report to the panel in July, has floated a similar idea, drawing an analogy to medieval fortresses.

"Can certain critical private infrastructure networks be protected now within virtual castle walls in secure domains where those pre-positioned offenses could be both lawful and effective?" he asked in a July 27 floor speech.

"This would obviously have to be done in a transparent manner, subject to very strict oversight. But with the risks as grave as they are, this question cannot be overlooked," said the Rhode Island Democrat. "There is a concerted and systematic effort under way by national states to steal our cutting-edge technologies."

The "dot.secure" idea may be slow in getting a full congressional airing. More than 40 bills on cyber security are currently pending. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton, told Reuters he was not ready to pass judgment on possible new powers for Cyber Command.

CYBER WARRIORS

Cyber Command leads day-to-day protection for the more than 15,000 U.S. defense networks and is designed to mount offensive strikes if ordered to do so.

The command has already lined up more than 40,000 military personnel, civilians and contractors under Alexander's control, nearly half the total involved in operating the Defense Department's sprawling information technology base.

It is still putting capabilities in place from across the military as it rushes to reach full operational capability by the end of this month. Reuters has pinned down the numbers involved for each service.

The Air Force component, the 24th Air Force, will align about 5,300 personnel to conduct or support round-the-clock operations, including roughly 3,500 military, 900 civilian and 900 contractors, said spokeswoman Captain Christine Millette. The unit was declared fully operational on October 1, including its 561st Network Operations Squadron based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado, where it operates, maintains and defends Air Force networks.

The Navy adds about 14,000 active duty military and civilian employees serving at information operations, network defense, space and telecommunication facilities around the world. They are now aligned operationally under the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, said spokesman Commander Steve Mavica.

The Army contributes more than 21,000 soldiers and civilians, including the Army Intelligence and Security Command, for cyber-related actions, said Lieutenant Colonel David Patterson, an Army spokesman.

The Marine Corps will assign roughly 800 of its forces to "pure" cyber work, according to Lieutenant General George Flynn, deputy commandant for combat development.

Cyber Command's headquarters staff will total about 1,100, mostly military, under a budget request of about $150 million for the fiscal year that started October 1, up from about $120 million the year before.

Beside guarding Defense Department computers, the nation's cyber warriors could carry out computer-network attacks overseas with weapons never known to have been used before.

"You can turn a computer or a power plant into a useless lump of metal," says a former U.S. national security official familiar with the development of U.S. cyber warfare capabilities. "We could do all kind of things that would be useful adjuncts to a balanced military campaign."

Such weapons could blow up, say, a chemical plant by instructing computers to raise the temperature in a combustion chamber, or shut a hydro-electric power plant for months by sabotaging its turbines.

Scant official information is available on the development of U.S. cyber weapons, which are typically "black" programs classified secret. They are built from binary 1s and 0s -- bits and bytes. They may be aimed at blinding, jamming, deceiving, overloading and intruding into a foe's information and communications circuits.

An unclassified May 2009 U.S. Air Force budget-justification document for Congress lifted the veil on one U.S. cyber weapon program. It described "Project Suter" software, apparently designed to invade enemy communication networks and computer systems, including those used to track and help shoot down enemy warplanes.

"Exercises provide an opportunity to train personnel in combined, distributed operations focused on the 'Find, Fix and Finish' process for high-value targets," says the request for research, development, test and evaluation funds.

The U.S. Air Force Space Command has proposed the creation of a graduate-level course for "network warfare operations." The proposed five-and-a-half-month class would produce officers to lead weapons and tactics development "and provide in-depth expertise throughout the air, space and cyberspace domains focused on the application of network defense, exploitation and attack," Lieutenant Colonel Chad Riden, the space command's Weapons and Tactics branch chief, said in an emailed reply to Reuters.

GEORGIA ON THEIR MIND

The world got a glimpse of what lower-level cyber warfare might look like in Estonia in 2007 and in Georgia in 2008 when cyber attacks disrupted networks amid conflicts with Russia.  Now, the Stuxnet computer virus is taking worries about cyber warfare to new heights as the first reported case of malicious software designed to sabotage industrial controls.

"Stuxnet is a working and fearsome prototype of a cyber-weapon that will lead to a new arms race in the world," said Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based security software vendor. "This time it will be a cyber arms race."

The program specifically targets control systems built by Siemens AG, a German equipment maker. Iran, the target of U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program, has been hit hardest of any country by the worm, according to experts such as the U.S. technology company Symantec.

Asked about Stuxnet, U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Bernard McCullough, head of Cyber Command's Navy component, told Reuters: "It has some capabilities we haven't seen before."

Discovered in June, Stuxnet -- named for parts of its embedded code -- is capable of reprogramming software that controls such things as robot arms, elevator doors and HVAC climate control systems, said Sean McGurk, who has studied it for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security at an Idaho lab that grabs live viruses from the Internet and serves as a kind of digital Petri dish.

"We're not looking right now to try to attribute where it came from," McGurk told reporters at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center that he runs in Arlington, Virginia. "What we're focusing on now is how to mitigate and prevent the spread," he said on September 24.

And then there is China. Its cyber clout has been a growing concern to U.S. officials amid bilateral strains over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Beijing's currency policies, its territorial claims in the South China Sea and other irritants.  Beijing appears to have thoroughly pierced unclassified U.S. government networks, said Dmitri Alperovitch, who heads Internet-threat intelligence analysis and correlation for McAfee, a software and security vendor that counts the Pentagon among its clients.

"In the U.S. when you're sending an email over an unclassified system you might as well copy the Chinese on that email because they'll probably read it anyway because of their pretty thorough penetration of our network," he says.

Still, Chinese cyber capabilities lag those of the United States, Russia, Israel and France in that order, adds Alperovitch. He headed McAfee's investigation into Aurora, a codename for a cyber espionage blitz on high-tech Western companies that led Google to recast its relationship with China earlier this year.  Cyber arms entail "high reward, low risk" says Jeffrey Carr, a consultant to the United States and allied governments on Russian and Chinese cyber warfare strategy and tactics.

Lynn, the deputy defense secretary steering the military's cyber overhaul, went to Brussels on September 14 to brief NATO allies on U.S. cyber defense initiatives. He encouraged them to take action to secure NATO networks, said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.  Some U.S. computer defenses are already linked with those of its allies, notably through existing intelligence-sharing partnerships with Britain, Canada, Australia and NATO. But "far greater levels of cooperation" are needed to stay ahead of the threat, Lynn says.

NATO's secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, "believes that this is a growing problem and that it can reach levels that can threaten the fundamental security interests of the alliance," NATO spokesman James Appathurai said.

A Rasmussen-compiled draft of a new NATO vision statement is due to be approved by NATO states at a November 19-20 summit in Lisbon and will endorse a more prominent cyber defense role for the alliance.  They all agree that castle walls alone are no longer an option.

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle and Scott Malone in Boston; David Brunnstrom in Brussels; editing by Jim Impoco and Claudia Parsons)
How Stuxnet is Scaring the Tech World Half to Death
Weekly Standard
BY Jonathan V. Last
September 30, 2010 2:30 PM

The computer worm Stuxnet broke out of the tech underworld and into the mass media this week. It’s an amazing story: Stuxnet has infected roughly 45,000 computers. Sixty percent of these machines happen to be in Iran. Which is odd. What is odder still is that Stuxnet is designed specifically to attack a computer system using software from Siemens which controls industrial facilities such as factories, oil refineries, and oh, by the way, nuclear power plants. As you might imagine, Stuxnet raises big, interesting geo-strategic questions. Did a state design it as an attack on the Iranian nuclear program? Was it a private group of vigilantes? Some combination of the two? Or something else altogether?

But it’s worth pausing to contemplate Stuxnet on its own terms, and understand why the tech nerds were so doomsday-ish about it in the first place. We should start at the beginning.

A computer worm is distinct from a virus. A virus is a piece of code which attaches itself to other programs. A worm is a program by itself, which exists on its own within a computer. A good (meaning really bad) worm must do several things quite subtly: It must find its way onto the first machine by stealth. While a resident, it must remain concealed. Then it must have another stealthy method of propagating to other computers. And finally, it must have a purpose. Stuxnet achieved all of these goals with astounding elegance.

The Stuxnet worm was first discovered on June 17, 2010 by VirusBlokAda, a digital security company in Minsk. Over the next few weeks, tech security firms began trying to understand the program, but the overall response was slow because Stuxnet was so sophisticated. On July 14, Siemens was notified of the danger Stuxnet posed to its systems. At the time, it was believed that Stuxnet exploited a “zero day” vulnerability (that is, a weak point in the code never foreseen by the original programmers) in Microsoft’s Windows OS. Microsoft moved within days to issue a patch.

By August, the details of Stuxnet were becoming clearer. Researchers learned troubling news: The virus sought to over-ride supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in Siemens installations. SCADA systems are not bits of virtual ether—they control all sorts of important industrial functions. As the Christian Science Monitor notes, a SCADA system could, for instance, override the maximum safety setting for RPMs on a turbine. Cyber security giant Symantec warned:

    Stuxnet can potentially control or alter how [an industrial] system operates. A previous historic example includes a reported case of stolen code that impacted a pipeline. Code was secretly “Trojanized’” to function properly and only some time after installation instruct the host system to increase the pipeline’s pressure beyond its capacity. This resulted in a three kiloton explosion, about 1/5 the size of the Hiroshima bomb.

As the days ticked by, Microsoft realized that Stuxnet was using not just one zero-day exploit but four of them. Symantec’s Liam O’Murchu told Computer World, “Using four zero-days, that’s really, really crazy. We’ve never seen that before.”

Still, no one knew where Stuxnet had come from. A version of the worm from June 2009 was discovered and when the worm’s encryption was finally broken, a digital time stamp on one of the components (the ~wtr4141.tmp file, in case you’re keeping score at home) put the time of compilation—the worm’s birthday—as February 3, 2009.

The functionality of Stuxnet is particularly interesting. The worm gains initial access to a system through a simple USB drive. When an infected USB drive is plugged into a machine, the computer does a number of things automatically. One of them is that it pulls up icons to be displayed on your screen to represent the data on the drive. Stuxnet exploited this routine to pull the worm onto the computer. The problem, then, is that once on the machine, the worm becomes visible to security protocols, which constantly query files looking for malware. To disguise itself, Stuxnet installs what’s called a “rootkit”—essentially a piece of software which intercepts the security queries and sends back false “safe” messages, indicating that the worm is innocuous.

