Control room at Palo Verde nuclear plant || Wikipedia
Opinion: A 2019 incident at Arizona’s Palo Verde nuclear plant and others should be our wakeup call: Bad actors could easily damage to the nation’s power grid.
By Phil Boas || The Arizona Republic
Attacks against the U.S. power grid have spiked. Arizona must get and stay ahead of these threats.
The U.S. power grid is facing a rise in attacks at a rate not seen in at least a decade.
These physical and cyberattacks on facilities are raising the alarm about the vulnerability of American electrical generation.
They’re also raising questions about who might be attacking the grid and whether they are coordinating efforts or perhaps performing trial runs before a larger assault on the U.S. power supply.
After analyzing the data, Politico determined that attacks on power infrastructure have reached their highest level since 2012.
On Dec. 3, saboteurs used firearms to attack two Duke Energy substations in Moore County, N.C., that shut down power to 45,000 people.
On Christmas Day, four substations belonging to Tacoma Public Utilities and Puget Sound Energy were attacked, knocking out power to 14,000 customers in Washington state.
“Overall, the past three years have been the most active for reported attacks on the grid in the past decade,” reported Politico.
Remember the drones at Palo Verde?
With the threat against power plants and substations rising, this is a good time to revisit what happened at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station on two successive nights in September 2019.
