Active learning both improves resilience and inflates safety margins. Whilst this holds true for all enterprises, in countries operating nuclear power plants, planners should take heed amid heightened geopolitical tensions. Dr Simon Bennett explains


Risk management owes much to the aphorism ‘prevention is better than cure’. It is axiomatic that resources are better deployed preventing incidents and accidents than dealing with the consequences, which may include death, injury, financial loss and reputational damage.

The most successful enterprises are those that prepare for the worst. Techniques that help enterprises prepare include safety imagination and active learning. Nick Pidgeon and Michael O’Leary define safety imagination as “[a] critical and self-reflective process...that...seeks to challenge the default assumptions about the world and its hazards [with a view to using] this interrogation to interpret the significance of external warning signs and events”. Brian Toft and Simon Reynolds define active learning as “knowing about something and then taking remedial action to rectify the deficiencies that have been uncovered”. Put simply, through safety imagination and active learning an enterprise can, by actioning safety lessons learned from competitors or, indeed, other industries, reduce the chance of mishap. The safest enterprises are those that continually scan the risk horizon for safety lessons, then internalise and action those lessons.

Case study – nuclear power

As demonstrated by the 1966 Detroit Edison Enrico Fermi-1 fast-breeder reactor near-miss, the 1957 Windscale and 1979 Three Mile Island accidents and the 1986 Chernobyl and 2011 Fukushima disasters, the nuclear industry has a chequered safety record.

Given its questionable safety record and public opposition to the building of nuclear power stations, it is essential the industry scans the risk horizon for actionable lessons. The predicament of Ukraine’s nuclear power stations offers the industry important lessons.

Calibrating risk

Foreign policy and nuclear expert Bennett Ramberg’s 1985 analysis Nuclear Power Plants: An Unrecognised Military Peril, provides the industry a means of calibrating the risks posed to nuclear power plants by, for example, armed conflict, terrorism, employee sabotage, operator stress and fatigue, and supply chain disruption.

In his 1985 book, Ramberg made several observations about NPPs in time of war, including that:

• threatening a state’s NPPs may influence that state’s decision-making in ways favourable to the state that issued the threat;

• bombing a state’s NPPs may render tracts of land uninhabitable. Targeting a reactor containment with, for example, ballistic or cruise missiles, could, if the containment was breached, create a radiological weapon or dirty bomb. Liberated radionuclides could be transported to neighbouring states, including the aggressor state;

• bombing a state’s NPPs may kill or immobilise significant numbers of soldiers and civilians;

• in an age of relatively cheap precision munitions, powerful states’ ambitious nuclear power programmes gift leverage to weak states armed with precision munitions;

• an enemy lacking precision munitions could target facilities with a larger footprint than a reactor building. For example, waste storage ponds, fuel reprocessing plants or marshalling yards for trains transporting reactor fuel or reactor waste; and that

• NPPs are vulnerable to saboteurs.

The Russia-Ukraine War through Ramberg’s optic

While there has been no deliberate targeting of NPP reactor containments by either protagonist, NPP auxiliary buildings and troops guarding NPPs have been targeted. Thus both Russia and Ukraine have fired conventional munitions into NPP sites, albeit with a view to destroying auxiliary equipment and degrading occupying forces. During the early stages of the war, the Russians fired conventional munitions into the decommissioning Chernobyl NPP complex. Later in the conflict, Defence Intelligence of Ukraine claimed Kyiv had mounted a drone strike on Russian soldiers billeted at the Zaporizhzhia NPP.

It is axiomatic that munitions – even GPS-guided munitions – are far from 100 per cent accurate. Power units (combustion, jet or rocket engines) malfunction or run out of fuel. Guidance systems malfunction or are jammed by electronic countermeasures. Exhausted artillerymen mis-programme guidance systems. Munitions are intercepted, generating shrapnel with high kinetic energy. It goes without saying that using munitions in proximity to NPP reactor containments is risky.

Ukraine’s NPPs rely on the country’s high-voltage electricity grid for reactor cooling. The Russians frequently target Ukraine’s grid with precision munitions. When the grid drops out, Ukraine’s NPPs use their back-up diesel generators – a last line of defence. The use of back-up generators worries Kyiv, the International Atomic Energy Agency and Ukraine’s neighbours. There is no back-up for a diesel generator. If it runs out of diesel, it stops. War interrupts supply lines.

Attacks on the grid spark furious exchanges between the protagonists, with Ukraine accusing Russia of targeting infrastructure critical to the safe operation of its NPPs and Russia accusing Ukraine of destroying, in a classic ‘false flag’ operation, its own pylons and substations to cast Russia in a bad light.

Ukraine’s NPPs have experienced near-misses. Munitions have detonated close to NPP reactor containments and NPPs have been overflown by Russian cruise and ballistic missiles.

