Are Drones a Threat to Nuclear Power Plants? Examining Risks to the U.S. Electric Grid

Are nuclear power plants, other electric facilities at risk from drones?

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

This is the third in a series of articles, examining the problems posed to critical infrastructure sites and other significant potential targets of drone incursions by hostile actors. Part one described current federal laws pertaining to the use of counter-drone technology. Part two looked at the threats from UAVs faced by jails and prisons.

This article will explore whether drones operated with malicious intent present a danger to nuclear power plants and other facets of the U.S. electric grid.

Counter-drone series – Part 3

Earlier this month the Nuclear Regulatory Commission put out a statement in an effort to reassure the public that nuclear power plants are safe from potential attacks from the sky in the form of drones flown by bad actors.

“While nuclear power plant security forces do not have the authority to interdict or shoot down aircraft, including drones, flying over their facilities, commercial nuclear power plants are inherently secure and robust, hardened structures,” the statement reads.

“They are built to withstand hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. Nuclear plants maintain high levels of security measures, which ensure they can defend against threats,” up to and including threats to the plant’s basic structure.

The statement notes that last year, the NRC updated its regulations to require its nuclear power plant licensees, which are largely private companies, to report sightings of drones over their facilities. These reports are sent to the NRC, the FAA, the FBI and local law enforcement.

“Additionally, in late 2019, the nuclear industry began coordinating with the Department of Energy (DOE) and the FAA to restrict drone overflights over certain nuclear power plants,” the statement says.

Yet, in recent months highly placed government officials have expressed their concerns over the possibility that drones flying near or over conventional and nuclear electric generating facilities could cause damage to the facilities, leading to power blackouts or worse. In early January, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry brought the question up to then President-elect Donald Trump at a dinner meeting of Republican governors at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. Landry reported that suspicious drone activity had been spotted over or near Entergy’s River Bend nuclear power plant in West Feliciana Parish.

Scott Parker, chief of unmanned aircraft systems at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said drones operated with malicious intent present two distinct threats to critical infrastructure sites such as power-generating facilities.

A drone “can be used to either compromise the site’s secret protocols, or it can also be used to capture information that that organization may want to protect, like intellectual property,” Parker said. “There’s also the added capability of cyber-attack tools.” Drones can easily be equipped with a number of capabilities that could identify and exploit wireless communications to gain access into sensitive systems or networks.

In addition, as demonstrated in overseas conflicts in recent months, drones can be equipped with weapons or explosives to devastating effect. “It could also be used to some degree in order to attack critical infrastructure, especially when you think about a close-in blast capability of a drone targeting a specific asset,” Parker said.

The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the trade association for nuclear power industry, downplays the potential hazards associated with UAV flights over its facilities.  “Nuclear power plants are among the most robust structures in America with comprehensive defensive strategies that are regularly re-evaluated, updated and thoroughly tested in partnership with federal security agencies,” Rich Mogavero, NEI’s director of security and incident preparedness, said in an emailed statement.

He said each nuclear plant in the U.S. “maintains a security plan that includes specific protocols to respond to suspicious aircraft activity.” Since federal criminal statutes prevent nuclear plant operators from taking counter-UAS actions that interfere with the operation of a drone, or bring it down, “the industry is limited to attaining airspace restrictions on a case-by-case basis from the FAA through U.S. DOE sponsorship.”

If nuclear power plants are not easy targets for drones operated by bad actors, the same cannot be said for other components of the electric grid, such as small electric relay stations. There have been several incidents of thwarted drone attacks on such electric infrastructure targets over the past several years. The most recent occurred last November when federal agents arrested a white supremacist for allegedly trying to attack an electric power station in Nashville, Tennessee using a homemade drone strapped with explosives.

Scott Aaronson, senior vice president of security and preparedness for the Electric Edison Institute, said Congress needs to pass legislation to make it easier for local enforcement agencies to help protect all components of the electric grid.

“If the question is: do I have some confidence in the industry’s resilience against drone incursions? I do. But do I think more needs to be done for this particular threat vector? I do,” Aaronson said in an interview.

“One of the issues that we are facing as an industry and with all critical infrastructure operators is looking at how can we work more closely with local law enforcement, federal law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and the FAA, to be able to counter drones either ourselves or in partnership with those agencies,” he said.

The EEI recently joined with a number of other critical infrastructure operators in writing a letter to U.S. Senator Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, who is sponsor of a bill that would extend authority to conduct counter measures against drones perceived as threats to state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement agencies. Currently, only a handful of federal agencies are authorized to safely bring down drones that threaten critical infrastructure and other significant potential targets.

As with virtually all private and public infrastructure operators, power companies’ choice of counter-UAS systems are limited to those that detect the presence of drones in their airspace. Aaronson said that in defense against drone incursions, electric companies employ a wide variety of different technologies to monitor the skies above their infrastructure asset and surrounding areas, with the level of protection dependent on the type and location of the asset.

“The electric infrastructure by definition is ubiquitous,” he said. “And so, we’re not necessarily concerned about every node on our system. The theory or philosophy around security is: you protect diamonds like diamonds and you protect pencils like pencils.”

He said many portions of the electrical system are not considered to be “single points of failure” that are critical to the day-to-day operations of the grid. “

“They are critical in that they are part of critical infrastructure, but they’re part of a bigger whole and so those are something that are going to be treated a little bit differently than for example a nuclear power plant,” he said.

“And so, how you’re going to protect a substation serving a couple hundred customers in the middle of nowhere is going to be very, very different versus how you are going to protect a nuclear power plant that is serving millions of people and is critical to operations across an entire region.

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Read more:

• Navigating the Limits: Federal Laws Restrict Counter-Drone Measures for Critical Infrastructure
• Drones in the Wrong Hands: How Criminals Use UAVs to Threaten Prisons and Jails
• Congressional Hearing Reveals Gaps in Counter-Drone Readiness Amid Concerns About N.Y./N.J. Drone Sightings
• Congressional Hearing, Part 2: Counter Drone Experts Urge Decentralized Innovation, Collaboration

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.