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Biden administration warns states of cyberattack threat to water, wastewater systems

News Feed
Wednesday, March 20, 2024

The Biden administration warned governors on Tuesday that “disabling” cyberattacks are targeting drinking water and wastewater systems throughout the country and urged them to help identify and address any vulnerabilities. Water and wastewater systems can represent an “attractive target” for cyberattacks because of their essential nature and frequent lack of “resources and technical capacity to adopt rigorous cybersecurity practices,” Michael Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said in a letter. “Even basic cybersecurity precautions – such as resetting default passwords or updating software to address known vulnerabilities – are not in place and can mean the difference between business as usual and a disruptive cyberattack," Regan and Sullivan said. They called on the governors to help ensure that all their state’s water systems identify any significant vulnerabilities, put in place practices to reduce cybersecurity risks and exercise plans to prepare for a potential cyber incident. Cyber actors affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and China have recently targeted critical U.S. infrastructure, including drinking water systems, Regan and Sullivan noted. IRGC-affiliated actors targeted and disabled operational technology at water facilities that failed to change a default manufacturer password late last year, while a Chinese state-sponsored cyber group has compromised the IT environments of several critical infrastructure organizations and appears to be pre-positioning itself to disrupt operations. “Drinking water and wastewater systems are a lifeline for communities, but many systems have not adopted important cybersecurity practices to thwart potential cyberattacks,” Regan said in a press release. The administration is inviting state environmental, health and homeland security secretaries to a meeting to discuss cyber threats to water systems and plans to form a Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force, according to the letter. “EPA and [National Security Council] take these threats very seriously and will continue to partner with state environmental, health, and homeland security leaders to address the pervasive and challenging risk of cyberattacks on water systems,” Regan added.

The Biden administration warned governors on Tuesday that “disabling” cyberattacks are targeting drinking water and wastewater systems throughout the country and urged them to help identify and address any vulnerabilities. Water and wastewater systems can represent an “attractive target” for cyberattacks because of their essential nature and frequent lack of “resources and technical capacity to...

The Biden administration warned governors on Tuesday that “disabling” cyberattacks are targeting drinking water and wastewater systems throughout the country and urged them to help identify and address any vulnerabilities.

Water and wastewater systems can represent an “attractive target” for cyberattacks because of their essential nature and frequent lack of “resources and technical capacity to adopt rigorous cybersecurity practices,” Michael Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said in a letter.

“Even basic cybersecurity precautions – such as resetting default passwords or updating software to address known vulnerabilities – are not in place and can mean the difference between business as usual and a disruptive cyberattack," Regan and Sullivan said.

They called on the governors to help ensure that all their state’s water systems identify any significant vulnerabilities, put in place practices to reduce cybersecurity risks and exercise plans to prepare for a potential cyber incident.

Cyber actors affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and China have recently targeted critical U.S. infrastructure, including drinking water systems, Regan and Sullivan noted.

IRGC-affiliated actors targeted and disabled operational technology at water facilities that failed to change a default manufacturer password late last year, while a Chinese state-sponsored cyber group has compromised the IT environments of several critical infrastructure organizations and appears to be pre-positioning itself to disrupt operations.

“Drinking water and wastewater systems are a lifeline for communities, but many systems have not adopted important cybersecurity practices to thwart potential cyberattacks,” Regan said in a press release.

The administration is inviting state environmental, health and homeland security secretaries to a meeting to discuss cyber threats to water systems and plans to form a Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force, according to the letter.

“EPA and [National Security Council] take these threats very seriously and will continue to partner with state environmental, health, and homeland security leaders to address the pervasive and challenging risk of cyberattacks on water systems,” Regan added.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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‘We feel we’re fighting a losing battle’: the race to remove millions of plastic beads from Camber Sands

A huge cleanup effort has seen volunteers working to remove beads by hand and machine. They can only wait and see the extent of damage to wildlife and dune habitatJust past a scrum of dog walkers, about 40 people are urgently combing through the sand on hands and knees. Their task is to try to remove millions of peppercorn-sized black plastic biobeads from where they have settled in the sand. Beyond them, a seal carcass grins menacingly, teeth protruding from its rotting skull.Last week, an environmental disaster took place on Camber Sands beach, on what could turn out to be an unprecedented scale. Eastbourne Wastewater Treatment Works, owned by Southern Water, experienced a mechanical failure and spewed out millions of biobeads on to the Sussex coastline. Southern Water has since taken responsibility for the spill. Ironically, biobeads are used to clean wastewater – bacteria attach to their rough, crinkly surface and clean the water of contaminants.Camber Sands is one of England’s most popular beaches, with rare dune habitat Continue reading...

