“Data storm” blamed for nuclear-plant shutdown

“Data storm” blamed for nuclear-plant shutdown
Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2007-05-18

The U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Homeland Security called this week for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to further investigate the cause of excessive network traffic that shut down an Alabama nuclear plant.

During the incident, which happened last August at Unit 3 of the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, operators manually shut down the reactor after two water recirculation pumps failed. The recirculation pumps control the flow of water through the reactor, and thus the power output of boiling-water reactors (BWRs) like Browns Ferry Unit 3. An investigation into the failure found that the controllers for the pumps locked up following a spike in data traffic — referred to as a “data storm” in the NRC notice — on the power plant’s internal control system network. The deluge of data was apparently caused by a separate malfunctioning control device, known as a programmable logic controller (PLC).