Iranian technicians at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant earlier this year. The facility has since reportedly been attacked by the Stuxnet worm.
For now, Iran has declared victory over the cyber attackers - whoever they are.
Posted on 10/03/2010 7:55:51 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
The worm may have turned.
Iran is claiming to have arrested several spies who may be responsible for the crippling cyber attack that has plagued the country's Bushehr nuclear power station.
"We are always facing destructive activities by these [Western spy] services, and, of course, we have arrested a number of nuclear spies to block the enemy's destructive moves," Intelligence Minister Moslehi told Iran's state-run Press TV.
At the center of the attack is the Stuxnet worm, a self-replicating malware that targets systems made by Siemens AG, and commonly used in industrial plants and power grids around the world. Most recently reports have surfaced that the Stuxnet super virus has also hit Chinese industrial facilities. But a majority of the documented Stuxnet attacks since its discovery by internet security experts in June have been on Iran, according to computer security experts.
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
Iranian technicians at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant earlier this year. The facility has since reportedly been attacked by the Stuxnet worm.
For now, Iran has declared victory over the cyber attackers - whoever they are.
They have probably arrested a few woman and will stone or hang them in public to make the mullahs look all powerful.
A Chernobyl type meltdown would just be perfect. I will be praying for that daily.
Chernobyl didn't "meltdown", that would have been much more benign than what actually happened. It was a nuclear barbeque. Chernobyl was carbon moderated, air cooled. (A design touted in Scientific American as inherently more safe than Western water cooled designs a few years prior to the disaster.) The problem with air cooling is that once it caught fire, there was no way to cool the reactor and smother and the fire.
I don't know much about the Bushehr facility, but given that it is Russian designed and Iranian run, disaster is never more than moments away.
"Russian designed". Words that make one's intestinal tract loosen if flying. "Oh, the aircraft? It's Russian designed."
Thanks for the explanation. Let’s hope the Iranians open a Pandora’s box on themselves. Their goal is not cheap energy, it is a weapon to intimidate their foes.
It didn’t catch on fire, it exploded. The fires were caused by the hot chunks of core material raining down over the area. A lot of firemen got fatal exposures just from being near them.
It wasn’t so much the design as the procedures that caused the disaster. It actually took a day or so to work up to it. They were doing an experiment to see how low they could turn down the power. It started to die, and they wanted to keep it going to avoid a lengthy down time, so they started pulling rods.
There was a design quirk that didn’t help. When the thing started to take off, they started to put the rods back in, but this actually caused a brief surge as the tips started to go in - “A feature not a bug”. I believe it was actually too late at that point anyway.
My source - THE TRUTH ABOUT CHERNOBYL by Grigori Medvedev
Russian designed and partially build by local Iranian contractors using parts left behind by the Germans who did not leave any documentation.
I was simplifying, admittedly. But Chernobyl had absolutely no chance of melting down, there was almost nothing to melt and lots to burn. It was, in fact, a burn down. The Chernobyl firefighters get high marks for heroism.
... Siderenko suggested dropping about 40 tons of lead to reduce the radiation. I was categorically opposed to this idea, as such a weight coming from a height of 650 feet (200 m), would have had an enormous impact, punching a hole right through to the suppression pool, and driving the entire MOLTEN CORE down into the water below. ...
Testimony of G.A. Shasharin, pg. 167, THE TRUTH ABOUT CHERNOBYL
( Emphasis mine. )
The entire planet has been on pins and needles worrying, waiting and watching for the (inevitable) Israeli attack on Iran. After vowing to wipe Israel off the map, Iran with nukes would be purely unacceptable. (Even the “peaceful” option of regime change in Iran would be messy as hell.)
If Israel attacks with nuclear missiles— big messy. A ground invasion is out of the question, which leaves an air attack — no easy thing to arrange or pull off. Iran would retaliate by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz and pinching off much of the world’s oil supply, while thinking of its next step. Big messy.
Then along comes a computer super-worm that devastates Iran’s computers in a clean, blameless way at a fraction of the cost of a military adventure.
Very clever indeed!
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