Earthquake in Japan causes Oil refinery fire and Nuclear Power Plant fire
For a more recent update on the nuclear plant incident please click here.
Tokyo, March 12 update- Pressure at one of the Daiichi reactors is continuing to rise, worrying the authorities. Reportedly radioactive steam from one reactor was vented out after evacuating residents in a 10 Km radius in Fukushima, about 170 miles north of Tokyo.
Tokyo, Mar 11, 2011- An earthquake of a very large magnitude (8.9 on the Richter scale) has caused massive damage at an oil refinery as well as a nuclear power plant. The Cosmo oil refinery, near the city of Ichihara, in Chiba prefecture experienced a massive blaze after the earthquake hit. You can see it in the video below.
According to reports, natural gas storage tanks were part of the blaze. It is still not clear if the fire is under control. Things are equally bad, if not worse at the various Nuclear Power plants, where safety shutdown systems are automatically programmed to shut down the plants in case of an earthquake above a certain magnitude. Residents near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, located about 170 miles north east of Tokyo, were reportedly evacuated after the cooling system failed, triggering a fear of a possible nuclear meltdown. If cooling water is unable to be pumped to the core, then it may cause the reactor to melt and carry over into a steel containment vessel, which also has an outer concrete containment chamber. So far no reports suggest that anything has come into the containment chambers.However this thought itself is scary as if something radioactive does escape, it can cause severe radiation damage to large parts of the countryside.
Meanwhile apparently Ms. Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State has informed that the US Military has transported additional coolant to the facility and will extend its help as needed.
There are reports of a fire in the turbines of the Onagawa Nuclear Power plant, while another facility at the same site is having a “water leak”, which is not good news at all.
The unprecendented nuclear power shutdown means that large swathes of areas are without any electricity at all, making the disaster worse than it had to be. Though diesel backup power generators are on, they cannot substitute for all the load. The earthquake highlights the consequential accidents and damages that can occur due to a natural phenomenon such as an earthquake.
The incident also highlights that supposedly “clean” nuclear power has a very big disadvantage-the danger of a radiation leak after something like an earthquake. Environmentalists please note!
Meanwhile various news reports suggest that there could be various nuclear facilities in Japan which could have failures that have been unreported so far, which is cause for worry. This has caused the Japanese government to declare an “atomic emergency”, a scary word indeed, not only for the Japanese, but for all of us as well.
HAZOP Study- A primer for technical professionals
Miami, Jan 29, 2011 – This article will present some information about HAZOP (acronym that stands for Hazard and Operability Study) that is used in process plants such as Oil and Gas facilities, chemical plants, power plants and similar installations, to assess the safety aspects of the plant and related facilities.
If you would like a more detailed coverage and training related to HAZOP, you can download the HAZOP Training Course from here.
HAZOP is a technique that started out circa 1960s as “efficiency” studies in ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) in the UK. At that time it was the rage to do efficiency and productivity studies on various operations in different kinds of industries (it was the golden era of Industrial Engineering) and some bright spark decided to try it out on a spanking new design of a phenol plant was on the design board.
Well, he opened a can of worms, as it were, because the efficiency improvement study found several holes in operational safety as well and the technique of HAZOP was born. Inititally it was confined only to ICIs internal departments, but later on it spread via conferences and papers to other companies as well and soon became an established safety technique.
The Bhopal incident that happened two decades later was a wake up call to the global chemicals and process industries and HAZOP began to be used not only for new plants at the design stage but also for older plants, modifications, shutdowns and turnarounds and so on. The process not only improved Safety but also operational ease.
In the typical HAZOP methodology, a plant or a subsystem of the plant (called a node) is chosen for study. Then all deviations are studied against the original intentions and permutations and combinations give rise to possibilities that can result in accidents. These are then assessed to modify the design or the workflow, so that the process becomes safer. Of course there is much more to this and it requires training in the technique plus a few real life HAZOP studies to really master the technique.
Today one cannot think of not using HAZOP in a process plant, it has become ubiquitous. However being subjective, the result of the HAZOP study depends greatly on the people that comprise the team carrying it out and a bad HAZOP from a bad team results in the plant being even more unsafe than had there been no HAZOP at all! As we always say, incompetence is worse than malfeasance, because malicious people will behave in certain predictable ways, but incompetent people can be incompetent and stupid in several ways that can never be thought of by the rest of humanity. So it is very important that only trained and competent people are in charge of HAZOPs.