Non-nuclear (thermal) powerplants have been targeted. For example, the Ukrainians claimed the Russians attacked the thermal powerplant at Kryvyi Rih on 13th June 2023. Ukraine’s Ukrainska Pravda reported: “As a result of a Russian attack on the night of 13th June, a building of a thermal power plant was damaged in Kryvyi Rih. Due to shelling, thousands of consumers in the front-line areas remain without electricity”.

The Russians claimed that one of its thermal powerplants, located in the Bryansk region, had suffered a drone attack on 4th September 2023. Britain’s Sky News reported: “Local governor Alexander Bogomaz...said there were no casualties, and the plant’s infrastructure remained unscathed”.

The nuclear industry claims today’s concrete containments are able to withstand high-energy kinetic impacts. However, embrittlement – a process whereby continuous exposure to high levels of radiation weakens structures – renders older stations less sturdy. “A reactor’s concrete structure becomes more vulnerable with time, in an accelerated fashion due to long-term radiation exposure” explain academics L. Sajo-Bohus, J.A. Lopez and M. Castro-Colin in their paper Historical Perspective of a Nuclear Power Plant at Risk in a War Zone.

What relevance do these events have for nuclear planners? The events described above hold important lessons for nuclear planners, for while the risk of attack or sabotage in states such as Britain and France is relatively low, the risk of attack or sabotage in states such as the US, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan and China is not inconsiderable. The 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon confirmed the US to be a prime target for Islamist terror groups. India and Pakistan are locked in dispute over Kashmir. Bangladesh, formerly known as East Pakistan, potentially is an ally of Pakistan. South Korea is frequently threatened by its northern neighbour. The UAE is building a NPP in a region destabilised by the Syrian civil war, the Israel-Hamas war and the Houthi insurrection in Yemen. On 20th March, 2022, Iran-backed Houthi rebels fired missiles and drones at Saudi critical national infrastructure. An Aramco plant in Jeddah was attacked. As an ally of Saudi Arabia, the UAE is vulnerable to Houthi attack. Relations between Taiwan and China are at a low ebb with each side investing in precision armaments and engaging in megaphone diplomacy.

One of the ironies of states’ pursuit of net-zero is the recasting of nuclear power as a guarantor of, rather than a threat to, life. Demonised by many in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident and 1986 Chernobyl disaster, nuclear power has been rehabilitated. It is ironic that one of the policy responses to global warming – the construction of more NPPs – could, potentially, damage the environment irreversibly.

In November 2023, the World Nuclear Association observed: “Many countries with existing nuclear power programmes [for example, the United Kingdom] either have plans to, or are building, new power reactors...About 30 countries are considering, planning or starting nuclear power programmes...About 110 power reactors with a total gross capacity of about 110 GWe are planned, and over 300 more are proposed...Most reactors currently planned are in countries in Asia, characterised by fast-growing economies and rapidly rising electricity demand”.

The purpose of a nuclear powerplant building programme is to provide a population security. The threats to NPPs described by Bennett Ramberg – for example, the possibility that, when tensions are high, one state may threaten another state’s NPPs to secure concessions – mean that NPP building programmes may, by presenting an aggressor more targets, provide a population less security. This ‘more means less’ paradox invites examination.

Any country minded to launch or expand a nuclear power programme should, as a minimum, secure its nuclear sites against foreseeable threats such as:

• sabotage by disaffected employees;
• terrorist attacks;
• in time of crisis or war, attacks mounted by insurgents or commandos; and
• in time of crisis or war, shellfire, drone strikes, cruise missile strikes, hypersonic missile strikes, ballistic missile strikes and airstrikes.

It is important to note that even if such threats do not, in fact, translate into offensive actions – employee sabotage or a commando raid, for example – the very possibility of their realisation may provide ill-wishers or adversaries leverage or traction over the policies and actions of countries with NPPs. Threat shapes thinking.

One of the axioms of risk management is that active learning – the improvement of technologies and procedures based on objective analyses of past failures and successes – improves resilience and inflates safety margins. It is important that current and aspirant NPP-operating countries recognise the fact that, in time of crisis or war, NPPs present adversaries tempting targets. As the saying goes, those who fail to learn from the past risk having it repeat. As indicated by the attacks listed in the table opposite, the threats described by Bennett Ramberg are genuine. Further, they endure. Time has not diminished them. If anything, our multi-polar world has multiplied and magnified the threats we face. There is war in Europe. A wider Middle East war is possible. Nuclear planners cannot afford to ignore the lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War. Imagining the worst is the sine qua non of good safety management. This axiom holds true not just for nuclear power, but for every enterprise, from deep mining to car manufacture.

Dr Simon Bennett teaches risk management at the University of Leicester, England. His book Atomic Blackmail? The Weaponisation of Nuclear Facilities during the Russia-Ukraine War is available from Libri Publishing.

Also available from March 2024 is Dr Bennett's book, Corruption and the Management of Public Safety: The Governance of Technological Systems, published by Routledge.




This article was published in the Q1 2024 issue of CIR Magazine.

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