From the Washington Post, "Are Nuclear Plants Secure?"

["jenday1" <jenday1@EMAIL.MSN.COM>]

I do agree with the statement that terrorists attacks are not reasonable

events.  Any acts of war are not.  Does anyone have an idea how much this is

going to cost the nuclear power industry?  To me, that will be the real

damage to the utilities and American public.

-- John



John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

3050 Traymore Lane

Bowie, MD 20715-2024

jenday1@email.msn.com (H)





To view the entire article, go to

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32790-2001Nov2.html



Are Nuclear Plants Secure?



By Michael Grunwald and Peter Behr



On the day after the terrorist attacks on America, the Nuclear Regulatory

Commission happened to file a legal brief about terrorist attacks on nuclear

facilities. A group called Georgians Against Nuclear Energy (GANE) had

lodged a complaint because no one had even analyzed the risk of a

"malevolent act" at a proposed plutonium plant on the Savannah River.



No, it hadn't, the commission responded. "Federal agencies need only address

reasonably foreseeable environmental impacts," the NRC brief stated. "GANE

does not establish that terrorist acts . . . fall within the realm of

'reasonably foreseeable' events."



It was an untimely argument to make on Sept. 12, 2001. But that was the

argument nuclear regulators had been making for decades. Now, federal and

state officials are scrambling to ramp up security at nuclear power plants

nationwide, banning planes from their airspace and dispatching National

Guard troops and Coast Guard boats to their perimeters, hoping to prevent

terrorists from creating a Chernobyl-style catastrophe in the United States.

They concede that Sept. 11 has caused a sea change in their attitudes about

"reasonably foreseeable" threats, and NRC Chairman Richard A. Meserve has

ordered a "top-to-bottom" review of security rules.



"The events of September 11 were a wake-up call," Meserve said in an

interview yesterday.



"Everything's on the table," added NRC spokesman Victor Dricks. "I'd like to

tell you that everything's going to be okay, but I can't do that."



For critics of the nuclear industry and its regulators, the first

multibillion-dollar question is whether an era of complacency is truly over.

The second is how the vulnerabilities of the nation's 103 operating nuclear

plants -- and several defunct plants still saddled with potentially lethal

stockpiles of nuclear waste -- can be reduced now and in the future. These

questions are not purely academic: Investigators say Islamic militant Ramzi

Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, has

encouraged followers to attack a nuclear power plant.



The NRC has acknowledged that U.S. nuclear plants were not designed to

withstand the impact of a Boeing 767 jetliner. But the risks go much deeper

than that.



Until now, the plants were never required to defend against attacks by air

or water. They were tested solely on their ability to stop a land assault by

a few mock intruders with automatic weapons, explosives and perhaps a

sport-utility vehicle, with limited assistance from at most one insider. And

even though the plants are always warned about the NRC tests in advance, 47

percent have revealed "significant weaknesses" in their security forces.



"Significant here means that a real attack would have put the nuclear

reactor in jeopardy with the potential for core damage and a radiological

release, i.e., an American Chernobyl," NRC security specialist David N.

Orrick explained in a February 1999 internal report. "This is nothing less

than evidence of an abject failure by the nuclear industry to be capable by

themselves of protecting against radiological sabotage."



Orrick wrote that report because the commission had just decided to scrap

its own security tests. The NRC subsequently reversed itself, but before

Sept. 11 it was considering a transition to industry-run self-assessments;

it had scaled back its own tests from eight to six a year. It had even

suspended imposition of penalties on plants where security deficiencies were

revealed. Meserve said his agency has had to make tough choices within a

steadily shrinking budget, but critics say it has focused far more on

accelerating the licensing process for nuclear utilities than toughening

security requirements.



"The mentality has always been that it can't happen here, and that has got

to change," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who has hectored the NRC

about nuclear plant safety for a decade. "These plants were flunking

elementary school security exams, and complaining the whole time that the

exams were too hard. Well, they need to start passing college level tests.

Now."



For now, the NRC has suspended all force-on-force tests; this, officials

say, is not the time for mock intruders near radioactive materials.



Since Sept. 11, the commission has also advised all nuclear plants to go on

their highest alerts, and "to take specific actions to address threats that

were not previously considered credible," Dricks said. The plants have added

security agents and physical barriers, while increasing patrols and

restricting access. New employees are no longer allowed to start work before

their background checks are complete, and employee lists are being

cross-checked with FBI terrorist watch lists. Earlier this week, the Federal

Aviation Administration banned aircraft from flying within 12 miles of

nuclear facilities below 18,000 feet. And Tom Ridge, director of the Office

of Homeland Security, urged governors to supplement security at nuclear

plants; at least eight have deployed National Guard troops.