Gas Leak in Indian pharma facility results in two fatalities
Hyderabad, India Dec 21- A suspected gas leak was reported at a facility operated by Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, a major Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer in Hyderabad. The leak resulted in two fatalities, both of whom were contract workers. Local sources say that an additional four persons were shifted to a local hospital after the incident.
No information was forthcoming from the company officials regarding the incident. Local police are said to be investigating.
Local media reports say that the gas that leaked was Nitrogen, which was inhaled by the workers and caused asphyxiation.
Nitrogen, though an inert gas can be extremely harmful to humans as it tends to displace Oxygen and causes asphyxiation. We had posted on this blog about the dangers of nitrogen, you can read the article here.
Industrial gases can be extremely dangerous if not monitored. However monitoring with gas monitors and gas detectors also requires training in understanding, selection and placement, as well as calibration and maintenance of gas monitors. To do this we recommend an excellent training course on gas monitors. Find out more about it here.
Stuxnet- The story gets worse
Oct 21, 2010-The Stuxnet story is going from bad to worse. What seemed to be a fringe incident of a worm (that infects only Siemens make PLC, SCADA and DCS systems) is slowly getting to be, well, mainstream. The infection which was thought to be restricted to less than a hundred systems now seems to be much more widespread. For those of you who missed our earlier report on Stuxnet, please click here.
The respected Control Global journal estimates that the brunt of the attack has been borne by Iran, where 33,000 installations have been affected, followed by Indonesia at 10,000 systems affected , followed by India at 5000 systems (approx numbers). While most plant managers and engineers who have non Siemens systems may be relieved (not in my backyard), there is hardly any room for complacency. Today it was Siemens, tomorrow it could be any other PLC or DCS vendor’s systems. To make matters worse, several systems now have Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS for short) integrated with the main control system, as against the SIS being largely relay and hardware interlock driven as in the old days. This means that a worm could theoretically infect an SIS and may cause havoc. Could be an environmental disaster. Have Safety Managers in industrial plants assessed the threat realistically? We do not think so. This issue should get far more attention than it is getting now.
Else we may get another Bhopal or a Three Mile Island due to a worm. Hardly a comfortable feeling, don’t you think?
Your thoughts are welcome.
Stuxnet-implications for industrial safety in plants using PLC, SCADA or DCS
Oct 18, 2010- Now with the advent of the Stuxnet, the world’s first known computer system worm, meant only to target industrial control systems, plant safety managers should sit up and take notice. Upto now you had to bother about fires, explosions, worker safety violations, legal permits and these kind of issues. Very soon you may have to worry about computer worms attacking plant control systems and wreaking havoc.
The Stuxnet worm that began appearing sometime reportedly in April of this year is designed apparently to only target industrial control systems made by Siemens. These include SCADA software like WinCC and the SIMATIC programming tools that are used to configure and program PLCs of the S7 series.
First a brief backgrounder for those who are not much aware of modern industrial control systems-PLCs are short for Programmable Logic Controllers and SCADA is shortform for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems. DCS is shorthand for Distributed Control Systems. It was always known that a virus or worm could potentially infect an industrial control system but this threat largely remained ignored because
a) No apparent benefit could accrue to any unethical hacker/cracker or similar person by writing malicious code for industrial computers
b) Since many of these systems are isolated from the internet, they are safe.
Turns out both these assumptions were totally wrong.Apparently some criminal or similar elements did write malicious code targeting DCS/PLC/SCADA systems and it did not matter that these systems were isolated from the internet. The infections were spread from USB drives!
Reports indicate that Stuxnet may have infected upto a hundred such industrial systems in India, China, Iran and even Germany. Initial analysis of the code indicates that it is specifically targeted towards Siemens systems and behaves in the following manner
a) It tries to identify the host. If it is a Siemens system it begins its work. Some experts say that it tries to capture control of the plant by infecting the PLCs and RTU (remote terminal units) and other controllers that control motors, pumps and valves. It then tries to change setpoints, modify programs and interlocks and generally can cause a lot of unexplained behavior of equipment
b) If the host is not a Siemens system, it does nothing-it lies dormant
c) It has a Kill switch- a date set out in 2012 after which it will self destruct.
The whole possibilities of such worm are horrible to contemplate! So sit up and take notice, do something! Do not confine your work to just enforcing personal safety such as wearing of helmets by personnel and taking permits for hazardous work. Lookout for hidden threats like Stuxnet-they have the potential to cause disasters far worse than what could be caused by human error.
Comments are welcome below.
