East of Miami, under the tropical liquid heat and along the smooth white sands nestled into the Atlantic, the small city of Riviera Beach waits idly inside a digital paralysis. The looming threat of cyber security attacks dropped through golden air and punctuated the city’s computer systems. In the stalled doldrums of the last three weeks, employees of the city have waded through a frustrating tapestry of locked emails, inaccessible bank accounts, blocked call logs and records, just to name a few. Local emergency dispatchers are unable to record 911 calls and even the police have had to issue paper citations and keep their records by hand. In essence, the governmental functions of Riviera Beach have been suspended until they agree to pay a $600, 000 ransom to faceless and virtually untraceable computer hackers.

            With little choice, city officials agreed to pay the ransom this week, using the hackers’ preferred payment in bit coins. The coastal Florida city isn’t alone—last year major cyber attacks fell upon Atlanta, Newark, and Baltimore, the latter of which is still struggling to bring their services back online after refusing to pay the ransom. The truth is that cyber attacks are becoming an increasingly prevalent side effect of the rabid digital world we have grown into as a species. With the all-encompassing rise of technology, with the connective wires roaming the planet in spades, also come the bullet holes by which cyber criminals can easily slip through. The plight of Riviera Beach could easily by the plight of a major corporation, a network of hospitals, or worse, a nuclear power plant.

            In that regard Otek has stepped up to the plate. We recently launched our brand new Solid State Analog Meter, colloquially known as the SSAM, that incorporates our award-winning patented technology with analog hardware to create a digital meter that can empirically be classified as a Cyber Security Exempt DPM. The secret lies in the meter’s construction—we designed it without any critical digital assets such as microprocessors, and using only good old fashioned CMOS logic. It functions like an advanced DPM, and does so without the potentially comprising parts cyber hackers love to pounce on. Going beyond even the security the SSAM offers, it also can play a major role in reducing the cyber security compliance costs NPP’s brush up against under the provisions of NEI 08-09. The SSAM also features a 4 ½ digit display, H.V. isolated alarm outputs, a post mortem signal fail alarm, and is covered by our lifetime warranty among many other exclusive features.

            With the world moving ever further under the digital cloud, it is imperative that we are proactive in guarding against cyber security threats. The lesson of Riviera Beach as proven what a reactive approach engenders.

            For more information on the SSAM or any of our other vast array of products please call our office at 520-748-7900 or email our sales office at sales@otekcorp.com

Fior Markets has released a global market study report entitled Global Process Instrumentation Market 2018 by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023, which predicts exponential growth for the process instrumentation market over the next five years. Several key players that are expected to shape and drive this growth are analyzed, including ABB Ltd, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Mitsubishi Electric, Honeywell International, and Yokogawa amidst a litany of others.

            The study takes a global approach, examining past market trends and their indicative futures along the key regions of North and Latin America, Africa, Europe, the Asiatic-Pacific area, and the Middle East. Competition among and within these regions has been extensively analyzed within the report. This inter-market competition is segmented into key areas, many of which overlap to show transparency, to underscore the dynamism and inclusive potential of the global market. Segmentation categories include: field instruments, control valves, analyzers (instrumentation type), and by Oil & Gas, Chemical & Pharmacy, Paper/Pulp, Water & Water Treatment, and of course, Power (application types).

            The study also poses several leading questions designed to make sense of the aforementioned data stream:

• What are the influencing factors for the growth of the global market?
• What are the major drivers and restraints of this market?
• Which regions are most demanding in terms of production and consumption?
• What are the key outcomes of industry analysis techniques?

            Overall the study predicts a progressive expansion of the instrumentation market over the next five years, mainly due to a diversified global economy, the increasing demand for greater and more efficient energy (which in turn drives up the need for precise measurement and control instrumentation), and the ineluctable rise of technology.

