By Frank Gaffney for Breitbart
Three years ago, on March 11, 20011, an earthquake-induced tsunami devastated Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power complex. The flooding knocked out power required to cool reactors and their spent fuel pools, causing dangerous – and continuing – radioactive contamination. Unfortunately, unless we act quickly, such a catastrophe is in the cards for America, too.
After the tidal wave flooded over five-hundred square kilometers of the Japanese coast, we learned that those siting the reactors at Fukushima ignored stone markers that had for centuries warned against building anything below the high-water mark of previous tsunamis.
Centuries-old stone tablets can be found along the Japanese coast warning of tsunamis in towns like Aneyoshi, Iwate Prefecture, in northern Japan. One marker reads, “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants… Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
That unheeded warning cost over 19,000 lives and literally incalculable sums. And the price in both can only increase as a result of the difficulties associated with trying to contain the leaking radiation in ground water under the stricken plant. Seawater is sure to flood the same areas again when – not if – future earthquakes trigger additional tsunamis.
Unfortunately, the United States is facing a potential disaster that could make Japan’s Fukushima nightmare look like, well, a day at the beach. And, as with the Japanese, we have been warned.
In fact, a compendium just published by the Center for Security Policy makes clear a stunning reality: The U.S. government has been on notice for over a decade that the vulnerability of our electric grid to man-caused or naturally occurring disruptions could result in prolonged power outages, possibly over large parts of the country.
The former include physical attacks, cyber-warfare, or weapons causing localized or widespread electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effects.
The Washington Free Beacon called attention Tuesday to a bulletin issued last month by the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center. It concludes that, in the wake of “multiple reports of intrusions in electric grid facilities” in that state and others, the electric grid is “inherently vulnerable” to widespread sabotage.
Even more ominous is a natural counterpart – think of it as a solar tsunami – that will come our way at some point in the foreseeable future: an intense geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) caused by one of the sun’s periodic, huge coronal mass ejections (solar flares). Such GMDs are known as Carrington Events, and they occur roughly every 150 years. The last one took place 155 years ago.
The difference is that in 1859, the only thing remotely equivalent to modern electric systems and the things they power were telegraph offices, equipment, and wires. And during the Carrington Event of that year, many of them caught fire.
A solar storm of such magnitude these days would, among other things, seriously damage, if not destroy outright, high-voltage transformers that constitute the backbone of the nation’s grid. It is, as a practical matter, impossible promptly to replace these critical pieces of equipment if large numbers of them are taken down at once – ensuring that the power will be off for many months, and probably years, in the affected areas.
It is hard to overstate the damage that such blackouts would cause in today’s thoroughly electrified America. Without power, every critical infrastructure in this country upon which our economy, security, and even our lives depend would cease to function.
Among the effects of a protracted suspension of the supply of electricity would be a nuclear circumstance even worse than that faced by Japan three years ago. The pumps needed to move cooling water through the nation’s sixty nuclear power complexes would fail to operate once their back-up generators run out of fuel. The standard for on-site backup fuel at nuclear plants is only seven days.
After that, reactors would melt down, but the radioactivity thereby unleashed should be largely confined within their containment vessels.
The cooling pools where spent fuel rods are kept at such sites would be a different story.
Without power for pumped cooling and water replenishment, the spent fuel pools will boil off and the still-hot fuel rods will overheat, catch fire, and disseminate radioactive fallout downwind. The effect would be simply devastating, especially when combined with other, horrific environmental and societal repercussions of blackouts that could last a year or longer.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has acknowledged the implications of the threat posed by intense solar storms, declaring in 2012, “The NRC believes that it is possible that a geomagnetic storm-induced outage could be long-lasting and could last long enough that the onsite supply of fuel for the emergency generators would be exhausted… Accordingly, it is appropriate for the NRC to consider regulatory actions that could be needed to ensure adequate protection of public health and safety during and after a severe geomagnetic storm.”
The bad news is that – despite the evidence revealed in the Center’s compendium entitled Guilty Knowledge, which presents the executive summaries of eleven different government-sponsored studies of grid vulnerability conducted since 2004 – federal authorities have failed to do anything appreciable to protect us from such disasters.
This state of affairs is as scandalous as the inaction of the Japanese in the face of evidence that their country and people were needlessly at risk. Members of Congress, led by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), who are committed to preventing this sort of predictable and existential peril need our strong support to ensure that corrective action is taken at the federal level.
The good news is that we know how to secure the grid and the price tag for doing so is manageable – especially compared to the intolerable costs of inaction. Better yet, several states are beginning to take steps aimed at protecting their parts of the grid and their populations from the effects of intense solar storms or other assaults.
Legislators in Maine, Virginia, and Florida have introduced and, in several cases, secured approval of initiatives to prepare for such remediation. In Oklahoma, the state legislature is expected to consider this week bills that would put a referendum on the ballot in November to determine if voters want their grid hardened against EMP and other effects. Every state should be encouraged to do the same.
The question is this: Will we heed in time the myriad warnings that the grid’s vulnerability must be mitigated? Or, like the Japanese, will we ignore such warnings – and suffer horrifically for doing so?
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. formerly acted as an Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. He is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for Breitbart News Network, and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio.