Just past a scrum of dog walkers, about 40 people are urgently combing through the sand on hands and knees. Their task is to try to remove millions of peppercorn-sized black plastic biobeads from where they have settled in the sand. Beyond them, a seal carcass grins menacingly, teeth protruding from its rotting skull.Last week, an environmental disaster took place on Camber Sands beach, on what could turn out to be an unprecedented scale. Eastbourne Wastewater Treatment Works, owned by Southern Water, experienced a mechanical failure and spewed out millions of biobeads on to the Sussex coastline. Southern Water has since taken responsibility for the spill. Ironically, biobeads are used to clean wastewater – bacteria attach to their rough, crinkly surface and clean the water of contaminants.In the days since, volunteers have flocked to the beach. On a chilly November morning, beneath a blue sky, they painstakingly pick out the minuscule beads by hand. It is mind-numbingly tedious work.Others – much to the envy of the hand-pickers – have sieves. One volunteer has fashioned a sieve from a mesh onion sack found nearby.“We’re scooping up the sand, then pouring the sand over a bucket into a sieve, and then pouring the water on top, so that we just get the beads,” says Hastings resident Roisin O’Gorman.Andy Dinsdale, the founder of Strandliners, an environmental organisation that runs beach cleanups, says: “They’ve got to get down on their hands and knees, almost into the strandline [the line of seaweed and other debris that lines the high water mark on beaches], to look for very small 5mm black pellets. We can only do our best.”Kneeling on the sand, on your knees, just picking them out, one by one, is futileHe is noticeably exhausted from his days-long effort coordinating the cleanup. He has missed his son’s birthday celebrations, he says, to be here.Despite their valiant efforts, many volunteers feel helpless. Walking tramples the plastic further into the sand and overfilled bin bags of waste can split, putting workers back to square one. “Kneeling on the sand, on your knees, just picking them out, one by one, is futile,” says Nick, a volunteer from Tunbridge Wells, in frustration.To make more of a dent, experts have brought in a special machine. “Do you remember Teletubbies?” says Dinsdale. He points about a mile down the beach, towards what looks like a giant vacuum cleaner – remarkably reminiscent of the character Noo-Noo from the children’s television series – sucking up a carpet of black beads.This microplastic removal machine is the invention of Joshua Beech, an environmental scientist and founder of the cleanup organisation Nurdle. “It works by vacuuming up material, separating it by density, and then sieving and separating in the back [of the machine] so it comes out as nearly pure plastic in the collection trays,” he says.Beech and his colleague Roy Beal have spent five backbreaking days vacuuming the beach from sunrise to sunset. Beech hoists the heavy nozzle on to his shoulders while Beal holds it underarm. “He has a rugby player’s shoulders,” says Beal. “I have kayaker’s shoulders.”They hope that removing as many biobeads as possible can prevent more damage.Tamara Galloway, professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Exeter, says microplastics “overlap with the prey item size of many marine organisms and can enter the food web, with the potential to transfer contaminants into cells and tissues”.They can also break down and leach harmful compounds that affect animals’ hormones and cause reproductive problems. Local people are already concerned by an unusual number of stranded animals – three seals and a porpoise – that recently washed up on the beach. At this stage, the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP), which investigates strandings, doesn’t think these deaths are linked to the spill.Rye Harbour nature reserve, adjacent to Camber Sands, is Sussex Wildlife Trust’s largest reserve. This special area is “a matrix of wetland habitat”, influenced by and linked to the sea, says site manager Paul Tinsley-Marshall. “The vegetated shingle is a globally threatened habitat.” It is home to more than 4,355 species, including common, sandwich and little terns, oystercatchers, plovers and avocets. Biobead pollution has now been confirmed at Rye Harbour, and the reserve’s team is currently assessing the damage and carefully planning their cleanup of this sensitive habitat.According to Strandliners, there have been two previous large-scale biobead incidents reported to the Environment Agency, in 2010 and 2017.“This is the worst microplastic spill we’ve seen this year,” says Beech. Worse even than the spill of nurdles (pre-production plastic pellets) in March, when two ships collided in the North Sea. The plastic beads washed up on Norfolk beaches and the surrounding coastline.The harm caused by the biobeads at Camber may depend on their composition. Beads like these used to be recycled from potentially toxic e-waste until regulatory legislation in 2006. No one knows when these beads were made, Dinsdale says.With the sun due to set at 4.20pm, time on the beach is limited. “We’re fighting against the sunlight,” says volunteer Cate Lamb who has travelled from London with her partner, Khalid Flynn, and eight-year-old Maya Flynn. “We feel like we’re fighting a losing battle, a little, because of the scale of the challenge.”At that moment, her bucket splits.Rother district council says attempts to remove all the pellets have “proven impossible” and that they “expect further large amounts to be deposited in the coming weeks and months”.Beech and the Nurdle team hope to return after the next spring tide brings in more, but this is dependent on them being able to cover the costs of a second clean.The money they make selling recycled sheeting made from the beach plastics to fund future cleanups isn’t enough. “We can’t afford to come back,” says Beech. “But the environment needs us back.”Southern Water has apologised for the spill but Helena Dollimore, the MP for Hastings and Rye, wants it to go further by funding the cleanup and any future nature restoration. She is also calling for an independent investigation. “Southern Water cannot be trusted to mark their own homework,” she says.