            As a recognized leader within the instrumentation industry, Otek prides itself on being part of this expected growth over the next five years. Our award-winning and patented technology continues to drive our commitment to innovation, precision, efficiency, and reliability every day. Our digital panel meters are enhanced with ultra-bright, pure white LED displays that nullifies the old parallax, inefficiency, and stuck needle syndrome of obsolete ammeters, and even replaces them form, fit, and function, using the same panels and wiring in most applications. Recently, we even became a Class 1E company because we believe our highly customizable and technologically advanced meters have enormous potential to help the nuclear industry.

             Otek is always looking toward tomorrow, with the lessons of the past firmly in hand.

            Give us a call at (520)748-7900 for more information on our products or email our sales department for a quote at sales@otekcorp.com.

            A sample copy of the Fior Market study may be obtained here: https://www.fiormarkets.com/report-detail/332965/request-sample

Earlier this week delegates and industry leaders from around the world gathered in London to hold court on the current state of nuclear industry. Billed as The Nuclear New Build 2019 Conference, the two day event broached several key topics affecting today’s nuclear energy, as well as influencing its directional future.

            A brief overview:

• Tim Stone opened the conference comparing the benefits of nuclear energy against their often perceived rivals, renewables such as solar and wind. He recalled a recent International Energy Agency report warning that decreased global nuclear power would empirically contribute to rising carbon emissions. He also joined with German-based Volkswagen decrying the German withdraw from nuclear energy and the disastrous effect it has had on the country’s energy expenses.
• EDF Energy managing director Humphrey Cadout-Hudson discussed the feasibility of diminishing nuclear plant construction costs by copying previous plant designs, as well as the massive potential of the new advanced and small modular (AMRS & SMRS) reactors in terms of both energy output and financial costs. These new age modular reactors became a continuous topic of interest throughout the conference.
• Nuclear Industry Council CEO David Blee continued the modular reactor talk in terms of the global market, noting, “AMR and SMRs are game changers that could lead to a “renaissance” in the supply chain.” The discussion continued over AMR’s and SMR’s as they pertain to individual countries’ nuclear energy output, at which the U.S.’s is expected to fall from 19% to 12% by 2050 unless modular reactors and policy changes are introduced.
• The conference concluded with a definitive commitment to global net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Skepticism remains prevalent unless governmental policies in key countries, such as the U.S. & Germany, are radically altered.

            While Otek did not attend the conference, our President and Owner Dr. Otto Fest is currently presenting a timely paper on nuclear I&C room’s efforts to digitize, and the economical feasibility of doing so. We have long supported the nuclear industry with a specialized line of DPMs that are uniquely designed to replace obsolete ammeters with Form, Fit, and Function technology, as well as adhere to NEI cyber security mandates.

            For more information on our pledge to the nuclear industry or any of our products, please give us a call at 520-748-7900 or email our sales department at sales@otekcorp.com.

There’s not much left to do. Science, reason, objectivity, truth—you can place these before the mind, just like you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink and you can’t make people think. And that, tragically enough, is the earthquake silently churning beneath our feet—the refusal to think. To cast aside our emotions, our ingrained perceptions, our hereditary notions of what is and what is not, our cultural tribes and our beloved self-image, our hopeless slavery to our reflection—to cast aside all this and remember what a real argument is, to be willing to be persuaded by soundness of thought, by logic, to hold no assumption or opinion too dear that it lies beyond the reach of transformative rationalization, to gaze with clean eyes upon the real shape of the world—to this we have become ghosts, strange and orphaned.