The trick is that installing a rootkit requires using drivers, which Windows machines are well-trained to be suspicious of. Windows requests that all drivers provide verification that they’re on the up-and-up through presentation of a secure digital signature. These digital keys are closely-guarded secrets. Yet Stuxnet’s malicious drivers were able to present genuine signatures from two genuine computer companies, Realtek Semiconductor and JMichron Technologies. Both firms have offices in the same facility, Hsinchu Science Park, in Taiwan. No one knows how the Stuxnet creators got hold of these keys, but it seems possible that they were physically—as opposed to digitally—stolen.

So the security keys enable the drivers, which allow the installation of the rootkit, which hides the worm that was delivered by the corrupt USB drive. Stuxnet’s next job was to propagate itself efficiently, but quietly. Whenever another USB drive was inserted into an infected computer, it becomes infected, too. But in order to reduce visibility and avoid detection, the Stuxnet creators set up a system so that each infected USB drive could only pass the worm on to three other computers.

Stuxnet was not designed to spread over the Internet at large. (We think.) It was, however, able to spread over local networks—primarily by using the print spooler that runs printers shared by a group of computers. And once it reached a computer with access to the Internet it began communicating with a command-and-control server—the Stuxnet mothership. The C&C servers were located in Denmark and Malaysia and were taken off-line after they were discovered. But while they were operational, Stuxnet would contact them to deliver information it had gathered about the system it had invaded and to request updated versions of itself. You see, the worm’s programmers had also devised a peer-to-peer sharing system by which a Stuxnet machine in contact with C&C would download newer versions of itself and then use it to update the older worms on the network.

And then there’s the actual payload. Once a resident of a Windows machine, Stuxnet sought out systems running the WinCC and PCS 7 SCADA programs. It then began reprogramming the programmable logic control (PLC) software and making changes in a piece of code called Operational Block 35. It’s this last bit—the vulnerability of PLC—which is at the heart of the concern about Stuxnet. A normal worm has Internet consequences. It might eat up bandwidth or slow computers down or destroy code or even cost people money. But PLC protocols interact with real-world machinery – for instance, turn this cooling system on when a temperature reaches a certain point, shut that electrical system off if the load exceeds a given level, and so on.

To date, no one knows exactly what Stuxnet was doing in the Siemens PLC. “It’s looking for specific things in specific places in these PLC devices,” Digital Bond CEO Dale Peterson told PC World. “And that would really mean that it’s designed to look for a specific plant.” Tofino Security Chief Technology Officer Eric Byres was even more ominous, saying, “The only thing I can say is that it is something designed to go bang.” Even the worm’s code suggests calamity. Ralph Langner is the most prominent Stuxnet sleuth and he notes that one of the last bits of code in the worm is the line “DEADF007.” (Presumably a dark joke about “deadf*ckers” and the James Bond call-sign “007.") “After the original code is no longer executed, we can expect that something will blow up soon,” Langner says somewhat dramatically. “Something big.”

The most important question is what that “something big” might be.

But there is another intriguing question: How did Stuxnet spread as far as it did? The worm is, as a physical piece of code, very large. It’s written in multiple languages and weighs in at nearly half a megabyte, which is one of the reasons there are still many pieces of it that we don’t understand. And one of those puzzles is how Stuxnet found its way onto so many computers so far away from one another. Iran is the epicenter, but Stuxnet is found in heavy concentrations in Pakistan, Indonesia, and India, too, and even as far away as Russia, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan. By the standards of modern worms, the 45,000 computers infected by Stuxnet is piddling. But if Stuxnet really can only propagate via local networks and USB drives, how did it reach even that far?

Stuxnet is already the most studied piece of malware ever, absorbing the attention of engineers and programmers across the globe, from private companies to academics, to government specialists. And yet despite this intense scrutiny, the worm still holds many secrets.


The Pentagon loses sensitive data
A cyberattack by an unnamed foreign government garners 24,000 files, to lead to new cyber war strategy. One idea - see "Live Free or Die Hard ('Die Hard 4')."


Hackers 'hit' US water treatment systems
I-BBC
21 November 2011 Last updated at 06:36 ET


Hackers are alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois.  Hackers with access to the utility's network are thought to have broken the pump by turning it on and off quickly.  The FBI and Department for Homeland Security (DHS) are investigating the incident as details emerge of what could be a separate second attack.

Experts said the news revealed a growing interest in critical infrastructure by cyber criminals.

Information about the 8 November incident came to light via the blog of Joe Weiss who advises utilities on how to protect hardware against attack.  Mr Weiss quoted from a short report by the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center which said hackers obtained access using stolen login names and passwords. These were taken from a company which writes control software for industrial systems.

The net address through which the attack was carried out was traced to Russia, according to Mr Weiss. The report said "glitches" in the remote access system for the pump had been noticed for months before the burn out, said Mr Weiss.   Peter Boogaard, A spokesman for the DHS, said it was gathering facts about the incident.

"At this time there is no credible corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety," he said.

Industrial action

The comments by the DHS prompted a hacker using the handle "pr0f" to claim he had access to the control systems for a second US water utility.  He posted a document to the Pastebin website which purportedly contained links to screenshots of the internal control systems for a waste water treatment plant in South Houston.  The hacker's claims about their ability to penetrate the control systems have yet to be confirmed or denied by South Houston's Water and Sewer Department.

In an interview with the Threat Post website, Pr0f said the hack of the South Houston network barely deserved the name because only a three-character password had been used to protect the system.  The attacks are the latest in a series in which different hackers and groups have targeted so called Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. These specialised computer systems are used to control machinery used to filter water, mix chemicals, distribute power and route trains and trams.

One of the best known SCADA attacks involved the Stuxnet worm which caused problems for Iran.

There were reports that the malware crippled centrifuges used in the nation's uranium enrichment program. Iran denied the claims saying that it had caught the worm before it reached its intended target.  Earlier this year, security researchers who investigated ways to attack SCADA systems were persuaded to cancel a public talk about their findings because of the "serious physical, financial impact these issues could have on a worldwide basis".

Lani Kass, a former advisor to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on security issues, said America had to start doing more work to understand attacks on critical infrastructure.

"The going in hypothesis is always that it's just an incident or coincidence," she said. "And if every incident is seen in isolation, it's hard - if not impossible - to discern a pattern or connect the dots."

"Failure to connect the dots led us to be surprised on 9/11," she said.

Computer-based attacks emerge as threat of future, general says
The Washington Times
By Bill Gertz
Tuesday, September 13, 2011

The general in charge of U.S. cyberwarfare forces said Tuesday that future computer-based combat likely will involve electronic strikes that cause widespread power outages and even physical destruction of thousand-ton machines.  Army Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of the new U.S. Cyber Command, also said that massive losses of private and public data in recent years to computer criminals and spies represent the largest theft in history.

Threats posed by cyber-attacks on computer networks and the Internet are escalating from large-scale theft of data and strikes designed to disrupt computer operations to more lethal attacks that destroy entire systems and physical equipment.

“That’s our concern about what’s coming in cyberspace — a destructive element,” Gen. Alexander, who is also the director of the National Security Agency, the electronic spying agency, said in a speech at a conference on cyberwarfare.

Gen. Alexander said two cases illustrate what could happen in an attack.  The first was the August 2003 electrical power outage in the Northeast U.S. that was caused by a tree damaging two high-voltage power lines. Electrical power-grid software that controlled the distribution of electricity to millions of people improperly entered “pause” mode and shut down all power through several states.  The example highlighted the threat of sophisticated cyberwarfare attackers breaking into electrical grid networks and using the access to shut down power.

“You can quickly see that there are ways now to get in and mess with [electrical] power if you have access to it,” he said.

The second example was the catastrophic destruction of a water-driven electrical generator at Russia’s Sayano-Shushenskaya dam, near the far eastern city of Cheremushki, in August 2009.  Gen. Alexander said one of the dam’s 10 650-megawatt hydroturbine generators, weighing more than 1,000 tons, was being serviced and, by mistake, was remotely restarted by a computer operator 500 miles away. The generator began spinning and rose 50 feet into the air before exploding. The flood caused by the accident killed 75 people and destroyed eight of the remaining nine turbines.

A similar deliberate attack remains a huge problem, Gen. Alexander said, saying that destruction by cyber-attacks was outranked only by nuclear bombs or other weapons of mass destruction.

In developing cyberwarfare strategies, Gen. Alexander said, the U.S. will respond to computer-based attacks as it will to other attacks. The government is adopting what he termed an “active defense” strategy aimed at bolstering the readiness of computer networks to respond.

The Pentagon’s cyberstrategy announced last summer calls for treating the cyberdomain as equal to the air, land, sea and space domains and leveraging U.S. technology to improve cyberdefenses for government and the private sector.  On information theft, Gen. Alexander said the problem is so pervasive that there are two categories for major companies: firms that are aware they have been hacked and the rest who remain unaware of the problem.

“What’s been going on over the last few years in the networks … is the greatest theft that we’ve seen in history,” he said. “What we’re losing in intellectual property is astounding.”

The four-star general said estimates of the value of lost corporate and government information range as high as $1 trillion. In one recent case, a U.S. corporation that he did not identify by name lost $1 billion worth of proprietary technology that was “stolen by the adversaries.” The technology took the company more than 20 years to develop.

The problem is “on a massive scale that affects every industry and every sector of the economy and government, and it’s one that we have to get out in front of,” he said.

Recent attacks on corporate computer networks include Sony’s system that affected 7.7 million video users in April and a second incident affecting 2.5 million users in May. Google, defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and the security company RSA also were targets of sophisticated computer attacks.  In May 2007, computer networks in Estonia were disabled by computer operatives from neighboring Russia.

“They had to disconnect their international connections to stop these attacks after several days. It was huge and greatly impacted Estonia,” Gen. Alexander said.

Asked about conducting offensive operations, Gen. Alexander said that current cyberdefenses are “far from adequate” and that more needs to be done before adopting more offensive tools.

“In cyber, we have not solved the defensive portion,” he said. “From my perspective, there is a lot that we can do to fix that before we take offensive actions.”

Response actions to cyber-attacks need to be carefully measured to avoid escalating from a conflict in the cyber-arena to full-scale conventional warfare, he said.  One example would be to “take down ‘botnets’” — malicious computer software packages — from the Internet.

Gen. Alexander defended the U.S. government practice of not identifying major cyberthreats such as those emanating from China and Russia.  Confronting foreign government complicates efforts to track cyber-activity, he said.