Industry officials say that for all the swift changes in recent weeks,

nuclear plants have always been among America's "hardest" targets; reactors,

for example, are housed in buildings with four-foot-thick reinforced

concrete walls. They say that whenever NRC security tests have identified

security weaknesses, they have moved quickly to fix the problems. So they

believe terrorists are far more likely to choose "softer" targets with less

security.



"We can't guarantee we're impervious to anything that might come," said

Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute. "But our

reactors are as well protected as anything you're going to find."



But many industry critics believe reactors are not the most worrisome

nuclear targets. They fret about an attack on less fortified stockpiles of

irradiated nuclear fuel that has been removed from reactors. There are about

40,000 tons of this spent fuel stored at operating and shut-down plants

around the country, usually in concrete-reinforced cooling pools that were

supposed to be temporary but now hold more radioactive material than the

reactors themselves. Most of the spent-fuel pools are housed in fairly

standard concrete or corrugated buildings; the Union of Concerned Scientists

describes them as "Kmarts without neon."



The NRC's security tests have never even contemplated a possible attack on

spent fuel. But a 1997 report for the NRC by Brookhaven National Laboratory

concluded that a severe release from a pool could cause as many as 28,000

cancer fatalities and $59 billion in damage, rendering about 188 square

miles of land unfit for habitation. And while it is generally true that

"older is colder" -- the potency of spent fuel declines somewhat with

time -- a 2000 NRC study found that even much older fuel could catch fire,

with similar consequences. Finally, a study conducted in 2000 by the

National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements warned that the

consequences of a spent-fuel release dispersed by a bomb could be far worse.



One top NRC official is so worried about spent fuel that he recently asked

Edwin Lyman, scientific director of the Nuclear Control Institute, if he

could stop talking so much about the subject in public. The NRC did not

object to the subjects covered in this article.



The fear is that an explosion, fire or crash that drained or boiled a

spent-fuel pool or destroyed its cooling system could create a massive

release of radioactive cesium. But industry officials say the critics are

trying to create needless hysteria. Kerekes argues that even a spent-fuel

fire would not necessarily mean disaster: A plant would likely have "several

hours" to put it out or start an alternative cooling system.



Even the worst-case scenarios are in dispute. The reactor explosion at

Chernobyl in 1986, for example, caused 31 immediate deaths, and 1,800

children subsequently developed thyroid cancer, according to a United

Nations report. But while some nuclear critics predict 20,000 additional

cancer cases, John Boice, a Vanderbilt University professor who participated

in the U.N. study, said that estimate is far too high. "We aren't seeing

excess cases of leukemia" around Chernobyl, Boice said. That would be the

first indicator of a wider impact.



Still, there is little doubt that a successful terrorist attack on a nuclear

plant -- even a decommissioned facility -- could have a disastrous outcome.

That was why Stanley Lane, a town selectman in Westport, Maine, was so

disturbed about his Oct. 3 visit to the shuttered Maine Yankee plant.



Lane and his neighbor, a retired chemical company executive named David

Bertran, drove unmolested past the plant's old perimeter in Bertran's pickup

truck, which had a tarpaulin draped over its flatbed. They finally stopped

near an open gate about 100 yards from the plant's buildings, which still

contain more than 1,432 spent-fuel assemblies. A private security officer

passed them in a van, but didn't stop to ask what they were doing.



"He was probably afraid we were terrorists," Lane joked. "They told us later

that we couldn't have driven into the plant, but it's their job to make us

feel comfy and calm."



Maine Yankee has blocked off its access roads. It is also preparing to move

its spent fuel into "dry cask" storage, outdoor concrete casks that are

considered more protective than the pools, and are now in use at about 20

plants. But those are temporary solutions, too. Years ago, the federal

government promised to take permanent custody of all spent fuel, but the

politics of nuclear waste have kept the promise unfulfilled. An underground

repository proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nev., might become reality someday,

but not for many years.



And so the focus today is on short-term safety. Nuclear plants may be

required to protect themselves against a larger team of suicidal terrorists

with heavier artillery and more inside help. Force-on-force tests may be

extended to spent-fuel pools, perhaps even at shut-down reactors. There is

talk of stockpiling anti-radiation tablets in areas downwind of nuclear

plants; France has even installed antiaircraft weaponry near its largest

plant.



In 1985, the average U.S. nuclear plant had more than five safety shutdowns

a year. By 2000, that figure had been cut 90 percent. The question is

whether those safety improvements can be replicated in the area of security.



"This is scary stuff," said Robert Alvarez, a former adviser to former

energy secretary Bill Richardson. "We saw what they did on September 11.

Nobody wants to think about what they could do at a nuclear facility."



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