            No matter what scientific logic you place before this new wave of hysterical climate-changers, poltical junkies, and environmentalists, they will point and sneer from behind their entrenchments, their walls of ideology which they tie (curiously) to their own personal identity. Take a recent op-ed piece published on projectsyndicate.com by Emeritus Professor of Physics and Fellow of Keble College at the University of Oxford, Wade Allison, in which the distinguished professor lends his voice to the percussive tide of scientists, teachers, engineers, researchers etc. emphasizing the need for nuclear energy. The article begins from a historical perspective, somewhat unintentionally (perhaps) lending humor to the discussion when it refers to renewables as “pre-industrial revolution fuel” and “the fuel of our ancestors”—which technically, it is. And a thousand green voices go shrieking into the air…..In reality, however far from that we may now live, Professor Allison is spot-on. He is assessing the potential of a fuel based on its inherent energy potential—namely, the number of electricity units (kWh) in a kilogram (2.2 pounds). He proceeds methodically in comparison: Pre-Industrial Era fuel (water, wind, solar, & vegetation) carries an energy density of 0.0003kwh, Industrial Revolution fuel (coal, oil, & gas) carries a 1-7kwh density, and Nuclear Revolution-era fuel (uranium and thorium) boasts an energy density of 20 million per kilogram. What’s the significance?

            The Professor makes a clear delineation, “To harness sufficient energy, pre-industrial fuels need huge, nature-despoiling – hardly ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ – power stations: massive arrays of solar panels, forests of gigantic windmills, and vast flooded river valleys. Their size attests to the weakness of the energy that they collect, while intermittency implies a typical working availability of only 30%. And, as Germany’s Energiewende policy has demonstrated, these fuels are not enough.”

            Germany, as one recalls, famously abandoned nuclear energy in total capitulation to unfounded nuclear hysteria among its population and all in the supposed name of reducing carbon emissions—the result has been comically disastrous. Not only have the country’s CO2 emissions actually risen, they have also, by virtue of being unable to make up the energy deficit left by nuclear abdication, had to buy/borrow energy from France in order to meet their country’s needs. Their famed Energiewende has now become a global joke. France meanwhile, who went all-in on nuclear energy to the point they are leading the planet in recycled fuel technology, has cut their CO2 emissions by 16.4% since 1990.

  Aside from sheer carbon statistics, those who still hold the word “nuclear” in a vile, dark, and evil cabinet, will point without pause to radiation—by now I think it’s relatively safe to say that even the staunchest opponents of nuclear energy will concede that a power plant cannot explode—and they will be wrong. Professor Allison continues,“Apart from the solitary decay of radioactive atoms, nuclear energy is firmly locked inside individual nuclei, which never meet one another except at the center of the sun. Nuclei do not release their energy prematurely, because only a free neutron can override the lock, and such keys decay quickly: their half-life is ten minutes. As a result, nuclear energy can be released only inside a working reactor. Such is the exceptional physical safety of nuclear energy. Moreover, biology protects life from nuclear radiation. Over three billion years, life has evolved to survive the natural radiation from rocks and space, developing ways to recover from the damage caused. But that is a longer story. The point is that moderate exposures to radiation are effectively harmless. Even higher doses are used routinely to diagnose and cure cancers, thanks to the work of Marie Curie. The public accepts the use of nuclear technology for human health; it should do the same for the health of the planet. Yet, although fears of nuclear power have no scientific basis – indeed, nuclear power is far safer than any other energy source – they pervade public policy, with the risks often being fictionalized for the sake of entertainment.” 

            To say the future of the planet is at stake should engender the dismissal of secular politics and the unification of our global efforts toward one goal: reduction of our carbon footprint. Instead, so horribly predictable in the spectrum of human history, it has shredded us into warring tribes of ideology, politics, and emotion. The world could be on fire and we’d debate it. Sad, the legacy we leave to our children will not be of action, but of petty squabbling over who gets to say they’re right.

            Here at Otek we try to keep our technology and our commitment to our customers above the cultural fracas. We specialize in customizing our award-winning and patented technology, including our New Technology Series and our latest development, the Solid State Analog Meter or SSAM, to your application needs. We became a Class1E company to better serve to nuclear industry and help the United States retain its planetary leadership over nuclear power, with new metering endeavors that replace obsolete ammeters in nuclear I&C rooms Form, Fit, and Function with technologically advanced DPMs that can be classified as either cyber security compliant or exempt depending on the model. The future is nuclear, and Otek forever has its eyes on tomorrow.

            Interested in more information about our products and our pledge to help the nuclear industry? Please give us a call at 520-748-7900 or email our sales department at sales@otekcorp.com.