“Candidly, if every time we say, ‘We know you’re doing A,’ they say, ‘Oh, you can see that?’ We don’t see it anymore. We don’t see them for a while.”

The foreign governments also seek to learn information about U.S. tracking capability and, when confronted, “all they do is deny it,” he said.

Gen. Alexander warned that cyberwarfare is expected to continue and that defenses need to be improved. “Whether or not we do that, it’s coming,” he said. “It’s a question of time. People say, ‘Aw that’s five years out, it’s two years out.’

“What we don’t know is how far out it is, an attack in cyberspace, and what that will be? Will it be against commercial infrastructure, government networks? Will it be against platforms? We don’t know.”

Nation's Fight Against Cyber Intruders Goes Local
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 20, 2011

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The next frontier in the fight to keep crucial electronic networks safe from harm will play out as close to home as Town Hall and require more involvement from private industry, which controls 85 percent of the infrastructure, experts say.

An explosion in threats against the nation's cyber networks has led the Pentagon to develop a cyber war strategy and states to open cyber security offices.

The Pentagon revealed last week that it sustained, earlier this year, one of its largest-ever losses of sensitive data in a cyberattack by an unnamed foreign government. Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynch disclosed the theft of 24,000 files while outlining the military's new cyber war strategy.

"What keeps me up at night is just that we have so much more work to do," said Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance. "We have to figure out how to work together or we'll never achieve cyber security."

At his confirmation hearing last month, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told senators America's next great battle will likely entail cyber warfare.

"The next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples our power systems, our grid, our security systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems," Panetta said. He has said that cyber security will be a key focus of his Pentagon tenure.

A report by Verizon, the U.S. Secret Service and Dutch High Tech Crime Unit found the number of records compromised in data breaches fell to 4 million last year from 144 million in 2009 and a whopping 361 million in 2008.

The report's authors say the decline in data loss is tied to a decrease in large-scale data breaches.

Cyber security giant Symantec says it recorded more than 3 billion malware attacks last year.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday arrested 14 people in nine states and the District of Columbia on charges out of California that they hacked into PayPal's web site last December as part of the group "Anonymous," according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Investigators say the hackers targeted PayPal after the online service suspended WikiLeak's account in the wake of the release of classified U.S. State Department cables. Prosecutors allege the cyberattack unleashed by the "Anonymous" group rendered PayPal inaccessible for users. They say the group dubbed the assault "Operation Avenge Assange," a reference to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Other recent high-profile victims of cyberattacks include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sony, Citigroup, the International Monetary Fund, the Gmail accounts of high-ranking U.S. officials and the computer security company RSA, which sells devices used to protect computer systems. Also lurking are computer viruses and worms that have the potential to overtake systems controlling pipelines, water systems, nuclear power plants and other facilities.

Rhode Island officials highlighted the need for cooperation from the private sector when it unveiled its new Cyber Disruption Team. The July 11 announcement took place at the Providence offices of Dell SecureWorks, which services customers in the financial services, utilities, health care, retail and government industries. The team, with representatives from law enforcement, academia and Dell SecureWorks, aims to prevent and respond to cyber security events and defend the state's cyber infrastructure.

"That public-private partnership is absolutely critical," said U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin, D-RI, who is co-founder of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus.

At the same time, combatting cyber security is getting more local, Kaiser said. The Washtenaw County Cyber Citizenship Coalition in Michigan and Cyber City USA in San Antonio, Texas are two such examples.

"Local is actually the next frontier," Kaiser said. "People turn first to their local government, law enforcement, fire departments, town council, local mayor. We need them to be prepared and ready."

States began taking cyber security seriously while also fortifying physical targets after the Sept. 11 attacks, said George Foresman, a former undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He said implementing cyber security measures has not been as consistent as the roll-out of homeland security efforts.

"It is still very much inconsistent and within that inconsistency lies a lot of vulnerabilities for states," Foresman said. States including Georgia, New York and California run cyber security offices to protect state networks.

In New York, the 40-person staff at the state's Office of Cyber Security annually processes 26 billion pieces of data culled from Internet monitoring devices, said director Thomas D. Smith. More than 150 events require immediate attention every year and the office's Incident Response Team typically investigates more than 50 cyber incidents annually, Smith said. Last year, New York's disaster preparedness statute was also amended to include "cyber events" as grounds for declaring a state of disaster emergency, Smith said.

The workload, however, is a fraction of what the private sector manages because it controls a larger percentage of cyber networks.

In announcing the Rhode Island Cyber Disruption Team, Maj. Alan J. White, who is Dell SecureWorks's director of security and risk consulting and leader of the Rhode Island Army National Guard's Computer Emergency Response Team, said the company processes about 15 billion cyber security events daily to protect its customers.

"It's usually the government that wants something done about these attacks but the infrastructure is usually owned by the private enterprise," said Shari L. Pfleeger, director of research at the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection at Dartmouth College. "You can't only do government. They are so intertwined. They are so interconnected. There needs to be a more comprehensive approach."

Yacov Y. Haimes, director of the Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems at the University of Virginia, said because private and public cyber networks are so closely linked he supports federal legislation that proposes to create a gold standard for cyber defense that can be applied to privately-run networks.

The bill, crafted by U.S. Sens. Joe Lieberman I-Conn., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Tom Carper, D-Del., would create a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications with authority to direct federal efforts to secure the cyber networks of government and the private sector.

One provision of the legislation would offer liability protection to network owners and operators of crucial infrastructure like electric grids and power plants who stick to security plans with a government seal of approval.

"The private sector is not ready to invest in the proper security because it's coming from the bottom line," Haimes said.

J. David Smith, former executive director of the RI Emergency Management Agency, said cooperation from the private sector is crucial not just to improve security on public networks, but to find more funding streams. The Rhode Island effort has financial support from the state police and emergency management officials, but no money has been set aside explicitly for the Cyber Disruption Team.

The scope of the task ahead is also daunting. New York is asking agencies to identify where sensitive information and data are stored, such as smart phones, laptops and computers, Smith said. He described the effort as a priority because it's impossible to protect data until establishing where it's stored. But the state has not imposed a deadline for agencies to report back because tight budgets have depleted manpower so dramatically.

Meanwhile cyber intruders are stepping up their game.

"We're seeing increasing sophistication in the way that hackers debilitate systems," Kaiser said. "There's still a lot of work to do."

New cybersecurity plan pushes private-sector role
By Bob Spoerl of Medill News Service
July 14, 2011, 5:01 p.m. EDT

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Land, air, sea, space — now cyberspace. The Department of Defense Thursday released its first-ever “Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace,” and private companies are being called to service.

“Everybody is on the frontline,” Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III said at an official announcement detailing the new cybersecurity plan at the National Defense University.

The strategy, called the first unified plan incorporating DOD’s military, intelligence and business operations, lays out five pillars for defending against cyber attacks. Several of those pillars specifically address civilian help. Defense contractors and Internet service providers are expected to play an integral role in cyber defense.

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the strategy a way “to build a layering for defense strategy awareness.”

As part of the strategy, the Pentagon created a 90-day pilot program involving AT&T (NYSE:T)  , Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ)   and Century Link (NYSE:CTL)  , the Internet service providers to a handful of defense contractors. They are given access to classified defense information to help protect against attacks by cyber hackers. After the program ends this summer, the Defense Department would like to expand its civilian cyber security base to allow dozens of companies to participate.

The pilot comes a few months after a March 24 cyber attack against defense contractor company Lockheed Martin Corp. (NYSE:LMT)  Some 24,000 of that company’s files, ones that contained military secrets, were hacked into. The Defense Department won’t say who or what group was responsible.

The Center for Democracy & Technology, a surveillance security watchdog, is optimistic that the information shared with defense-related companies will lead to more thorough Internet security.

“It breaks a logjam that has been in place and that could have led to Department of Defense monitoring networks itself,” center lawyer Greg Nojeim said.

As a result of the Defense Department pilot program, Internet providers now have access to classified signatures, which would better defend networks, Nojeim said. The only concern is how the private companies will share information with the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

“The flow back to the government hasn’t been described,” Nojeim said. “You want to avoid a back-door wiretap.”

Cyber exploitation in the form of fraud and intellectual property theft has cost the nation some $1 trillion, according to the Defense Department.

“Blunting our edge in military technology and enabling foreign competitors to copy the fruits of our commercial innovation has a deeply corrosive effect over the long-term,” Lynn said.

Thursday’s cybersecurity announcement may spur defense technology innovation. The Defense Department announced it would commit $500 million to research. However, it doesn’t know how Defense will fund long-term cybersecurity initiatives, especially the part of the plan that mixes private and public safety concerns.

“The legal policy framework as well as the business model here are challenges,” Lynn said.
20 October 2010 Last updated at 08:12 ET I-BBC
US inquiry into China rare earth shipments
Mini magnets made from chemically processed rare earths are shown in Beijing

US trade officials say they are looking into a New York Times report that China is blocking shipments of rare earths to the US and Europe.  China mines 97% of the specialist metals crucial to green technology. 
The report, citing anonymous industry sources, said Chinese customs officials had broadened export restrictions.  Meanwhile China's commerce ministry has denied a report by the official China Daily that it will cut quotas by 30% next year to stop overmining.

"The report is completely false," the ministry said in a statement.

"China will continue to supply rare earths to the world, and at the same time, to protect usable resources and sustainable development, China will also continue to impose restrictive measures on exploration, production and import and export of rare earths."

Threat to economy

The US Geological Survey recognises 17 different rare earths.  They are used in everything from catalytic converters in cars to computer monitors, TVs and in pharmaceuticals.  Analysts say without these elements, much of the modern economy would shut down.  China accounts for about 97% of global rare-earth production. The BBC's Paul Mason says the rare earth story goes to the heart of China's relationship with the West.

The US, which is also a major buyer of rare earths, mined no rare earth elements last year.  US trade officials say they are now checking the New York Times report that China is blocking shipments to the US and Europe, following reports of a similar move against Japan.  The newspaper cited unnamed Chinese rare earths officials as saying that "the embargo is expanding".

Nefeterius McPherson of the US Trade Representative's office said: "We're seeking more information in keeping with our recent announcement of an investigation into whether China's actions and policies are consistent with WTO rules."

Washington is investigating whether China is violating international trade rules by subsidising its clean energy industries.  EU trade spokesman John Clancy told the BBC that he was unable to confirm claims made by European industry officials in media reports of China blocking shipments to the EU.

"Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stressed at the recent EU-China Business Summit that China did not intend to take such action or close its market," Mr Clancy said in a statement.

He said rare earths were a key element of European industrial policy, and that the situation was being monitored closely.  Japan accused China of halting rare earth shipments last month amid a diplomatic row over Japan's detention of a Chinese fishing boat captain whose trawler collided with two Japanese patrol boats.
US studying Australian Internet security program
YAHOO
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
Sat Oct 16, 2010 1:51 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The government is reviewing an Australian program that will allow Internet service providers to alert customers if their computers are taken over by hackers and could limit online access if people don't fix the problem.  Obama administration officials have met with industry leaders and experts to find ways to increase online safety while trying to balance securing the Internet and guarding people's privacy and civil liberties.

Experts and U.S. officials are interested in portions of the plan, set to go into effect in Australia in December. But any move toward Internet regulation or monitoring by the U.S. government or industry could trigger fierce opposition from the public.  The discussions come as private, corporate and government computers across the U.S. are increasingly being taken over and exploited by hackers and other computer criminals.

White House cybercoordinator Howard Schmidt told The Associated Press that the U.S. is looking at a number of voluntary ways to help the public and small businesses better protect themselves online.

Possibilities include provisions in the Australia plan that enable customers to get warnings from their Internet providers if their computer gets taken over by hackers through a botnet.  A botnet is a network of infected computers that can number in the thousands and that network is usually controlled by hackers through a small number of scattered PCs. Computer owners are often unaware that their machine is linked to a botnet and is being used to shut down targeted websites, distribute malicious code or spread spam.

If a company is willing to give its customers better online security, the American public will go along with that, Schmidt said.

"Without security you have no privacy. And many of us that care deeply about our privacy look to make sure our systems are secure," Schmidt said in an interview. Internet service providers, he added, can help "make sure our systems are cleaned up if they're infected and keep them clean."

But officials are stopping short of advocating an option in the Australian plan that allows Internet providers to wall off or limit online usage by customers who fail to clean their infected computers, saying this would be technically difficult and likely run into opposition.

"In my view, the United States is probably going to be well behind other nations in stepping into a lot of these new areas," said Prescott Winter, former chief technology officer for the National Security Agency, who is now at the California-based cybersecurity firm, ArcSight.

In the U.S., he said, the Internet is viewed as a technological wild west that should remain unfenced and unfettered. But he said this open range isn't secure, so "we need to take steps to make it safe, reliable and resilient."

"I think that, quite frankly, there will be other governments who will finally say, at least for their parts of the Internet, as the Australians have apparently done, we think we can do better."

Cybersecurity expert James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Internet providers are nervous about any increase in regulations, and they worry about consumer reaction to monitoring or other security controls.  Online customers, he said, may not want their service provider to cut off their Internet access if their computer is infected. And they may balk at being forced to keep their computers free of botnets or infections.

But they may be amenable to having their Internet provider warn them of cyberattacks and help them clear the malicious software off their computers by providing instructions, patches or anti-virus programs.  They may even be willing to pay a small price each month for the service — much like telephone customers used to pay a minimal monthly charge to cover repairs.

Lewis, who has been studying the issue for CSIS, said it is inevitable that one day carriers will play a role in defending online customers from computer attack.  Comcast Corp. is expanding a Denver pilot program that alerts customers whose computers are controlled through a botnet. The carrier provides free antivirus software and other assistance to clean the malware off the machine, said Cathy Avgiris, senior vice president at Comcast.

The program does not require customers to fix their computers or limit the online usage of people who refuse to do the repairs.

Avgiris said that the program will roll out across the country over the next three months. "We don't want to panic customers. We want to make sure they are comfortable. Beyond that, I hope that we pave the way for others to take these steps."

Voluntary programs will not be enough, said Dale Meyerrose, vice president and general manager of Cyber Integrated Solutions at Harris Corporation.

"There are people starting to make the point that we've gone about as far as we can with voluntary kinds of things, we need to have things that have more teeth in them, like standards," said Meyerrose.

For example, he said, coffee shops or airports might limit their wireless services to laptops equipped with certain protective technology. Internet providers might qualify for specific tax benefits if they put programs in place, he said.  Unfortunately, he said, it may take a serious attack before the government or industry impose such standards and programs.

In Australia, Internet providers will be able to take a range of actions to limit the damage from infected computers, from issuing warnings to restricting outbound e-mail. They could also temporarily quarantine compromised machines while providing customers with links to help fix the problem.

Attacking the edges of secure Internet traffic
YAHOO
By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer
Fri Jul 30, 12:51 am ET

LAS VEGAS – Researchers have uncovered new ways that criminals can spy on Internet users even if they're using secure connections to banks, online retailers or other sensitive Web sites.

The attacks demonstrated at the Black Hat conference here show how determined hackers can sniff around the edges of encrypted Internet traffic to pick up clues about what their targets are up to.

It's like tapping a telephone conversation and hearing muffled voices that hint at the tone of the conversation.

The problem lies in the way Web browsers handle Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, encryption technology, according to Robert Hansen and Josh Sokol, who spoke to a packed room of several hundred security experts.

Encryption forms a kind of tunnel between a browser and a website's servers. It scrambles data so it's indecipherable to prying eyes.

SSL is widely used on sites trafficking in sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, and its presence is shown as a padlock in the browser's address bar.

SSL is a widely attacked technology, but the approach by Hansen and Sokol wasn't to break it. They wanted to see instead what they could learn from what are essentially the breadcrumbs from people's secure Internet surfing that browsers leave behind and that skilled hackers can follow.

Their attacks would yield all sorts of information. It could be relatively minor, such as browser settings or the number of Web pages visited. It could be quite substantial, including whether someone is vulnerable to having the "cookies" that store usernames and passwords misappropriated by hackers to log into secure sites.

Hansen said all major browsers are affected by at least some of the issues.

"This points to a larger problem — we need to reconsider how we do electronic commerce," he said in an interview before the conference, an annual gathering devoted to exposing the latest computer-security vulnerabilities.

For the average Internet user, the research reinforces the importance of being careful on public Wi-Fi networks, where an attacker could plant himself in a position to look at your traffic. For the attacks to work, the attacker must first have access to the victim's network.

Hansen and Sokol outlined two dozen problems they found. They acknowledged attacks using those weaknesses would be hard to pull off.

The vulnerabilities arise out of the fact people can surf the Internet with multiple tabs open in their browsers at the same time, and that unsecured traffic in one tab can affect secure traffic in another tab, said Hansen, chief executive of consulting firm SecTheory. Sokol is a security manager at National Instruments Corp.

Their talk isn't the first time researchers have looked at ways to scour secure Internet traffic for clues about what's happening behind the curtain of encryption. It does expand on existing research in key ways, though.

"Nobody's getting hacked with this tomorrow, but it's innovative research," said Jon Miller, an SSL expert who wasn't involved in the research.

Miller, director of Accuvant Labs, praised Hansen and Sokol for taking a different approach to attacking SSL.

"Everybody's knocking on the front door, and this is, 'let's take a look at the windows,'" he said. "I never would have thought about doing something like this in a million years. I would have thought it would be a waste of time. It's neat because it's a little different."

Another popular talk at Black Hat concerned a new attack affecting potentially millions of home routers. The attack could be used to launch the kinds of attacks described by Hansen and Sokol.

Researcher Craig Heffner examined 30 different types of home routers from companies including Actiontec Electronics Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.'s Linksys and found that more than half of them were vulnerable to his attack.

He tricked Web browsers that use those routers into letting him access administrative menus that only the routers' owners should be able to see. Heffner said the vulnerability is in the browsers and illustrates a larger security problem involving how browsers determine that the sites they visit are trustworthy.

The caveat is he has to first trick someone into visiting a malicious site, and it helps if the victim hasn't changed the router's default password.

Still: "Once you're on the router, you're invisible — you can do all kinds of things," such as controlling where the victim goes on the Internet, Heffner said.
US unveils plan to make online transactions safer
YAHOO
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
26 June 2010

WASHINGTON – In the murky world of the Internet, how do you ever really know who you're talking to, who you're buying from or if your bank can actually tell it's you when you log in to pay a bill?

Amid growing instances of identity theft, bank account breaches and sophisticated Internet scams, the government is looking for ways to make those transactions in cyberspace more secure.  But officials must tread carefully, as efforts to create identity cards, personal certificates or other systems of identifiers raise privacy worries and fears of Big Brother tracking its citizens online.  In a draft plan released Friday, the White House laid out an argument for a yet-undeveloped, voluntary identification system and set up a website to gather input from experts and everyday Internet users on how it should be structured.

The website was already getting votes, snipes and suggestions Friday afternoon — underscoring the incendiary nature of any discussion of Internet regulation or formal structure.

"The technology that has brought many benefits to our society and has empowered us to do so much has also empowered those who are driven to cause harm," said White House cyber coordinator Howard Schmidt in a blog posting Friday outlining the need for better security online.

The plan, he said, envisions a future in which people would be able to get a secure identifier — such as a smart identity card or a digital certificate — from a variety of service providers. Customers could then use the card or identifier to prove who they are as they make their online transactions.

"Digital authentication has been the holy grail of Internet security policy since the early '90s," said James Lewis, cyber security expert and senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. This latest effort, he said, has a better chance of succeeding than previous tries, "but we need to see how much opposition it runs into and whether people will actually use it even if it gets deployed."

Ari Schwartz, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the unfettered openness of the Internet is what allowed it to grow and prosper but also created security gaps that need to be addressed. But any move to improve identity systems raises many concerns.

"The whole thing is very difficult to do and privacy is one of the more difficult pieces of it," said Schwartz, adding that the system has to balance efforts to maintain privacy while still finding out enough about someone to ensure his identity.

The government, he said, is correct to try to plan ways to move toward better security, rather than letting it just happen with no coordination.

But cyber security experts also argued that the technologies for creating such identifiers already exist and are already used in different ways by businesses, particularly banks.

"The vision they put forth is already realized and commercially available," said Roger Thornton, a cyber security expert and chief technology officer for California-based Fortify Software.

He noted that banks already use sophisticated fingerprinting processes to identify a customer who signs in. The system knows if a customer is using a different computer and will often require additional identification if that computer has not been used for the banking website before.

But many companies don't bother with the more expensive or complex identification systems.

So, said Thornton, "the opportunity is there to make things more interoperable and more uniform."

