Joe Weiss, an international authority on cybersecurity, told me he has catalogued nearly 12 million control system cyber incidents, the first of which involved the computer that guided Apollo 17 to the moon. Although the computer glitch was discovered while the Saturn V rocket was still on the ground, Mission Control decided not to abort the flight, and it went off without a hitch, despite the faulty sensor.
Weiss said even today’s most state-of-the-art sensor has failed in 69 of 139 manufacturing safety requirements listed in ISA 62443-4-2, putting the nation’s fuel pipelines, electrical grids, and other systems in danger of failure. Even the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant has “no cybersecurity, no authentication, no cyber logging, anything, in any of those devices.”
So while the nation focuses on the Colonial Pipeline communications system hack, the operational technology — the sensors, actuators, drive valves, motors, pumps, and relays — could fail at any time, potentially causing explosions and loss of life.
Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Released In Florida
Nature reports that, over the objections of Florida residents, Oxitec, a biotechnology firm based in Abingdon, United Kingdon, has released genetically engineered mosquitoes into the Florida Keys in hopes of reducing the population of mosquitoes that can carry diseases such as Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.
While the company already has field-tested the insects in Brazil, Panama, the Cayman Islands, and Malaysia, such experiments have never been allowed in the United States, and Barry Wray of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, told the Daily Mail that “People here in Florida do not consent to the genetically engineered mosquitoes or to being human experiments.”
The first phase of the project is releasing as many as 144,000 genetically engineered mosquitoes over the next 12 weeks. Ultimately, up to a billion will be released in Monroe County. The bioengineered male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which don’t bite, are expected to mate with the wild female population which does bite prey and can transmit disease. The males carry an altered gene that passes to their offspring and kills female progeny in early larval stages. Male offspring will pass the gene to future generations, leading to a dwindling population of the insects.
Lithium Gold Rush
The New York Times carried an in-depth article about the rush to mine lithium, necessary for the batteries powering electric vehicles. With the government’s emphasis on ending the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels, “Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife, and people.”
The Lithium Americas project, which involves blasting and digging out a giant pit atop a long-dormant volcano in northern Nevada, has drawn protests from members of a Native American tribe, ranchers, and environmental groups. It would use billions of gallons of ground water, potentially contaminating some of it for 300 years, while leaving behind a giant mound of waste, according to opponents.
Berkshire Hathaway, Controlled Thermal Resources, and Materials Research are looking at a more environmentally friendly process that would extract lithium from the brine of the Salton Sea after the water passes through geothermal plants. Created by flooding from the Colorado River more than a century ago, the Salton Sea and lithium extraction projects like it could produce about 100,000 tons of lithium annually, or 20 times the current domestic production.
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Tom, this is great journalism! In depth good investigations!