INDIA | SAFETY & SECURITY
As India has one most active civil nuclear programmes in the world, it is not surprising that India’s evolving safety and security architecture would be of significant interest to policymakers worldwide
While the discussion on India’s emergency response mechanisms is robust, the report only cursorily touches upon the engineered safety measures in Indian reactors. Discussing the indigenous risk mitigation measures in
Indian reactors the report says: ‘Newer reactors in India are equipped with built-in safety
measures that are designed to minimise risks. For example, new light water and heavy water reactors at nuclear plants such as Tarapur nuclear power plant in the state of Maharashtraand the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu have double containment to ensure that nuclear material is confined in case of a nuclear emergency.’ However this is not new. Indian PHWRs have featured double containment from the time of MAPS 1&2, which were commissioned in the 1980s. There have been far more important developments in the realm of post-Fukushima upgrades. For example, in Tarapur 3 an indigenously developed containment filtered venting system, which operates on the wet-scrubbing principle, has been operational for some time and is set to see fleet-wide deployment. NPCIL is also deploying iodine scrubbing through a containment spray system on which tests using different aerosols have been conducted and removal rate measurements recorded. Even the Tarapur 1&2 BWRs, which are older than Fukushima Daichi I and had been upgraded prior to 2011 to ensure continuous cooling during site blackouts, were modified in the last decade to allow nitrogen injection into the containment in the event of a hydrogen build-up. The new IPHWR-700 features a range of important new
safety measures such as interleaving of primary heat transport system feeders, regional over-power protection, a mobile fuel transfer machine, a steel liner on the inner containment wall and a passive decay heat removal system. To be fair, the report’s thrust is not on the engineering
aspects related to nuclear safety and security but on the institutional arrangements and evolving threats such as insider activity, cyberattacks and a melding of the two.
Nuclear security The second half of the report goes deeper into the issue of nuclear security, marked out under the IAEA’s definition as distinct from the issue of nuclear safety. On the human aspects of nuclear security, the report also makes a distinction between nuclear safety culture and nuclear security culture. On the latter the report says complacency is the biggest threat and it identifies some of pillars of a positive nuclear security culture. Flagging the rare danger of insider attacks, the report makes a few suggestions about what could be done
to reduce the threat. It moves onto issues related to cybersecurity, including the September 2019 cyberattack on Kudankulam . A subsequent security audit of the attempted breach by DAE’s Computer & Information Security Advisory Group and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team concluded that the malware infection was limited to the administrative network. It did not have much chance of compromising the control and instrumentation, which naturally does not have any connections to the plant intranet, much less to administrative networks connected to the internet. It must be said that was probably not the intention
anyway. Insiders who have spoken to this writer believe that it was a Stage-I attack aimed at gathering information about the cyber structure of the plant, details about project allocations and information on the purchase details, updates and maintenance contracts of the SCADA software used by the plant. The aim may have been to re-engineer any updates of the software used and then send that to the plant, possibly via an insider. Some progress seems to also have been made with
respect to attribution, with insiders saying that the attack may have a Chinese origin with the supposed North Korean attacker ‘Kim Jon Hyak’ a mere cutout. The report agrees with other recommendations: in respect of further strengthening of Information Security in administrative networks, various measures have been taken viz. hardening of internet and administrative intranet connectivity, restriction on removable media, blocking of websites & IPs which have been identified with malicious activity. The report says “India would do well to draw lessons
from the experiences of other countries like the US, UK and Japan, which have advanced cyber systems to strengthen cyber protection of their nuclear infrastructure” and that “India could also engage in multilateral dialogues, and collaborate with the private sector in order to build a robust cyber security system for its nuclear architecture.” Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, not least because as the report says: “The paradox is that nations are faced with the dilemma of what level of information should be shared in the interest of nuclear security.” At an international level, nations discuss their achievements more than the shortcomings and subsequent lessons learned and international cooperation is hampered by ongoing geopolitical issues. This is why a peer review mechanism was explicitly excluded during the negotiations of the CPPNM 2005 Amendment, as the report mentions. In any case, India too is employing advanced systems to enhance cyber protection systems. For example, a new version of ‘ANU NISHTA’ with enhanced hardware features for ensuring cyber security of instrumentation and control systems has been recently rolled out by DAE. The enhancements include modifications to the power supply circuit of the board, tamper-detection enclosure, provision for terminal contacts for remote diagnostics and observation of non-secure behaviour of the local network. ANU NISHTA’s new version has been extensively tested. At the end of the day, nuclear safety and security cannot be seen in silos. Defence in depth engineering remains the nuclear industry’s best bet in ensuring that adverse events, whatever their origin, do not cascade. Obviously, approaches need to be combined with pure engineering solutions and a holistic approach must be adopted. ■
www.neimagazine.com | January 2022 | 33
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