The draft plan is part of an administration effort to promote cyber security both within the government and among society as a whole. Lawmakers have introduced a number of bills aimed at furthering those goals, and the White House plan was met with initial support from one of the authors of Senate computer security legislation.

The White House Blog:  The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
Posted by Howard A. Schmidt on June 25, 2010 at 02:00 PM EDT

Cyberspace has become an indispensible component of everyday life for all Americans.  We have all witnessed how the application and use of this technology has increased exponentially over the years. Cyberspace includes the networks in our homes, businesses, schools, and our Nation’s critical infrastructure.  It is where we exchange information, buy and sell products and services, and enable many other types of transactions across a wide range of sectors. But not all components of this technology have kept up with the pace of growth.  Privacy and security require greater emphasis moving forward; and because of this, the technology that has brought many benefits to our society and has empowered us to do so much -- has also empowered those who are driven to cause harm. 

Today, I am pleased to announce the latest step in moving our Nation forward in securing our cyberspace with the release of the draft National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).  This first draft of NSTIC was developed in collaboration with key government agencies, business leaders and privacy advocates. What has emerged is a blueprint to reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve online privacy protections through the use of trusted digital identities.

The NSTIC, which is in response to one of the near term action items in the President’s Cyberspace Policy Review, calls for the creation of an online environment, or an Identity Ecosystem as we refer to it in the strategy, where individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on. For example, no longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services. Through the strategy we seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) from a variety of service providers – both public and private – to authenticate themselves online for different types of transactions (e.g., online banking, accessing electronic health records, sending email, etc.). Another key concept in the strategy is that the Identity Ecosystem is user-centric – that means you, as a user, will be able to have more control of the private information you use to authenticate yourself on-line, and generally will not have to reveal more than is necessary to do so.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a key partner in the development of the strategy, has posted the draft NSTIC at www.nstic.ideascale.com. Over the next three weeks (through July 19th), DHS will be collecting comments from any interested members of the general public on the strategy. I encourage you to go to this website, submit an idea for the strategy, comment on someone else’s idea, or vote on an idea. Your input is valuable to the ultimate success of this document. The NSTIC will be finalized later this fall.

Thank you for your input!

Howard A. Schmidt is the Cybersecurity Coordinator and Special Assistant to the President

White House sees no cyber attack on Wall Street
YAHOO
By DANIEL WAGNER, AP Business Writer
Sun May 9, 2010 (?) 12:45 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The White House's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser says there is no evidence that a cyber attack was behind the chaos that shook Wall Street last Thursday.

John Brennan told "Fox News Sunday" that officials have uncovered no links suggesting that cyber attacks caused turbulence that sent the Dow Jones industrials plunging almost 1,000 points before staging a partial recovery at the end of the day.

The market already was weak because of the spreading European debt crisis. Some have speculated that a typographical error might have triggered the massive computerized sell-off.

Regulators and market officials are scouring millions of trades to understand what caused the volatility. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are relying on self-regulatory offices at the New York Stock Exchange and elsewhere to help them identify questionable trades.

In a joint statement Friday, the SEC and CFTC identified one possible cause for Thursday's plunge: Conflicting trading rules for different markets.

Markets generally write and enforce their own varying rules, under the oversight of the SEC and CFTC.

The SEC will meet Monday with representatives from major exchanges, according to Joe Ratterman, CEO of BATS Global Markets, one of the largest U.S. trading networks. Ratterman said Friday that SEC officials called him at his Kansas City, Mo., office late Thursday and again on Friday seeking information on the unusual trading. BATS had to cancel 540 trades.

New York Stock Exchange Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer told CNBC on Friday that his exchange canceled 4,000 trades. Nasdaq declined to give a number. Direct Edge, the third-largest U.S. exchange, reviewed some of the 10 million trades made Thursday and found 2,000 that had to be canceled.

Nasdaq OMX Group and NYSE Euronext in a joint statement Sunday said they are committed to working closely with each other, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators to determine the cause of Thursday's market plunge and develop effective ways to make the markets more stable.

Obama to Name Chief of Cybersecurity
NYTIMES
By JOHN MARKOFF
December 22, 2009

Nearly seven months after highlighting the vulnerability of banking, energy and communications systems to Internet attacks, the White House on Tuesday is expected to name a technology industry veteran to coordinate competing efforts to improve the nation’s cybersecurity in both military and civilian life.

The decision to appoint Howard A. Schmidt, an industry executive with government experience who served as a cybersecurity adviser in the Bush administration and who also has a military and law enforcement background, is seen as a compromise between factions. Government officials and industry executives say there has been a behind-the-scenes dispute over whether strict new regulations are necessary to protect the network that increasingly weaves together the vast majority of the world’s computers.

Mr. Schmidt will report to the National Security Council — not both to the council and to the National Economic Council, as previously planned, an administration official said on Monday. Mr. Schmidt will also “have regular access to the president,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to talk publicly about the appointment.

Cybersecurity has taken on new urgency this year in the face of a growing range of cyberattacks and reports of vulnerabilities in business and military computing systems. Indeed, at the May 29 announcement of his administration’s decision to create the position of cybersecurity coordinator, Mr. Obama described how during his presidential campaign computer intruders had “gained access to e-mails and a range of campaign files, from policy position papers to travel plans.”

“It was,” he said, “a powerful reminder: in this information age, one of your greatest strengths — in our case, our ability to communicate to a wide range of supporters through the Internet — could also be one of your greatest vulnerabilities.”

After reviewing the nation’s cybersecurity preparedness, the White House said it would create the position of cybersecurity coordinator to harmonize the nation’s various efforts to “deter, prevent, detect and defend” against cyberattacks.

The administration’s decision to appoint Mr. Schmidt was slowed by a tug of war among political, military, intelligence and business interests, said people with direct knowledge of the selection process. Industry officials, for example, have expressed concern that new regulations would dampen innovation.

In recent months the administration has been criticized by lawmakers and others for not moving more quickly to fill the position. Experts on the issue had questioned how effective a cybercoordinator could be if forced to report to two governmental councils without direct access to the president.

“I’ve come away with a strong sense that Vivek Kundra, chief information officer, and Aneesh Chopra, the chief technology officer, and participants at the N.S.C. are aligned on this effort,” said Vinton Cerf, a co-author of the original Internet standards who has been consulted by the administration in choosing a “cyberczar.”

The White House official also said that criticisms that the administration had been frozen on cybersecurity policies while waiting for the appointment of a cybersecurity chief were inaccurate, citing a range of initiatives now under way at various agencies to improve cybersecurity. In November the White House met with a Russian delegation of cybersecurity officials in an effort to build cooperation on international law enforcement issues.

One significant difference in the Obama administration’s approach to cybersecurity and that of the previous administration has been the degree of secrecy about strategy and policy issues. In the Bush administration, cybersecurity decisions were made in a highly classified fashion. What remains unclear, however, is how the new administration will balance cybersecurity decisions between military and civilian organizations.

In May the administration’s cybersecurity review was not specific about transforming the administration’s goals into practical realities. At the time Mr. Obama did not explain how he planned to go about resolving the running turf wars among the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies over the conduct of defensive and offensive cyberoperations.

Mr. Schmidt is the chief executive officer of the Information Security Forum, a nonprofit computer security trade association based in London. He has served as chief information security officer at eBay and chief security officer at Microsoft. In the Bush administration, he was the vice chairman of the president’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and a special adviser for cyberspace security.

He also served in the Air Force and the Army in computer security roles and led a computer forensics team for the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the National Drug Intelligence Center.

----------------------


Schmidt talked here (not in the story below).

ISF Panelists Spar Over Security vs. Anonymity
By Renay San Miguel
TechNewsWorld
Part of the ECT News Network
11/03/09 11:08 AM PT

Can the Web's big-time masters of malware really be tracked down? How risky is cloud computing to network security? And what challenges await the Obama administration's plans to lock down the nation's electronic infrastructure -- while at the same time creating a "smart grid?"

Left to right: Howard Schmidt, Mary Ann Davidson, Greg Garcia, Bruce Schneier and Alexander Seger

An experienced panel of computer security experts representing industry, governments and law enforcement batted around possible answers to those questions Monday during a "guru fireside" session that was a highlight of the Information Security Forum's 20th World Congress. Some 500 ISF members are in Vancouver, British Columbia, this week for keynote speeches and sessions focusing on the latest trends in information security.

The "guru" panel included Mary Ann Davidson, chief security officer for Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL); Bruce Schneier, an oft-quoted cryptologist and author; Greg Garcia of Garcia Strategies, who was the first U.S. Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications under former Pres. George W. Bush; and Alexander Seger, head of the economic crime division of the 47-member Council of Europe. ISF president/CEO Howard A. Schmidt, a former Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) security executive and the nation's first cybersecurity czar immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, hosted the panel.

Schneier, chief technology officer for BT Counterpane Security, is known to speak his mind regarding issues of privacy, government regulation of networks and law enforcement techniques. He's written extensively on those subjects for The New York Times, the Guardian, Forbes and Wired. So it probably came as no surprise to the other panelists, and the audience, when he challenged Seger's contention that law enforcement officials need legislation and regulatory weapons to help them track down large-scale hackers and identity thieves.

"I'm sorry, but you're not going to be able to track attacks," Schneier said. "I would like it to be different, but you can't do it."

"You can, Bruce, but it's very hard to do," interjected Garcia.

"You cannot take a [data] bit and backtrack it to where it came from," Schneier maintained. "You don't know who's in front of the keyboard sending it out there. You cannot do it, a bit does not have location specificity. It's a bit. It's not that you can't have identification. Banks work great, corporate networks work great. But you cannot make a system that doesn't have anonymity."

Web Anonymity, 'Smart Grid' Risks

All the panelists were asked to give their take on present trends in cybersecurity and technology overall, and Schneier's emphasis on anonymity with Garcia and Seger was a continuation of his thesis that anonymity is not inherently bad, but trying to punish anonymity in the search for Web safety is dangerous. "You make it harder for the naive or the innocent to do things, and no harder for criminals or the determined," he said. "That isn't to say you can't have identity. You can build a network with different degrees of working well -- bank accounts, Facebook accounts, you can have different levels of identity, but you're not making anonymity go away."

Closed platforms, Schneier added, will be the rule -- which opens up a world of focusing on services rather than devices -- and the government would have more clout if it cleaned up its own networks and used its buying power to demand better products from vendors. "If big government comes out with a contract for a secure laptop or a firewall or database or OS, and has a list of security requirements, then the contract will be big enough that vendors will need to meet those requirements and produce more secure products."