            The full article may be viewed here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nuclear-energy-clean-green-reliable-by-wade-allison-2019-06

The snake charmer plays his tune and the serpent rises, hypnotized, charmed. Yet beneath the allure of music, posturing, and theatre, lies the real question—who is charming whom? Unfortunately, it seems one can easily apply this question to the curious relationship between Democrats, their constituents, and the global albatross of climate change. The population stirs the clean energy song, the politicians writhe and moan to its music before the 2020 pulpit, and then turn around and hypnotize their voters with cartoonish promises of reduction deadlines, emission percentage goals, and prophetic demands levied at the high walls of industry, and the people swoon. Also known as the song and dance routine. Yet neither the snake nor the charmer, whomever each one is, performs the truth. Snakes cannot hear music and the charmer sees only his reflection. Vibrations and shadows.

The sound of the truth comes pouring in. The International Energy Agency (IEA) published a report last month detailing the ineluctable role nuclear energy must play in any initiative toward clean energy, stating “without more nuclear energy, global carbon dioxide emissions will surge and efforts to transition to a cleaner energy system will become drastically harder and more costly.” This speaks to an alarming gaffe in the Carbon Reduction/Clean Energy crusade—namely that where nuclear power plants are retired and shutdown, egregious carbon-spewing natural gas plants are erected to take their place and fill in the energy gap. This is almost universal in occurrence, which begs another question—how exactly does everyone screaming on their mothers’ graves that nuclear energy is a vile, evil, and shockingly dangerous option while flat-out demanding a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030, realistically expect to ever reach such a goal? Wishful thinking? Devout prayer? Armed coercion? The case is simply impossibly, as it has always been, without nuclear energy. As the IEA eloquently states: “$1.6 trillion in additional investment would be required in the electricity sector in advanced economies from 2018 to 2040 if the use of nuclear energy continued to decline. That, in turn, would mean higher prices, as electricity supply costs would be close to $80 billion higher per year on average for advanced economies as a whole.”

Within the same report the IEA addresses the favorite go-to of renewable zealots, wind and solar energy—they’re summation is simple: renewables alone are not enough. Among a simple reason, one that would even give the political/media spinsters a run for their money, is land-use conflicts. It turns out people and their communities simply don’t want to give up their land for thousand-acre solar panels or sprawling wind turbines. This is true in Europe as well as in the United States. “Resistance to siting wind and, to a lesser extent, solar farms is a major obstacle to scaling up renewables capacity”, the IEA states. In May, a county in Illinois voted against a 12,000 acre wind project that called for over 67 turbines reaching a height of nearly 600 feet—that same month also saw Indiana pass legislation preventing the zoning of land for industrial-scale wind turbines. Since 2015, over 200 government entities have rejected proposed wind projects, and solar projects are not far behind. Opponents of nuclear energy bemoan the size of Nuclear plants, and yet seem either oblivious of conspicuously arrogant about the vast scale wind and solar projects require of the land and surrounding environment—and half the time they can’t even functionally operate due to nature’s whims, with the battery technology to support such lapses currently nothing more than a fantastical daydream. Says Cambria town supervisor Wright Ellis, whose town recently rejected a 100-megawatt solar project in New York, “We don’t want it. We are opposed to it.” Ellis stated the “permanent loss of agricultural land” and devaluing of surrounding homes among the reasons for rejecting the proposal.

The IEA isn’t alone in its assertion that a clean energy future is not possible without nuclear energy. The International Panel on Climate Change recently made the following proclamation regarding what is necessary for clean energy: “achieving deep cuts in emissions will “require more intensive use” of low-emission technologies “such as renewable energy and nuclear energy.”

And here we which the great American Divide: obsession with clean energy and a long, deep-seated, intensely psychological distrust of nuclear energy. Until we either put aside our politics in order to serve whatever best accomplishes our goal, or we finally admit to ourselves we care only for proliferation of our own image and nothing else, this schism will continue to grow. It’s anyone’s guess when, and more importantly, if, this will ever happen. Once again, who is charming whom?