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Weaponizing wastewater laws to block abortion

An anti-abortion group has been co-opting environmental laws in an effort to restrict access to medication abortion.

An anti-abortion group has been co-opting environmental laws in an effort to restrict access to medication abortion.

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London judge rules BHP Group liable for Brazil’s 2015 Samarco dam collapse

About 600,000 people seeking compensation a decade on from disaster that killed 19 and devastated villagesA London judge has ruled that the global mining company BHP Group is liable in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster, when a dam collapse 10 years ago unleashed tons of toxic waste into a major river, killing 19 people and devastating villages downstream.Mrs Justice O’Farrell said at the high court that Australia-based BHP was responsible despite not owning the dam at the time. Continue reading...

A London judge has ruled that global mining company BHP Group is liable in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster, when a dam collapse 10 years ago unleashed tons of toxic waste into a major river, killing 19 people and devastating villages downstream.Mrs Justice O’Farrell said at the high court that Australia-based BHP was responsible despite not owning the dam at the time.Anglo-Australian BHP owns 50% of Samarco, the Brazilian company that operates the iron ore mine where the tailings dam ruptured on 5 November 2015, sending as much as 40m cubic metres of mining into the Doce River in south-eastern Brazil.Sludge from the burst dam destroyed the once-bustling village of Bento Rodrigues in Minas Gerais state and badly damaged other towns.The disaster also killed 14 tonnes of freshwater fish and damaged 370 miles (600 miles) of the Doce River, according to a study by the University of Ulster in the UK. The river, which the Krenak Indigenous people revere as a deity, has yet to recover.About 600,000 Brazilians are seeking £36bn ($47bn) in compensation, although the ruling only addressed liability. A second phase of the trial will determine damages.The case was filed in Britain because one of BHP’s two main legal entities was based in London at the time.The trial began in October 2024, just days before Brazil’s federal government reached a multibillion-dollar settlement with the mining companies.Under the agreement, Samarco, which is also half owned by Brazilian mining company Vale, agreed to pay 132 billion reais ($23bn) over 20 years. The payments were meant to compensate for human, environmental and infrastructure damage.BHP had said the UK legal action was unnecessary because it duplicated matters covered by legal proceedings in Brazil.

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MIT senior turns waste from the fishing industry into biodegradable plastic

Jacqueline Prawira’s innovation, featured on CBS’s “The Visioneers,” tackles one of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.