Moving health and medical records online concern both Schneier and Davidson, and Davidson added that "smart grid" plans are another potential risk. "Figure out what problem you're trying to solve before you throw technology at it," she said. "Now we want to put everybody's house on the grid without thinking about the neighborhood kid knocking you off the grid, or being subject to attacks. I don't think people understand the risk they're exposing us to by doing that. "

Medical records online could also pose threats by hackers changing those records or using them to blackmail the innocent.

"Not that I think we should stop all progress, but my concerns are that we are coming up the awareness curve to some degree that this is infrastructure that needs to be both defensive and self-defending, which is a different construct than what we have now," Davidson said.

Cybersecurity Is Not a Red/Blue Issue

The good news in Washington, D.C., is that cybersecurity does not appear to be a partisan political issue, Garcia said. The Obama administration has basically affirmed the strategy Download Free eBook - The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales that he and others in the Bush administration had worked on to place network/infrastructure protection on a higher level of priority. "Now it is incumbent upon this administration take that strategy, which is on pretty firm conceptual footing, and now turn it into something that is operational, executable and well-organized," Garcia said. "That's what's lacking now. We were not well organized in the Bush administration because we had too much mission creep from other organizations involved," including various aspects of the military, the intelligence community and the State Department.

Whoever ends up with the job of White House-level cybersecurity adviser -- promised by President Obama -- will need to lay out the roles and responsibilities for those agencies with a stake in network protection.

The picture is cloudier regarding the enterprise, Garcia said. Hackers and cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated in their use of technology, and some companies still aren't taking network security seriously. "They are doing risk assessments and saying they'll consider a cyberattack as a cost of doing business. I think that's potentially dangerous thinking," he said.

Also potentially dangerous: relying on cloud computing for protecting personal and corporate data without first asking a lot of questions regarding security, Davidson said. "It's not about whether somebody does a service for you, that's a business decision. But when something is important to you and you hand it off, you still need to answer basic questions -- 'where is my data? who has access to it?' And if you cannot answer those questions, this whole idea of the cloud, 'just trust us,' is silly."


---------------------



FROM THE INTERNET:  Cyber Conference Focuses on Protecting Company Assets

The practice of surfing the Web from your work terminal may come to an end, according to cyber security expert Howard A. Schmidt.

Schmidt, the former head of online security for Microsoft and eBay, explained that many companies are mistakenly confident about the security of their computer networks and the proprietary information they hold.

"Firewalls and anti-virus packages are great first steps, but we’re finding tremendous vulnerabilities in software and firmware," he said in a keynote speech on Jan. 7 at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham. "Instead of enjoying the benefit of a new piece of software, we have to install it and then watch it."

To stem the tide of hackers and other cyber criminals who want to commit economic espionage, Schmidt suggested that industries foster closer relationships with the federal government.

"Workplaces are designed to be open environments, and the general consensus is that when the government gets involved it will make things more difficult," he said. "But that’s not the case."

Schmidt said that the government can help protect the assets of corporations by crafting cyber crime laws and working with other nations to standardize those laws around the globe, as well as using law enforcement officers to track cyber criminals across national borders.

Corporations also must take more responsibility for their own online security, he said, which may lead to the restriction or outright end of personal Web surfing at work. The practice has been tolerated, if not outright encouraged, by companies thus far.

"We’re starting to see the security implications of allowing someone unfettered access to the Web from within the network," he said, "and we’re beginning to hear complaints, like, 'You took away my outlet for watching baseball games while I work.' But like government systems, it’s difficult to allow that access and still maintain the level of security that’s necessary.'

Schmidt, the current president of the Information Security Forum, was chairman of cyberspace security for the White House and chief security strategist in the Department of Homeland Security...

Fordham University, NYC
1/09

------------------------
FROM THE INTERNET:  Did the Weston Police officers study with him at U. N.H.?
Western International University Graduation 2007- Sean's (r.) video

Commencement speaker (l.), 2007, Western International University, and the following information comes from the video taken by Sean's family of that graduation ceremony.  Schmidt addresses, live, the graduates about how he got his college degree in his 30's and his master's in his 40's from the University of Phoenix.  The e-graduation speakers, via the Internet, were, among others, Senator John McCain, Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona.

Howard A. Schmidt CISSP, CISM
President & CEO R & H Security Consulting LLC
Former Chair of President Bush’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and
Special Adviser for Cyberspace Security for the White House

Howard A. Schmidt has had a long distinguished career in defense, law enforcement and corporate security spanning almost 40 years. He has served as Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Security Strategist for online auction giant eBay. He most recently served in the position of Chief Security Strategist for the US CERT Partners Program for the National Cyber Security Division, Department of Homeland Security.

He retired from the White House after 31 years of public service in local and federal government. He was appointed by President Bush as the Vice Chair of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and as the Special Adviser for Cyberspace Security for the White House in December 2001. He assumed the role as the Chair in January 2003 until his retirement in May 2003.

Prior to the White House, Howard was chief security officer for Microsoft Corp., where his duties included CISO, CSO and forming and directing the Trustworthy Computing Security Strategies Group.

Before Microsoft, Mr. Schmidt was a supervisory special agent and director of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) Computer Forensic Lab and Computer Crime and Information Warfare Division. While there, he established the first dedicated computer forensic lab in the government.

Before AFOSI, Mr. Schmidt was with the FBI at the National Drug Intelligence Center, where he headed the Computer Exploitation Team. He is recognized as one of the pioneers in the field of computer forensics and computer evidence collection. Before working at the FBI, Mr. Schmidt was a city police officer from 1983 to 1994 for the Chandler Police Department in Arizona.

Mr. Schmidt served with the U.S. Air Force in various roles from 1967 to 1983, both in active duty and in the civil service. He had served in the Arizona Air National Guard from 1989 until 1998 when he transferred to the U.S. Army Reserves as a Special Agent, Criminal Investigation Division where he continues to serve. He has testified as an expert witness in federal and military courts in the areas of computer crime, computer forensics and Internet crime.

Mr. Schmidt had also served as the international president of the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and the first president of the Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center (IT-ISAC). He is a former executive board member of the International Organization of Computer Evidence, and served as the co-chairman of the Federal Computer Investigations Committee. He is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists. He serves as an advisory board member for the Technical Research Institute of the National White Collar Crime Center, and was a distinguished special lecturer at the University of New Haven, Conn., teaching a graduate certificate course in forensic computing.

He served as an augmented member to the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology in the formation of an Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection. He has testified before congressional committees on computer security and cyber crime, and has been instrumental in the creation of public and private partnerships and information-sharing initiatives. He is regularly featured on CNN, CNBC, Fox TV as well as a number of local media outlets talking about cyber-security. He is a co-author of the Black Book on Corporate Security.

Mr. Schmidt has been appointed to the Information Security Privacy Advisory Board (ISPAB) to advise the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Secretary of Commerce and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget on information security and privacy issues pertaining to Federal Government information systems, including thorough review of proposed standards and guidelines developed by NIST.

Howard holds board positions on a number of corporate boards in both an advisory and director positions and recently has assumed the role as Chairman of the Board for Electronics Lifestyle Integration (ELI).

Mr. Schmidt holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration (BSBA) and a master’s degree in organizational management (MAOM) from the University of Phoenix. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate degree in Humane Letters. Howard is an Adjunct Professor at GA Tech with the GTISC.

2006
US cyber-security tsar steps down
I-BBC
Page last updated at 09:24 GMT, Tuesday, 4 August 2009 10:24 UK

The White House's acting cyber-security tsar has resigned from her post, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Melissa Hathaway told the paper she was leaving for "personal reasons" and would return to the private sector.

The former strategist was appointed as acting national cyber-adviser in February and was expected to be offered the post of full time.

President Barack Obama has said that cyber-security is a high priority for his administration.

In May, the President announced plans for securing American computer networks against cyber attacks.

In recent years, US government and military bodies have reported attempts to infiltrate systems by hackers.

He announced the creation of a cyber-security office in the White House, and said he would personally appoint a "cyber-tsar".

Ms Hathaway was widely regarded as the person to fill that post after taking on the role as acting senior director for cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils in February.

In April she completed a review of cyber-security for the Obama administration.

At the time, Ms Hathaway said the job ahead was "a marathon, not a sprint."

Her successor has not yet been named by the White House.


Melissa Hathaway tackles cybersecurity Mission Impossible
The Last Watchdog
Posted on | April 25, 2009

There was no way Melissa Hathaway was going to steal Pres. Obama’s thunder at the RSA Conference on security in San Francisco last week. Expectations ran high that Hathaway would divulge details from the exhaustive 60-day review of cybersecurity policy she just recently delivered to senior White House officials.

But her report remains under review by Obama. Hathaway, nonetheless, gamely took to the stage Wednesday afternoon, April 22, in front of several thousand tech industry executives, software engineers, computer scientists, analysts and reporters at the RSA Conference on security. The audience arrived early to jockey for good seats. Compensating, somewhat, for the meager steak she would deliver, Hathaway opened with some Hollywood sizzle.

As Hathaway arrived at the podium, the theme from Mission Impossible blared over the over PA.
Dum; dum, dum, dum. Dum; dum, dum, dum . . .

Hathaway stepped back and looked up at the giant video screens. Images appeared correlating to instructions from a disembodied voice:

Good afternoon Melissa Hathaway. The digital infrastructure shown here supports critical public services and is vital to the global economy . . . Criminals, terrorists and foreign adversaries have devised plans to use flaws in the infrastructure to hold the economy hostage, disrupt our government and threaten public safety. Your mission, Melissa, should you decide to accept it, is to assemble a team of experts, engage every possible stakeholder group and devise a strategy to work together for the common good . . . Please begin immediately. This Blackberry will self destruct in 60 days. Good luck.

Beginning of the beginning

melissahathaway_cropAfter joking about which of her three Blackberries might blow up, Hathaway for the next 30 minutes stood stiff behind the podium, reading word-for-word from her prepared statement, which you can see here. She did call for  “a White House organizational structure that can effectively address cyberspace-related issues, ” and noted that her recommendations to the president include  “an action plan,” derived from 40 meetings with “stakeholder groups” and a review of more than 100 reports.

“When the report is made public you will see that there is a lot of work for us to do together and an ambitious action plan to accomplish our goals,” she said. “Sixty days’ work is just the beginning of the beginning.”

She concluded by issuing a rallying cry for a “holistic approach” to stemming rising cyber threats. “We need to sow the seeds for a national dialogue, nurture them, even see them in our dreams, to help this critical conversation grow,” she said.