Otek however, believes in the potential of nuclear energy and stands firm in our commitment to the industry. That’s we strove to become a Class 1E company and geared our NTM and SSAM metering technology to help the industry get back to its place of prominence. Our two flagship models can replace obsolete ammeters in nuclear I&C rooms Form, Fit, and Function using all the same wiring and panels, with only minimal operator training, and can do so on an individual basis as the analogs fail or all at once in a single planned outage. We’re doing our part to help the industry meet its promise.

For more information on our efforts to help the Nuclear industry through technological panel meter innovation, or to peruse our vast selection of products, please feel free to give us a call at 520-748-7900 or email our sales team at sales@otekcorp.com

“The answer must include nuclear, or it’s no answer at all.”
Those are the exacting words of Maria Korsnick, the President and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, better known by the colloquial acronym NEI. That statement came forth in the middle of her “State of the Industry” address on March 26th, 2019, reprinted in the Nuclear Plant Journal. Ms. Korsnick enters and withdraws from a host of avenues in which nuclear energy shapes our homes, our communities, our economy, our nation, and the world, but the overarching light of her address remains the same—nuclear energy is necessary for humanity.
Now we know a thousand mouths are suddenly shrieking blind indignation at those words. We know that green-spun environmentalists are weaving their retributive tapestries at these words, we know eager-lipped senators and congressmen are plastering themselves with buttons, stickers, and crocheted pendants displaying pick and paste adopted ideologies like “I’ve always put the planet first!” “We’re going green for our children!” “No Nukes, Not Now Not Ever!” and streaking their faces with non-GMO soil for measure, we know young Americans eager to join in on anything that makes them seem cohesive with whatever the current cultural ‘this is end of the world’ fad is are throwing themselves into the New Green Deal and lecturing their parents on the dangers of such words, we know there is a long and deeply-woven fear of the very word nuclear. We know all this and have known for the better part of seventy years. The only question left would be….is any of this really necessary?
The answer, of course, is no. But history and by proxy, cultures, are slow to warm to the winds around them.
Fortunately, men and women like Ms. Korsnick move quicker. So let’s take a look at three major themes she addresses: nuclear innovation, importance, and the carbon question.
The agency and stability nuclear energy possesses is paramount to understanding its vitality. Its complexity can be reduced to a simple notion—nuclear power is always on, 24-7/365 days a year and the numbers never lie. “Nuclear is responsible for a fifth of this nation’s total electricity”, Ms. Korsnick surmises, “It represents more than 55% of our emissions free energy. Which is even more impressive when you consider that out of the 8,000 power plants connected to the grid, less than one percent of them are nuclear plants.” And too—“We produced 800 million megawatt hours of nuclear energy last year—the most ever.” As Ms. Korsnick explains, the industry is constantly evolving and seeking better, more efficient, less special, less costly, less vulnerable means of producing energy—micro reactors, small modular systems capable of generating the same output as their massive counterparts, are passing through certification phases and are expected to change the way we think of nuclear power plants by being able to fit into communities and global necessities where traditional reactors just aren’t feasible. Additionally, as Ms. Korsnick notes during a visit to micro-reactor developer NuScale’s facility in Oregon, these reactors are capable of self-correcting during an emergency without the aid of operators—this has enormous implications considering the majority of global nuclear disasters are largely attributed to human error. “Today we operate at more than 92% capacity. A generation ago, we were at only 63%.”
The importance of nuclear energy to this country, to its people, and to the world cannot be understated. A short litany: nuclear energy is indirectly responsible for nearly half a million jobs and half a billion dollars in economic activity each year, nuclear energy powers electricity for 8.6 million American homes—roughly more than every single household in New York, nuclear energy is the only energy source proven to keep the lights on during a natural disaster, if America does not renew its resolve for nuclear energy, Russia and China will overtake us as the world leaders. It’s this last article that is most jarring—Russia and China are not as benevolent in their ideological pursuits as America. Imagine a world in which nuclear energy is controlled and dictated by the cold eyes of Communism, hungry, after a century of watching America, for supremacy.
Finally we come to the big one—the carbon question, and by extension, climate change. Ironically enough, nuclear energy has nothing to do with climate change and actually, by its very nature, works against it—but common sense is an arrow unrefined. Ms. Korsnick ticks off the irrefutable evidence:
– Nuclear energy generates the highest percentage of our countries carbon-free emissions
– In order to match nuclear energy’s production one would have to multiply 2018’s total solar output by twelve. For wind, you would need 3x the amount of turbines currently in existence
– Nuclear energy is always connected, always ready to produce. Wind and solar rely on the finicky whims of Nature
– Battery technology to back up renewables does not exist
If empirical facts are not enough to sway those who hold the weight of their opinions in the deepest trenches of their hearts, global organizations such as The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nature Conservancy, Mass. Senator Ed Markey (who long opposed nuclear), The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, and Google have all endorsed nuclear energy as a necessary part of any real endeavor against climate change. The reality is stunningly simple to understand—“The answer to the climate crisis won’t be as simple as replacing carbon with renewables and batteries. The answer must include nuclear, or it’s no answer at all.”
Ms. Korsnick also mentions, “A new generation of entrepreneurs who are stewarding digital technology” and that’s where Otek comes in. As a Class1E company, we developed our Solid State Analog Meter (SSAM) to function as a cyber security exempt meter in nuclear I&C rooms. The SSAM was designed with without microprocessors in order so that it may be classified as a Non-Critical Digital Asset under NEI 08-09 regulation, as well has having the ability to replace obsolete ammeters and older DPMs wire by wire using the same panels and requiring only minimal operator training. With the SSAM beginning to garner huge interest across the industry, we’re gearing up in 2019 to help revitalize the nuclear industry all along the planet.
For more information on how Otek has aided the nuclear industry or our vast array of customizable technology driven products, please call us at (520) 748-7900 or send us an email at sales@otekcorp.com.

