"This 'safety case' is subject to approval from the independent nuclear regulator, the ONR Officee for Nuclear Regulation)." The power outages following the discovery of a fault on a boiler "spine" at Heysham 1 have already led the National Grid to fast-forward an emergency plan to obtain more electricity from other providers to meet a possible shortfall.
Power outages were reported in Virginia, parts of West Virginia, Maryland and the metropolitan Washington area, following freezing rain, wet snow and sleet.
Early software problems have been compounded in recent days with network outages, but Sebelius re-iterated a pledge to have all problems ironed out by the end of November.
He agreed that smart cities are "highly hackable" but predicted that we are more likely to see pranks – such as fiddling with highway signs or one-day outages on transport systems that cause chaos – than large-scale attacks.
In Ghana, whose impressive GDP growth has not been met with the requisite increase in national grid capacity, people are using Twitter to monitor the frequency of power outages.
Everyone living in Ghana – rich and poor – is lumped together in a permanent jumble of terrible traffic, unreliable water and frequent power outages.
Those of us with constant access to wireless internet connections have been able to pick up the slack for those who are equally outraged, but undermined by power outages.
Forecasters said the potent system already blamed for numerous power outages, thousands of weekend flight cancellations and a handful of deaths elsewhere, has Virginia and other mid-Atlantic states in its sights before hitting the north-east.
The firm claims it can make outages 100 times less likely.
The investigation into last year's North American blackout revealed that during the precious minutes following the first outages in Ohio, when action might have been taken to prevent the blackout spreading, the local utility's managers had to ask the regional system operator by phone what was happening on their own wires.
The prank is designed to cause power outages so that when repairmen come they can be bribed to lay illegal lines to houses.