Hathaway, who is 40, has two sons, 8 and 9. She took no questions from the audience.

As the crowd filed out of the massive main auditorium at Moscone Convention Center, I definitely heard some grumbling about lack of substance in her speech. But protocals  tied Hathaway’s hands. I spoke to three Hathaway admirers who’ve actually worked with her. One was Rod Beckstrom, who resigned last month as a top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security. Beckstrom credited Hathaway for delivering a “very professional speech,” noting that he was encouraged by the “values of collaboration that were espoused, particularly working with international partners, which I think is critical.”

Beckstrom, who resigned in protest to being marginalized by the National Security Agency, received a small measure of vindication when NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander said in an earlier RSA keynote that the NSA does not want to run cybersecurity for the U.S. government.

“It was nice to see the messaging changing,” say Beckstrom.

Familiar themes

Another Hathaway fan: Dennis P. Gilbert, a principal from  Booz Allen Hamilton’s Herndon, Virg. offices. Hathaway spent 15 years at Booz Allen building her reputation as a management consultant with an uncanny knack for getting military and intelligence policy wonks to collaborate. Gilbert told me he first encountered Hathaway in 1999 when he was was an Air Force Lt. Col., and Hathaway was an up-and-coming consultant on information warfare.

Gilbert recalls Hathaway as “resilient and determined” — and a political agnostic. To this day, he says, he doesn’t know if she’s a Democrat or Republican. “We worked with combatant commanders, and all the joint forces commanders, and with a lot of the special agencies to come up with our recommendations. And basically all of them were implemented, and a lot of them turned into programs that are funded today, 10 years later,” says Gilbert.

The projects Gilbert and Hathaway tackled generally involved integrating massive amounts of data from multiple sources and turning the data into something useful. “One of the things we looked at was second and third order of effects, the notion that everything was connected through the Internet, and when you do something, everything is affected,” recalled Gilbert. “We looked at what the ripple effect would be across the DoD, across government, maybe even across the private sector.”

Sound familiar? “Ten years ago we found everything is integrated, beyond sometimes what we even understood,” says Gilbert . “We had to look at things holistically to solve the problem. You can see how those types of themes are in the problem set that we have today. Everything is interconnected. I definitely see the parallel.”

Yoda of cybersecurity

The skills Hathaway demonstrated in getting bull-headed  military brass and intelligence officials to play nice ultimately  got her called up to the big leagues of presidential politics. In March 2007, she was recruited to do the grunt work of marshaling support for President Bush’s then-top secret Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative. This required getting  big bureaucracies and the military branches to buy into Bush’s secretive $30 billion plan to keep foreign cyberspies from continuing to  clean out government databases.

Meanwhile, in the same time frame, but on a separate track, a bi-partisan collection of 60 tech industry executives, military officials and a handful of lawmakers formed a special commission to hammer out a consensus view of what U.S. cybersecurity policy should look like. The commission, convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), ultimately delivered this stack of recommendations, titled “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th President,” to Obama last December. The CSIS report has since been downloaded more than 35,000 times.

Hathaway became and something of  an ad hoc member of the CSIS commission; she debriefed the commissioners regularly about what  Bush was up to, and continued doing so as Obama’s  go-to cybersecurity expert.   CSIS commissioner, Tom Kellermann, has worked closely with Hathaway over the course of the past year and a half.

After hearing Hathaway’s Mission Impossible keynote at RSA, Kellermann,  Vice-President of Security Awareness at Core Security Techonologies, had this to say:  “I have utmost faith in her holistic vision and I have utmost faith in her leadership style.”

Kellerman says that the appointment of a cabinet-level cybersecurity adviser to lead the holistic charge, appears to still be on the table, despite Obama already having named a White House CTO and CSO.

What’s more, Kellermann believes the White House is giving Hathaway serious consideration  as a darkhorse candidate for the nation’s top cybersecurity job; she’s said to be vying against two, and possibly three, longtime Beltway power brokers. If it were up to Kellermann,  Hathaway would be the  slam dunk choice  for cybersecurity czar.
Melissa Hathaway Challenged by Cyber Security
Defensetech.org
Kevin Coleman
February 9, 2009

As part of President Obama’s cyber security plan, the White House is planning on announcing that Melissa Hathaway, the current top cyber security adviser, will oversee a 60-day review of federal cyber security efforts. Insiders have stated that after this assignment, she will likely be offered the position of cyber czar. Hathaway serves as the cyber coordination executive at the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and was senior adviser to former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. She is also as chair on the National Cyber Study Group, as well as a senior-level interagency body that played a lead role in the development of President Bush's Comprehensive National Cyber security Initiative.

Hathaway has her work cut out for her. Researchers recently concluded the average number of unique new infected sites grew from 100,000-200,000 a day to 200,000-300,000 a day and this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. In addition, the world recently witnessed the third cyber attack against a country (Kyrgyzstan). Many cyber security experts have stated that the threat of attack by traditional artillery and nuclear warfare has been replaced by cyber attacks aimed at Internet targets for gathering intelligence and disrupting communications. "We are in a new age of warfare," stated one cyber Intelligence analyst I talked with on the subject. She went on to say that "cyber attacks are likely to proceed any conventional attack or at least done in coordination with a conventional or nuclear attack."

Can the United States defend our networks against cyber-attack? That was just one of the many questions President Obama's pick for CIA Director Leon Panetta was asked in his confirmation hearings. It is clear Hathaway will have her hands full. The United States is by far the most reliant on computer technology and the internet, as such it faces so many challenges securing cyber space and defend and protect the country against cyber attacks. Hathaway is a firm believer that government and the private sector must join together to address this national security threat. She is well aware that threats to government systems stem from both technology and from the policies, practices and procedures that govern how people use that technology.

Cyberwar: U.S. Weighs Risks of Civilian Harm in Cyberwarfare
NYTIMES
By JOHN MARKOFF and THOM SHANKER
August 2, 2009

It would have been the most far-reaching case of computer sabotage in history. In 2003, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies made plans for a cyberattack to freeze billions of dollars in the bank accounts of Saddam Hussein and cripple his government’s financial system before the United States invaded Iraq. He would have no money for war supplies. No money to pay troops.

“We knew we could pull it off — we had the tools,” said one senior official who worked at the Pentagon when the highly classified plan was developed.

But the attack never got the green light. Bush administration officials worried that the effects would not be limited to Iraq but instead create worldwide financial havoc, spreading across the Middle East to Europe and perhaps to the United States.

Fears of such collateral damage are at the heart of the debate as the Obama administration and its Pentagon leadership struggle to develop rules and tactics for carrying out attacks in cyberspace.

While the Bush administration seriously studied computer-network attacks, the Obama administration is the first to elevate cybersecurity — both defending American computer networks and attacking those of adversaries — to the level of a White House director, whose appointment is expected in coming weeks.

But senior White House officials remain so concerned about the risks of unintended harm to civilians and damage to civilian infrastructure in an attack on computer networks that they decline any official comment on the topic. And senior Defense Department officials and military officers directly involved in planning for the Pentagon’s new “cyber command” acknowledge that the risk of collateral damage is one of their chief concerns.

“We are deeply concerned about the second- and third-order effects of certain types of computer network operations, as well as about laws of war that require attacks be proportional to the threat,” said one senior officer.

This officer, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the work, also acknowledged that these concerns had restrained the military from carrying out a number of proposed missions. “In some ways, we are self-deterred today because we really haven’t answered that yet in the world of cyber,” the officer said.

In interviews over recent weeks, a number of current and retired White House officials, Pentagon civilians and military officers disclosed details of classified missions — some only considered and some put into action — that illustrate why this issue is so difficult.

Although the digital attack on Iraq’s financial system was not carried out, the American military and its partners in the intelligence agencies did receive approval to degrade Iraq’s military and government communications systems in the early hours of the war in 2003. And that attack did produce collateral damage.

Besides blowing up cellphone towers and communications grids, the offensive included electronic jamming and digital attacks against Iraq’s telephone networks. American officials also contacted international communications companies that provided satellite phone and cellphone coverage to Iraq to alert them to possible jamming and ask their assistance in turning off certain channels.

Officials now acknowledge that the communications offensive temporarily disrupted telephone service in countries around Iraq that shared its cellphone and satellite telephone systems. That limited damage was deemed acceptable by the Bush administration.

Another such event took place in the late 1990s, according to a former military researcher. The American military attacked a Serbian telecommunications network and accidentally affected the Intelsat satellite communications system, whose service was hampered for several days.

These missions, which remain highly classified, are being scrutinized today as the Obama administration and the Pentagon move into new arenas of cyberoperations. Few details have been reported previously; mention of the proposal for a digital offensive against Iraq’s financial and banking systems appeared with little notice on Newsmax.com, a news Web site, in 2003.

The government concerns evoke those at the dawn of the nuclear era, when questions of military effectiveness, legality and morality were raised about radiation spreading to civilians far beyond any zone of combat.

“If you don’t know the consequences of a counterstrike against innocent third parties, it makes it very difficult to authorize one,” said James Lewis, a cyberwarfare specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But some military strategists argue that these uncertainties have led to excess caution on the part of Pentagon planners.

“Policy makers are tremendously sensitive to collateral damage by virtual weapons, but not nearly sensitive enough to damage by kinetic” — conventional — “weapons,” said John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “The cyberwarriors are held back by extremely restrictive rules of engagement.”

Despite analogies that have been drawn between biological weapons and cyberweapons, Mr. Arquilla argues that “cyberweapons are disruptive and not destructive.”

That view is challenged by some legal and technical experts.

“It’s virtually certain that there will be unintended consequences,” said Herbert Lin, a senior scientist at the National Research Council and author of a recent report on offensive cyberwarfare. “If you don’t know what a computer you attack is doing, you could do something bad.”

Mark Seiden, a Silicon Valley computer security specialist who was a co-author of the National Research Council report, said, “The chances are very high that you will inevitably hit civilian targets — the worst-case scenario is taking out a hospital which is sharing a network with some other agency.”

And while such attacks are unlikely to leave smoking craters, electronic attacks on communications networks and data centers could have broader, life-threatening consequences where power grids and critical infrastructure like water treatment plants are increasingly controlled by computer networks.