Source - http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/11/An-American-Fukushima
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REPORT - US ELECTRIC GRID INHERENTLY VULNERABLE TO SABOTAGE
By Adam Kredo for the Washington Free Beacon
Electric grid compounds across the country have faced an uptick in unauthorized intrusions by unknown individuals, causing concern that the U.S. grid is “inherently vulnerable” to widespread sabotage, according to a recent oversight report issued by New Jersey’s Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC), which monitors the threat level.
Following at least eight “reports of intrusions at electrical grid facilities in New Jersey” from October 2013 until January 2014, the ROIC’s Intelligence & Analysis Threat Unit issued a report warning that the U.S. electrical grid is “inherently vulnerable” to attacks that could wipe out power across large swaths of the country.
The ROIC report, released in late February, is marked as “unclassified” but designated “for official use only.” New Jersey State Police Spokesman Trooper Jeff Flynn confirmed that a report of this nature had been commissioned by ROIC when contacted by the Washington Free Beacon.
The multiple incidents of “sabotage” and crime outlined in the report “highlight the grid’s vulnerabilities to potential threats,” according to a copy of the report obtained by the Free Beacon.
U.S. officials and experts have increasingly warned over the years that the electrical grid could be a prime target for terrorists or others seeking to damage the country’s infrastructure and disrupt daily life.
The concern is that many of the incidents outlined in the ROIC report could be a sign that preparations are under away for a larger, coordinated attack on the grid.
Highly sensitive areas of the electrical grid were found to be lightly monitored, leaving them vulnerable to attack, according to the report.
“The electrical grid—a network of power generating plants, transmission lines, substations, and distribution lines—is inherently vulnerable,” the report said.
“Transmission substations are critical links in the electrical grid, making it possible for electricity to move long distances and serving as hubs for intersecting power lines,” according to the report. “Many of the grid’s important components sit out in the open, often in remote locations, protected by little more than cameras and chain-link fences.”
While the incidents are greatly concerning to security officials—and remain mostly unresolved—the ROIC “currently does not have enough information to classify the New Jersey incidents listed [in the report] as indicative of pre-operational activity or connect them to a pattern,” according to the report, which does not discount this possibility.
However, the incidents of grid tampering are not isolated to New Jersey.
An unidentified individual in Tucson, Ariz., in January, “removed multiple bolts from an electric tower’s support structure, increasing the potential for collapse and electrical service interruption.”
Authorities suspect that the goal was “sabotage rather than vandalism” due to the “deliberate manner of the bolt removal, including probable acquisition of the requisite tools,” the report said.
In April 2013, “unknown subject(s) fired multiple shots at an electrical transmission substation” in San Jose, Calif., “damaging several transformers,” the report notes.
Surveillance video of the incident shows sparks flying across the compound as bullets strike the substation.
“Authorities subsequently discovered intentionally cut fiber optic cables in a manhole,” according to the report. “No motive or suspects have been identified.”
Sabotage has also been reported in Jacksonville, Ark., where in August 2013, “an identified suspect … removed bolts from the base of a high-voltage transmission line tower and tried to bring down the 100-foot tower with a moving train,” according to the report
One month later, “the subject reportedly set a fire at a substation control house.”
In October of that year, “the subject cut into two electrical poles and used a tractor to pull them down, cutting power to thousands of customers,” according to the report.
While the incidents in San Jose received widespread media attention, several of the others did not.
New Jersey has experienced eight separate incidents of a similar nature since last year.
On Jan. 26, for instance, “employees found a hole, approximately three-foot high by two-foot wide, in the perimeter fence of an electric switching and substation in East Rutherford,” according to the report.
Several days before that incident, on Jan. 22, “an identified subject entered a Burlington generating station using false identification,” according to the report. “The subject claimed he had a gun (none found) and a bomb (package cleared).”
Other incidents include break-ins at certain electrical stations and the theft of various on-site materials.
The ROIC concluded that while “the incidents more likely involve vandalism and theft, rather than sabotage,” any type of “intrusion or damage to substations is a critical concern to the power supply and public safety.”
Counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole warned that these attacks could be a “test-run” for a larger act of sabotage.
“While some of these incidents involving substations can be attributed to metal scavenging, it’s planned attacks, much like the one in San Jose, that have officials worried the most and raises a number of questions,” Poole told the Free Beacon. “Why was this substation targeted? What were they trying to accomplish with this attack? Was this a test-run for something larger?”
“What the New Jersey ROIC report shows is that this fits into a larger pattern of incidents, which should be keeping someone at Homeland Security up at night,” Poole said. “The other big question is how many more of these incidents are going unreported?”
The ROIC report outlines several types of suspicious behavior that authorities should be on the lookout for.
These include “photographing objects or facilities that would not normally be photographed,” instances of individuals “loitering in sensitive areas,” and other types of atypical behavior such as “unfamiliar or out of place persons posing as panhandlers, protesters, vendors, [or] news agents.”
Flynn told the Free Beacon that ROIC aims to analyze and codify various grid incidents across the country in order to “learn from those incidents and apply them to situations here in New Jersey.”
The goal is to reach “potential conclusions to solve potential problems we have in state,” Flynn said in response to questions about the report.
Source - http://freebeacon.com/report-u-s-electric-grid-inherently-vulnerable-to-sabotage/
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