Since 1976 “Project Censored,” a U.S.-based nonprofit media watchdog organization, has been identifying “the news that didn’t make the news,” the most significant stories it believes are being systematically overlooked. Slashdot ran stories about its annual list of the year’s most censored news stories in 1999, 2003, 2004, and in 2007, when they’d presciently warned that the media was ignoring the…
Tag: nuclear power plants
Security Blueprints of Many Companies Leaked in Hack of Swedish Firm Gunnebo
Brian Krebs: In March 2020, KrebsOnSecurity alerted Swedish security giant Gunnebo Group that hackers had broken into its network and sold the access to a criminal group which specializes in deploying ransomware. In August, Gunnebo said it had successfully thwarted a ransomware attack, but this week it emerged that the intruders stole and published online tens of thousands of sensitive documents…
Russians Who Pose Election Threat Have Hacked Nuclear Plants and Power Grid
The New York Times reports:
Cybersecurity officials watched with growing alarm in September as Russian state hackers started prowling around dozens of American state and local government computer systems just two months before the election. The act itself did not worry them so much — officials anticipated that the Russians who interfered in the 2016 election would be back — but the…
Who Committed the 25-Year, $8 Million Library Heist?
An anonymous reader shares a fascinating true-crime story from Pittsburgh. Smithsonian magazine reports:
Like nuclear power plants and sensitive computer networks, the safest rare book collections are protected by what is known as “defense in depth” — a series of small, overlapping measures designed to thwart a thief who might be able to overcome a single deterrent. The Oliver Room, home to…
America Wants to Build Nuclear Power Plants on the Moon and Mars
“The U.S. wants to build nuclear power plants that will work on the moon and Mars, and on Friday put out a request for ideas from the private sector on how to do that,” reports Time magazine:
The U.S. Department of Energy put out the formal request to build what it calls a fission surface power system that could allow humans to…
Nuclear ‘Power Balls’ May Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new generation of reactors coming online in the next few years aims to make nuclear meltdowns a thing of the past. Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they’ll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium…
Coming Soon: Open-Source Blueprints for a Tiny Nuclear Reactor
“A nonprofit startup is offering an open-source nuclear plant plan,” reports Popular Mechanics: A mechanical engineer-turned-tech entrepreneur has plans to, well, empower people around the world to build their own 100-megawatt nuclear power reactors. That’s much larger than some of the modular reactors designed by nuclear startups, but still much smaller than operating nuclear power plants in the U.S. The Energy…
France Shuts Down Oldest Reactors, But Nuclear Power Still Reigns
An anonymous reader shares a report from Agence France-Presse (AFP): France will start closing its oldest atomic power plant on Saturday after 43 years in operation, the first in a series of reactor shutdowns but hardly a signal the country will reduce its reliance on nuclear energy anytime soon. Unplugging the two reactors at Fessenheim, along the Rhine near France’s eastern…
Germany Rejected Nuclear Power — and Deadly Emissions Spiked
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On New Year’s Eve, while the rest of the world was preparing to ring in a new decade, employees of the German energy company EnBW were getting ready to pull the plug on one of the country’s few remaining nuclear power plants. The license to operate the two reactors at the Philippsburg nuclear…
Do You Remember the Y2K Bug?
harrymcc writes: In the late 1990s, lots of people were concerned that the Y2K bug could lead to power outages, financial collapse, riots, and worse when the clock rolled over to January 1, 2000. Hundreds of books about the problem and suggestions on how to respond (quit your job, move to the country, stockpile food) not only capitalized on this fear…