Over the centuries, rules governing combat have been drawn together in customary practice as well as official legal documents, like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations charter. These laws govern when it is legitimate to go to war, and set rules for how any conflict may be waged. Two traditional military limits now are being applied to cyberwar: proportionality, which is a rule that, in layman’s terms, argues that if you slap me, I cannot blow up your house; and collateral damage, which requires militaries to limit civilian deaths and injuries.

“Cyberwar is problematic from the point of view of the laws of war,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The U.N. charter basically says that a nation cannot use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation. But what kinds of cyberattacks count as force is a hard question, because force is not clearly defined.”


Sunk by N. Korea during maneuvers by U.S/S. Korea ships.

Abnormal radiation detected near Korean border
YAHOO
By HYUNG-JIN KIM, Associated Press Writer
21 June 2010

SEOUL, South Korea – Abnormally high radiation levels were detected near the border between the two Koreas days after North Korea claimed to have mastered a complex technology key to manufacturing a hydrogen bomb, Seoul said Monday.

The Science Ministry said its investigation ruled out a nuclear test by North Korea, but failed to determine the source of the radiation. It said there was no evidence of a strong earthquake, which follows an atomic explosion.

On May 12, North Korea claimed its scientists succeeded in creating a nuclear fusion reaction — a technology necessary to manufacture a hydrogen bomb. In its announcement, the North did not say how it would use the technology, only calling it a "breakthrough toward the development of new energy."

South Korean experts doubted the North actually made such a breakthrough. Scientists around the world have been experimenting with fusion for decades, but it has yet to be developed into a viable energy alternative.

On May 15, however, the atmospheric concentration of xenon — an inert gas released after a nuclear explosion or and radioactive leakage from a nuclear power plant — on the South Korean side their shared border was found to be eight times higher than normal, according to South Korea's Science Ministry.

South Korea subsequently looked for signs of a powerful, artificially induced earthquake. Experts, however, found no signs of a such a quake in North Korea, a ministry statement said.

"We determined that there was no possibility of an underground nuclear test," it said. The ministry said the gas is not harmful.

While any fusion test would have registered seismic activity, according to nuclear expert Whang Joo-ho of South Korea's Kyung Hee University, the presence of xenon could also have come from a leak.

Since the wind was blowing from north to south when the xenon was detected, a Science Ministry official said the gas could not have originated from any nuclear power plants in South Korea.

But the official — speaking on condition of anonymity, citing department policy — said the xenon could have come from Russia or China. Whang agreed, saying a nuclear test or radioactive leakage would be the only reasons that could explain the atmospheric concentration of xenon reported by the ministry.

A Vienna-based United Nations agency, however, said no signs of increased radioactivity were detected last month along the Korean border.

"We have not registered anything that would raise any suspicion," said Kirsten Haupt, a spokeswoman for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, a U.N. agency that looks for signs of nuclear testing worldwide.

Earlier Monday, South Korea's mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported that North Korea may have conducted a small-sized nuclear test, citing the abnormal radioactivity. The paper cited an atomic expert it did not identify.

North Korea — which is believed to have enough weaponized plutonium for at least a half-dozen nuclear weapons, conducted two underground nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, drawing international condemnation and U.N. sanctions.

The news of the detected radiation comes as tension is running high on the Korean peninsula over the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship blamed on a North Korean torpedo attack. North Korea flatly denies the allegation and has warned any punishment would trigger war, as the U.N. Security Council reviews Seoul's request for action over the sinking.
NK Test, US Treaty OK Could Set Off Chain Reaction
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 26, 2009Filed at 1:43 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A decade after its defeat on the Senate floor, the treaty to ban all atomic bomb tests has found new life in the age of Obama, and at a time of renewed nuclear defiance by North Korea.

Monday's bomb test by the Pyongyang government ''underlines the urgency of the entry into force of the (treaty) and the necessity of putting an end to all nuclear explosions for all time,'' said the pact's chief booster, Tibor Toth, who heads the U.N.-affiliated Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization.

In the coming months in Washington -- and in other key capitals -- leaders will make cold strategic calculations as they weigh military balances and the future role of doomsday weapons in deciding whether to ratify the CTBT. Passage in the Senate this time around may set dominoes toppling from Beijing to New Delhi and beyond, Toth said.

''The U.S. example will be defining,'' he told The Associated Press in an interview at his Vienna headquarters.

Negotiated in the 1990s, the treaty specified 44 nuclear-capable states -- from Algeria to Vietnam -- that must give full formal approval before it can take effect, putting the power of international law and the U.N. Security Council behind the ban. All but nine of those have ratified, along with the governing bodies of 113 other nations.

Besides the U.S., the holdouts among the 44 are China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

Although earlier treaties outlawed all but underground nuclear blasts under 150 kilotons -- equivalent to 150,000 tons of TNT -- this one would impose a blanket ban on any test anywhere, with compliance overseen by Toth's agency.

It would end an era in which eight nations exploded 2,054 nuclear bombs in the air, under water and below ground, from the mushroom cloud of July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, N.M., and the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to North Korea's underground blast on Monday, its second test, estimated at a yield of a few kilotons.

The tests helped weapon designers build ever more compact, durable and finely tuned bombs. Ending testing would put a cap on developing new weapons, halting proliferation to more states and giving nuclear-armed states more confidence to negotiate deep reductions, treaty proponents say.

President Barack Obama endorsed this view in an agenda-setting speech in Prague, Czech Republic, on April 5, when he said he would ''aggressively'' pursue Senate ratification. A vote may come next year, after a lobbying campaign to win the required two-thirds Senate majority.

Republicans controlled the upper house in 1999 when the pact was rejected 51-48 on a largely party-line vote. The debate focused on whether the treaty's monitoring system could detect clandestine nuclear blasts, and whether the U.S. arsenal would remain safe and reliable without tests.

Much has changed since then: The monitoring system has grown into a $1 billion, high-tech worldwide network, and the U.S. weapons stockpile has been certified reliable annually since the 1990s, as the U.S. and four other original nuclear powers -- Russia, Britain, France and China -- have observed testing moratoriums.

The Senate has changed as well, with a 60-vote Democratic majority likely, just seven short of two-thirds. Meanwhile, some influential Republican voices have shifted to support the treaty, including former secretaries of state Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said during his 2008 presidential campaign the treaty deserved ''another look.''

''The climate is different and that's important,'' former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn, a leading arms-control advocate, told the AP. ''The fact the president has made this a top priority means it's going to get a lot more attention from the American public than it did the last time.''

And more attention from the rest of the world.

''If the U.S. keeps its promise to push for ratification of the CTBT, it will serve as a catalyst for similar action by other states,'' Indonesia's U.N. ambassador, Marty Natalegawa, said May 5 at a disarmament conference in New York.

Toth said Indonesia, which has no nuclear weapons, is one holdout showing ''positive signs'' on ratification. Another is a big one: China.

''China supports early entry into force of the CTBT,'' Beijing's arms control chief, Cheng Jingye, told the same U.N. conference.

It has been clear since 1999 that China withheld ratification because the U.S. did. Toth said the Chinese now are ''closely following developments in Washington'' and assure him they are preparing to ratify.

If the U.S. Senate accedes, Obama pledges a diplomatic effort to bring other governments aboard. Nuclear-armed India is a likely target, since a recent U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear agreement gives Washington added leverage with New Delhi.

The Indians' chief nuclear envoy, Shyam Saran, told the AP his country wants to see broad movement toward abolition of nuclear arms before committing to a test ban. Some analysts believe, however, that a CTBT ratification by China, the Asian rival whose bomb motivated India to build its own, might induce the Indian ''domino'' to follow suit.

And what about next-door Pakistan, with at least 40 nuclear warheads, to traditional enemy India's 50 or more?

''Our response (on CTBT) depends very much on the position taken by India,'' Zamir Akram, Pakistani ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, told the AP.

In the Middle East, nuclear-armed Israel is known to have backed off early ratification only because the U.S. did. Accession to this major nuclear agreement might help lift the global embargo on civilian nuclear trade with Israel. Egypt might then logically follow.

If Iran, accused of harboring plans for nuclear bombs, or North Korea, with rudimentary weapons, remained holdouts, they would face ever-growing isolation and international pressure to join.

Toth indicated he wouldn't be surprised by a North Korean ratification, if Pyongyang sees all of the ''P-5'' -- the original nuclear powers -- behind the treaty and no longer demanding that North Korea accept restrictions that they don't.

On the other hand, analysts say, a repeat failure to ratify in Washington could send dominoes tumbling in the other direction. China might feel a need to resume testing to perfect bombs for multiple-warhead missiles, to match U.S. capabilities. A testing chain reaction among nations might ensue.

''What the nuclear powers do, in fact, does affect the decisions of other countries,'' veteran U.S. arms negotiator James Goodby told a nonproliferation conference in Washington last month. ''And testing is perhaps the most visible of nuclear weapons activities.''

------

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Charles J. Hanley has been reporting on nuclear arms control since 1983.


Restart of Big Particle Collider Now November
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:06 a.m. ET
July 30, 2009

GENEVA (AP) -- Repairs to two small helium leaks in the world's largest atom smasher will delay the restart of the giant machine another month until November, a spokesman for the operator said Thursday.

James Gillies said an additional setback to the timing could result if some other problem is found, but the European Organization for Nuclear Research is taking pains to make sure it avoids another major shutdown like the electrical failure of Sept. 19.

''Essentially what's happening is we're proceeding with extreme caution,'' Gillies told The Associated Press. ''We have to be absolutely certain that when we switch on this time, it stays switched on.''

The organization, which is known as CERN, has nearly finished examining the 10,000 electrical interconnections like the one that failed in September. Originally CERN said it expected to start test collisions in April, but that start up date has been pushed back several times already, most recently to October.

''Decisions will be taken as to whether there are more that need repairing or not within the next couple of weeks, and when we know that, we will be in a position to be a little bit more definitive about what we plan to do for the rest of the year,'' Gillies said.

If a November start holds, it will still take until December for the accelerator in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border to start producing collisions of subatomic particles.

Only then will physicists be able to probe deeper into the makeup of matter.

They hope the fragments that come off the collisions will show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe. The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing quickly.

The leaks currently being repaired were found in the system that uses liquid helium to bring the temperature inside the accelerator to near absolute zero, colder than outer space.

That low temperature makes it possible to use the massive superconducting electromagnets that control the beams of particles that will fly in both directions around the accelerator at near the speed of light until the scientists make them collide.

CERN expects repairs and additional safety systems to cost about 40 million Swiss francs ($37 million) over the course of several years, covered by the organization's budget. The overall Large Hadron Collider project cost $10 billion.