Coal—the darkness animated by fire, the acrid smoke hurling future death into the air from chimneys, the ebony sheen, the stories deep in the black underworld of mines, the horrific recoil environmentalists liquefy into at the mention of its name, that long train whistle, burning dinosaur bones. Coal for all its uncovered malice, is nearly extinct in the United States. Seventy years ago half of America’s homes warmed their evenings and blistering winters with heat produced by coal—now, in 2019, that number has dwindled to less than 130,000 homes. What was once an American empire has been ravaged by circumstance—the Greenhouse effect entered the collective consciousness upon the backs of global climate related disasters, polar ice caps falling into the sea, monstrous hurricanes eviscerating New Orleans and Houston, the planetary temperature climbing higher inch by inch….these are sins by which coal now where’s the malicious mantle. But there are two sides to every hysterical coin….

In a recent NPR article, Northeastern Pennsylvania resident John Ord, among others, was profiled for his continued use of coal to heat his home. Once about every two weeks Mr. Ord drives to a hardware store in his rural community where he buys close to 400 pounds of coal in forty pound bags, which he then lugs home to feed into the hopper of a coal-burning stove in his basement. This keeps the house a comfortable 70-72 degrees throughout the harsh northeast winter months, and most importantly, is cheaper than oil and electric he says. “It’s cleaner too”, he says, pointing to a dry chimney atop the house, “No smoke at all”.