Sometimes the answers to seemingly intractable environmental problems are found in nature itself. Take the growing challenge of plastic waste. Jacqueline Prawira, an MIT senior in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), has developed biodegradable, plastic-like materials from fish offal, as featured in a recent segment on the CBS show “The Visioneers with Zay Harding.” “We basically made plastics to be too good at their job. That also means the environment doesn’t know what to do with this, because they simply won’t degrade,” Prawira told Harding. “And now we’re literally drowning in plastic. By 2050, plastics are expected to outweigh fish in the ocean.” “The Visioneers” regularly highlights environmental innovators. The episode featuring Prawira premiered during a special screening at Climate Week NYC on Sept. 24.Her inspiration came from the Asian fish market her family visits. Once the fish they buy are butchered, the scales are typically discarded. “But I also started noticing they’re actually fairly strong. They’re thin, somewhat flexible, and pretty lightweight, too, for their strength,” Prawira says. “And that got me thinking: Well, what other material has these properties? Plastics.” She transformed this waste product into a transparent, thin-film material that can be used for disposable products such as grocery bags, packaging, and utensils. Both her fish-scale material and a composite she developed don’t just mimic plastic — they address one of its biggest flaws. “If you put them in composting environments, [they] will degrade on their own naturally without needing much, if any, external help,” Prawira says. This isn’t Prawira’s first environmental innovation. Working in DMSE Professor Yet-Ming Chiang’s lab, she helped develop a low-carbon process for making cement — the world’s most widely used construction material, and a major emitter of carbon dioxide. The process, called silicate subtraction, enables compounds to form at lower temperatures, cutting fossil fuel use. Prawira and her co-inventors in the Chiang lab are also using the method to extract valuable lithium with zero waste. The process is patented and is being commercialized through the startup Rock Zero. For her achievements, Prawira recently received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, awarded to undergraduates pursuing careers in science, mathematics, or engineering. In her “Visioneers” interview, she shared her hope for more sustainable ways of living. “I’m hoping that we can have daily lives that can be more in sync with the environment,” Prawira said. “So you don’t always have to choose between the convenience of daily life and having to help protect the environment.”

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What should countries do with their nuclear waste?

A new study by MIT researchers analyzes different nuclear waste management strategies, with a focus on the radionuclide iodine-129.

