The UK’s nuclear power watchdog has announced plans to sue Sellafield’s main waste treatment site for breaching cybersecurity regulations.
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Sellafield, Britain’s “largest and most damaging nuclear site” according to Britain’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, breached the Nuclear Industries Safety Act, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority said after conducting an investigation.
“These fees relate to alleged computer security breaches over a four-year period between 2019 and early 2023,” the independent nuclear regulator said in a prosecutorial statement on Thursday.
“There is no evidence that public protection has been compromised as a result of these issues,” the ONR said. “As some cases are now the subject of legal proceedings, we are unable to comment further. “
The first court hearing is still scheduled.
Sellafield has around 12,000 staff and an annual budget of £2 million, or $2. 5 billion. It mainly processes and markets nuclear waste and manages the decommissioning of nuclear devices and infrastructure.
Earlier in the week, The Guardian reported that Richard Meal, Sellafield’s CISO for 10 years, was making plans to step down from his role later this year, following a similar announcement through Sellafield’s head of safety and security, Mark Neate, who announced in January that he is contemplating leaving.
Sellafield’s law allegedly violated calls for Americans to “adequately protect” classified data designated as “sensitive nuclear data” in the interest of national security. They are enforced through the ONR’s Civil Nuclear Safety Branch on behalf of the Secretary of State for Nuclear Security. Energy and climate change.
The founding of Sellafield, in a remote coastal domain in northwestern England, dates back to 1947, when the British government asked it to produce plutonium for the country’s nuclear weapons program. Subsequently, he contributed to the design and structure of the country’s first nuclear reactor. , which contributed to the country’s power grid until 2003, as well as the recycling of uranium and plutonium.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a non-ministerial executive public body created by the Energy Act of 2004, estimated in 2018 that the closure of the country’s nuclear facilities would take until 2120 and cost at least $153 billion, of which Sellafield is expected to account for $115 billion. The NDA said that “these estimates remain highly uncertain” because it “has fought to the extreme of the paints needed to cover up its most damaging facilities. “
In 2022, the government placed Sellafield under “special measures” due to repeated cybersecurity failures, The Guardian reported as part of a long-running investigation that documented only cybersecurity failures, but also radioactive contamination and a “toxic” paint culture.
The newspaper reported last December that teams of state-owned hackers connected to Russia and China had penetrated Sellafield’s networks and planted “latent malware. “
Western governments warn against using such tactics through Beijing and Moscow. Last month, U. S. security agencies and their counterparts in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance in the U. K. , Canada, Australia and New Zealand warned that a Chinese hacker organization codenamed Volt Typhoon had taken hold in some victims’ computer environments “for at least five years” and gave the impression of being “a pre-positioning for long-term disruptive or destructive attacks. “
The countries warned that Chinese-backed hackers had also leaked sensitive data similar to operational generation systems, adding SCADA systems and relays and, in some cases, had also accessed CCTV surveillance systems on critical infrastructure.
The alert came amid emerging tensions between China and the West over the South China Sea, and when Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered his armed forces to invade Taiwan until 2027. Western observers have warned that China could simply try to curb the criticism. Infrastructure of Western countries to curb the army’s reaction and give Beijing’s ground forces time to conquer Taiwan.
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