While it may be cleaner than the more common bituminous coal burned in industrial applications, this does not mean the anthracite coal Mr. Ord is burning is contributing CO2 free emissions into the Susquehanna skies, according the Energy Information Association. “It still emits quite a bit of dangerous sulfur dioxide, as well as heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, and mercury,” says Tom Schuster with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

But there is a human side to this within the depth of the Quaker state. Pennsylvania sits atop vast coal reserves in its lumbering hills, which were tapped into for a century by the prosperous coal industry which called the state home. Generations of families grew up, lived, and died by the whims of the coal industry. Now all that remains are a few stragglers who are operating more out of namesake nostalgia than any logical pursuit of profit. Coal is contributing to the decline of planetary health yes, it fosters the Greenhouse effect’s meteoric rise, and is a piece that would need to be moved off the board to achieve a clean energy future by 2050—that’s all true. Yet before we throw our voices against the walls of Washington in circus-like, Twitter-funded hysterical cries for legislation and a New Green Deal utterly devoid of scientific reality, perhaps we should consider families like Mr. Ord. Perhaps we should help them transition to cleaner forms of energy instead of lassoing them to our conclusions with the firebrand whip of idealism.

Coal must be overtaken by cleaner alternatives, but those cannot be solar and wind renewables alone. Nuclear energy must have a seat at that table and it must be at the head. As they say, the numbers don’t lie. Just like the readings on all Otek’s digital panel meters—super bright LED technology is accurate, reliable, and efficient. We don’t know what will happen to individuals like Mr. Ord or bituminous coal facilities with their smoking towers when the dust settles in Washington, but Otek’s lights will still be on, faithfully keeping their measurement—instrumentation that measures up.

For more information on Otek products please call our office at (520)748-7900, or shoot our sales department an email at sales@otekcorp.com

In a recent article published in Water Technology magazine, Indegy Director of Industrial Security and cyber-defense strategies guru Chris Grove draws attention to the types of cyber security threats currently facing industrial water facilities. What he extols is rather surprising—while nuclear power plants sit on a fevered pitch against cyber security hackers, Mr. Grove says that for the water treatment industry, the most subversive threat lies in what he terms “insider threats”. The Trojan horse passing through the gates of Troy to applause and falling garlands, only by the glint of shadows does it spill its lethal payload of soldiers unto the slumbering streets.

Mr. Grove identifies three main tricks of Odysseus that typically prey on water facilities from the inside: the malicious insider, the compromised insider, and the negligent insider. The malicious insider mostly closely resembles Odysseus’s famous trick—these are the employees who’ve risen through the ranks and endeared themselves to a company before the empty their soldiers’ knives into operational technology that comprises the facility; they are the lease prevalent invasion. The compromised insider resembles the unaware leadership of Troy who welcomed the horse into their city as an offering. This type of threat entails an employee whose access to the facility’s networks has been hacked or pilfered by an external threat, which then, unbeknownst to the employee, uses their information to spindle into the network with malware and other harmful programs. Phishing scams that ask for user ID and passwords are the typical manifestations of this particular threat. Last and sadly most common of all, is the horribly-preventable negligent insider. This is plain and simple human error. Engineers, as every industry on earth knows, are perpetually overworked and under herculean mountains of stress—which can lead to miscalculations, overlooked procedures, and erroneous reporting. While this type of accidental threat is wholly preventable, to expect flawlessness under such scrutiny is incorrigible with human nature—a diamond after all, only achieves its perfection under immense and suffocating pressure. Negligent engineers are not carbon crystals waited to be spun immaculate. This would be the Trojan common sense—wholly negligent.

Mr. Grove’s conclusion is that the water treatment industry should employ the same measures it takes against cyber security to these insider threats.

At Otek we know a little bit about cyber security. Our Solid State Analog Meter, colloquially referred to as the SSAM, was designed specifically to meet the cyber security regulation wrung around the nuclear industry by the NRC, in the form of NEI 08-09. When nuclear I&C rooms look to join the wave of digitalization they incur massive expenses in switching their analogs over to DAS systems that must pass ROI-bleeding security compliance measures. The SSAM avoids all that by being able to replace the obsolete ammeters individual using the wiring already in place and performing without any critical digital assets, rendering our new technology completely cyber security exempt.

For more information on Otek and our products please call us at (520) 748-7900 or email our sales office at sales@otekcorp.com.