One of the highest-risk components of nuclear waste is iodine-129 (I-129), which stays radioactive for millions of years and accumulates in human thyroids when ingested. In the U.S., nuclear waste containing I-129 is scheduled to be disposed of in deep underground repositories, which scientists say will sufficiently isolate it.Meanwhile, across the globe, France routinely releases low-level radioactive effluents containing iodine-129 and other radionuclides into the ocean. France recycles its spent nuclear fuel, and the reprocessing plant discharges about 153 kilograms of iodine-129 each year, under the French regulatory limit.Is dilution a good solution? What’s the best way to handle spent nuclear fuel? A new study by MIT researchers and their collaborators at national laboratories quantifies I-129 release under three different scenarios: the U.S. approach of disposing spent fuel directly in deep underground repositories, the French approach of dilution and release, and an approach that uses filters to capture I-129 and disposes of them in shallow underground waste repositories.The researchers found France’s current practice of reprocessing releases about 90 percent of the waste’s I-129 into the biosphere. They found low levels of I-129 in ocean water around France and the U.K.’s former reprocessing sites, including the English Channel and North Sea. Although the low level of I-129 in the water in Europe is not considered to pose health risks, the U.S. approach of deep underground disposal leads to far less I-129 being released, the researchers found.The researchers also investigated the effect of environmental regulations and technologies related to I-129 management, to illuminate the tradeoffs associated with different approaches around the world.“Putting these pieces together to provide a comprehensive view of Iodine-129 is important,” says MIT Assistant Professor Haruko Wainwright, a first author on the paper who holds a joint appointment in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “There are scientists that spend their lives trying to clean up iodine-129 at contaminated sites. These scientists are sometimes shocked to learn some countries are releasing so much iodine-129. This work also provides a life-cycle perspective. We’re not just looking at final disposal and solid waste, but also when and where release is happening. It puts all the pieces together.”MIT graduate student Kate Whiteaker SM ’24 led many of the analyses with Wainwright. Their co-authors are Hansell Gonzalez-Raymat, Miles Denham, Ian Pegg, Daniel Kaplan, Nikolla Qafoku, David Wilson, Shelly Wilson, and Carol Eddy-Dilek. The study appears today in Nature Sustainability.Managing wasteIodine-129 is often a key focus for scientists and engineers as they conduct safety assessments of nuclear waste disposal sites around the world. It has a half-life of 15.7 million years, high environmental mobility, and could potentially cause cancers if ingested. The U.S. sets a strict limit on how much I-129 can be released and how much I-129 can be in drinking water — 5.66 nanograms per liter, the lowest such level of any radionuclides.“Iodine-129 is very mobile, so it is usually the highest-dose contributor in safety assessments,” Wainwright says.For the study, the researchers calculated the release of I-129 across three different waste management strategies by combining data from current and former reprocessing sites as well as repository assessment models and simulations.The authors defined the environmental impact as the release of I-129 into the biosphere that humans could be exposed to, as well as its concentrations in surface water. They measured I-129 release per the total electrical energy generated by a 1-gigawatt power plant over one year, denoted as kg/GWe.y.Under the U.S. approach of deep underground disposal with barrier systems, assuming the barrier canisters fail at 1,000 years (a conservative estimate), the researchers found 2.14 x 10–8 kg/GWe.y of I-129 would be released between 1,000 and 1 million years from today.They estimate that 4.51 kg/GWe.y of I-129, or 91 percent of the total, would be released into the biosphere in the scenario where fuel is reprocessed and the effluents are diluted and released. About 3.3 percent of I-129 is captured by gas filters, which are then disposed of in shallow subsurfaces as low-level radioactive waste. A further 5.2 percent remains in the waste stream of the reprocessing plant, which is then disposed of as high-level radioactive waste.If the waste is recycled with gas filters to directly capture I-129, 0.05 kg/GWe.y of the I-129 is released, while 94 percent is disposed of in the low-level disposal sites. For shallow disposal, some kind of human disruption and intrusion is assumed to occur after government or institutional control expires (typically 100-1,000 years). That results in a potential release of the disposed amount to the environment after the control period.Overall, the current practice of recycling spent nuclear fuel releases the majority of I-129 into the environment today, while the direct disposal of spent fuel releases around 1/100,000,000 that amount over 1 million years. When the gas filters are used to capture I-129, the majority of I-129 goes to shallow underground repositories, which could be accidentally released through human intrusion down the line.The researchers also quantified the concentration of I-129 in different surface waters near current and former fuel reprocessing facilities, including the English Channel and the North Sea near reprocessing plants in France and U.K. They also analyzed the U.S. Columbia River downstream of a site in Washington state where material for nuclear weapons was produced during the Cold War, and they studied a similar site in South Carolina. The researchers found far higher concentrations of I-129 within the South Carolina site, where the low-level radioactive effluents were released far from major rivers and hence resulted in less dilution in the environment.“We wanted to quantify the environmental factors and the impact of dilution, which in this case affected concentrations more than discharge amounts,” Wainwright says. “Someone might take our results to say dilution still works: It’s reducing the contaminant concentration and spreading it over a large area. On the other hand, in the U.S., imperfect disposal has led to locally higher surface water concentrations. This provides a cautionary tale that disposal could concentrate contaminants, and should be carefully designed to protect local communities.”Fuel cycles and policyWainwright doesn’t want her findings to dissuade countries from recycling nuclear fuel. She says countries like Japan plan to use increased filtration to capture I-129 when they reprocess spent fuel. Filters with I-129 can be disposed of as low-level waste under U.S. regulations.“Since I-129 is an internal carcinogen without strong penetrating radiation, shallow underground disposal would be appropriate in line with other hazardous waste,” Wainwright says. “The history of environmental protection since the 1960s is shifting from waste dumping and release to isolation. But there are still industries that release waste into the air and water. We have seen that they often end up causing issues in our daily life — such as CO2, mercury, PFAS and others — especially when there are many sources or when bioaccumulation happens. The nuclear community has been leading in waste isolation strategies and technologies since the 1950s. These efforts should be further enhanced and accelerated. But at the same time, if someone does not choose nuclear energy because of waste issues, it would encourage other industries with much lower environmental standards.”The work was supported by MIT’s Climate Fast Forward Faculty Fund and the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Climate
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