Yes. The biggest risk is of process controllers being reconfigured to cause physical damage. For instance, gas turbines can be cranked up to speeds & temperatures at which the turbine blades disintegrate. Or you can shut off combustion but keep fuel flowing, then restart combustion and get an explosion in the exhaust system.

Why not just design equipment to have analog fail-safes? To get the last few percent of efficiency out of many systems you have to push them beyond what can be simply protected with fuses and analog shutoffs, and depend on software.

Nuclear reactors can't just be turned off. You have to keep the cooling pumps running or the core overheats.

Solar thermal farms can be hacked to point all the mirrors wrong and melt the tower.

Large windmills have very complicated wind speed/blade angle controls, and can be made to disintegrate in minutes with the right inputs.

All the effects I mentioned are local to one system. It's not clear if there's an attack that depends on the dynamics of the overall grid. But I can understand why researchers focus on the largest possible abstraction, rather than writing detailed engineering papers about turbine failure modes.

Actually it depends heavily on the design of the reactor. I recall that more modern designs have either far higher or complete degrees of 'passive' safety. The very heat of the reactor being sufficient to circulate the cooling loop at a safe level.

Really we should be planning for the active replacement of //ALL// infrastructure within it's designed service lifetime or less (since invariably it'll take longer than initially estimated to accomplish).

Modern designs do that, but paradoxically it's the political environment of anti-nuclear fearmongering that makes it impossible to switch to them.

> Attacks against the power grid are weak because, in almost every scenario you can conjure, the remediation is just disconnecting the network and flipping the on switch.

In two of the last four winters, I've lost power for extended periods of 4 and 5 days, respectively. It's not fun, and even with friends, family and businesses in the area that did still have power that we could depend on, it was difficult. These types of issues are not flip the switch to reset, there is physical damage that needs to be repaired. Imagine this on a much larger scale and it is pretty scary.

If you've never watched the document Zero Days [1], I recommend it. Towards the end, they mention (and the documentary pulls from quotes and testimony of many intelligence personnel) that Olympic Games (Stuxnet) is just the tip of the iceberg, and that we essentially own Iran top to bottom. We completely own their power grid and could destroy strategic pieces of it in the same way we destroyed the centrifuges..using only code. They state that with something like this it could take weeks or months to fully get power restored. Considering the fact that water plants, refrigeration, businesses, etc. depend on that power, access to clean food and water would likely be severely limited, probably also leading to looting, riots and violence...a not-insignificant number of innocent civilians would certainly die.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5446858/

Restarting a down grid is nontrivial. Small power stations are used to kickstart the larger stations. Think of the starter motor in a car. Now do all of this while precisely maintaining 60 Hz (in the US) everywhere.

This is called a "black start". [1] Definitely nontrivial.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

Can they still do it the old fashioned way with a telephone to coordinate and an oscilloscope to line up the phase?

Back in 2014-ish, when Eskom in South Africa was having particular problems with blackouts, they discussed this possibility. Some estimates on restart times were given at the time, but this is the only reference I could find now: https://africacheck.org/reports/does-south-african-face-an-e...

> What is a very important thing that would impact lots of people that is very easy to do or set in motion, but much harder to un-do or stop?

War. WW1 was started by a student with a pistol and resulted in >30m people killed or wounded.

The conflict that started on 9/11 fifteen years ago is still ongoing and has cost over a trillion dollars and a million lives, having destabilised Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. Turkey may be next.

Terrorism suceeds when it provokes a spiral of escalation. Perhaps a grid collapse is fine - everyone goes on holiday for a day and hangs out with their neighbour, NYC passim, but a grid collapse plus a more conventional terrorist attack?

WW1 was inevitable. The incident that triggered it was irrelevant.

That's pretty much the case that's being made of a widespread grid failure.

> Everything that has an off switch has an on switch.

That is very naive. You can say that only because real and well organized attacks are very very rare.

Power Grid on its own is very complex system, and it is not trivial to revive it after blackout.

And second paragraph does not save it. Weak spots are everywhere. A few guys with rented trucks could cause blackout in several counties for weeks.

> not trivial to revive it after blackout

and yet, we do it on the regular.

edit:

> real and well organized attacks are very very rare

and why is that? if the system is as vulnerable as they say and the world is as full of enemies as they say then why is it not constantly going down?

> and yet, we do it on the regular.

No, we don't. When the whole grid is down the power stations have to shut down - they can't run without load. Power stations require power to start up, and without power on the lines there's no synchronisation.

There are facilities designed to start a grid, the utilities are prepared, but it generally takes 6-8 hours to get synchronisation to a level where the main generators can get back online.

As most major generators are a long way from population centres (and their primary load) a coordinated attack could partition most country's grids in a way that ensures a long term blackout.

As it turns out, the world is not as full of enemies as they say. Additionally, most symmetric actors generally also like to avoid their own downfall.

> Everything that has an off switch has an on switch.

Not really. The ultimate off switch for every appliance is that appliance burning out. And quite a lot of dangers to the power grid include, or would cause, physical destruction of key infrastructure elements.

that scenario is covered in the second paragraph ;)

I think the point is that a single high altitude EMP burst would do so much physical damage that the grids would be offline for for a long time.