The full article in Water Technology magazine may be found here: https://www.watertechonline.com/cybersecurity-risks-industrial-water-fac…

As midnight steals over the Prime Meridian and the sleepy emerald lawns of Greenwich, England wave in the opening seconds of April 6th, 2019, an invisible calamity will begin to unfurl across the globe. Slithering into the world’s banks, its tapestry of cellular towers stretching endlessly across spherical distances, its atmosphere of airplanes and drones, its oceans traversed by shipping vessels carrying planetary commerce, plunging into our cars, our Google maps, our precious cell phones, worming even into the modern human concept of timing, is the epochal death of our Global Positioning System. We have long forgotten how to heed the directional offerings of the sun upon stones, and an entire generation has risen on this earth without the ability to read a paper map. In short, the invisible hand guiding the rhythm of our existence is about to going sputtering by degrees.

Referred to as the GPS Epoch Failure or GPS Rollover, the eerily similar to Y2K event will occur when the Coordinated Universal Time Cock (UTC) reaches the maximum allowance for its calculation algorithm, its 10-bit “week number counter” or WN. At this moment, when midnight falls over the Prime Meridian’s shoulders, the satellite navigation system will revert back to the counted measure of its original existence—August 21st, 1999, the 0000000000 hour. That’s when this current iteration of the GPS epoch began—a cycle of roughly 20 years dating back to the system’s inception at the hands of Mr. Reagan in January of 1980. Due to the present 10 digit limit of the 31 satellite system that was created and still maintained by the United States Air Force, every 1,024 weeks the atomic clocks inside each satellite will run out of computation space and reset back to base zero. This happens because of the intricate processes which keep GPS humming through humanity’s galaxy of needs and demands: the system works by transmitting a time signature to the network of satellites orbiting earth where the unique code contained within the signature is unpacked, this code is compiled by the week and seconds within the initial week when GPS Time was birthed—January 6th, 1980. Once the internal limit is reached, the whole system leaps back to 0000000000—a dubious parallel to the “Beyond the Zero” narrative of Thomas Pynchon’s 1979 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

So are we facing the global annihilation of technology? Will mankind be flung back into its darkened past of sundials and carrier pigeons? Not quite—most of the technological devices created in the last five years or less have firmware that’s already been programmed to handle the roll back, or is capable of receiving the necessary preventable updates. The danger lies in the distance beyond those years—think of trains, airplanes, banks, institutions that are traditionally slow to change their technology suddenly being thrown out of orbit. Think of driving down interstate 5 toward Santa Clarita and hearing directions for an avenue along the southern ridge of Easter Island, think of Google Earth detailing your route to a shopping mall that existed in 2001 and is a parking lot now—think September 1st, 1983 and 269 souls aboard Korean Airlines Flight 007 plummeting to their death after being blasted out of the sky by Soviet missiles as a result of faulty GPS coordinates deceiving the plane into unknowingly flying over Russian airspace. Doom by miscalculation.

While the worldwide impact will more than likely be negligible, this does offer an interesting moment for humanity to consider how reliant it is on technology. We’ve created gods out of electricity and the confluence of information, we’ve reduced the planet to a handheld device, and we’ve surrendered our ancient knowledge to digital arbitration. Yet the sun is still out there and its shadows still crawl across the stone dial—we have only to forget, and remember again.

As an industry leader in process measurement and control, as a well as an ardent supporter of technological progress, Otek prides itself on balancing the digital future with the past’s wisdom. That’s how we created our latest addition to our New Technology Fleet, the Solid State Analog Meter or SSAM, which was built with the analog past in mind so that the meter functions without critical digital assets and in harmony with our cutting-edge patented 2019 technology. We brought the past and the future, the ammeter and the DPM, together to give the nuclear industry its first cyber security exempt digital panel meter.

So tonight, as the clock folds over midnight and an epoch ends, we pause to remember the past as we consider the future. A future Otek will continue to push beyond the limits of panel meter technology.

For more information on Otek’s fleet of tecnologically advanced instrumentation, please call our office at (520)-748-7900 or email our sales office at sales@otekcorp.com