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leventhal on nuke security and Yucca - CNN
Leventhal, as before, takes the middle road, and not surprisingly, supports
Yucca with some reservations...
norm
> Dumping Ground Debate: Paul Leventhal
(Leventhal is the Director of the Nuclear Control Institute)
>
> February 1, 2002 Posted: 4:14 PM EST (2114 GMT)
>
> NEXT@CNN: Why is it so important to protect nuclear plants?
>
> Paul Leventhal: Right now the nuclear power plants in this
> country are vulnerable to
> a terrorist attack, if it were one on a scale of what we
> saw on September 11.
>
> NEXT@CNN: Why is spent fuel such an issue?
>
> Levanthal: With a nuclear power plant you have two things
> to worry about in terms
> of potential sabotage. You have the reactor itself, which
> has a large amount of
> radioactive fuel inside of it. The other is the pool on
> the plant site where all the
> spent fuel is stored.
> NEXT@CNN: Would the Yucca Mountain option help?
>
> Levanthal: Both from a site security standpoint and a
> nuclear non-prol iferation
> standpoint, since spent fuel contains a lot of plutonium
> (a nuclear weapons
> material) it's better that the spent fuel be put for final
> disposal in a geological
> repository. And the site that's been selected, in this
> country, is Yucca Mountain.
> But, there's a lot of controversy about whether this is
> the appropriate site and
> whether it has been fully characterized to be safe. And it
> looks like it's going to take
> several years before they are in a position to speak
> authoritatively on that question.
>
> We very much hope that the site can be safely
> characterized, so that the spent fuel
> can be gotten out of harm's way. There's another issue
> too. There are some in the
> nuclear industry and bureaucracy that would still like to
> reprocess that spent fuel to
> extract the plutonium, so that the plutonium can be
> recycled as fuel. This is a
> program that has been shut down in the United States since
> the late '70s, early '80s.
> But there are some die-hard supporters that think that the
> plutonium is too valuable
> a resource to throw away. The problem is that in
> addition to being a potential
> fuel, it is also a potential atom bomb material. It is one of the two
> principle materials
> used in nuclear weapons. So our institute has been strongly advocating
> disposing of
> the spent fuel without reprocessing -- disposing of it in unaltered
> form, deep
> in the earth.
>
> NEXT@CNN: What about the dangers of transporting it?
>
> Levanthal: That is a major consideration. But it is one
> like nuclear plant security
> itself -- it is solvable if you apply the necessary
> resources. For nuclear power
> plants, we are advocating military protection when we are
> in a state of war against
> terrorists. Right now, the regulations do not require a
> military escort along the
> entire route -- only when it passes through, or near,
> large cities.
>
> The notion that these massive casts are resistant to
> terrorist attacks is fallacious.
> There are ways that these casts can be penetrated through
> the use of high
> explosives, their contents dispersed. And therefore you
> have to make sure that
> terrorists can't get near them. You don't want to get into
> a situation where they've
> actually overcome the escort and are in a position to use
> explosives on the highly
> radioactive spent fuel.
>
> NEXT@CNN: How bad could the radiation threat be?
>
> Levanthal: A successful attack on a plant -- meaning that
> the core melts down, and
> the containment is breached so there is a pathway out of
> the plant for the highly
> radioactive plume -- you could have hundreds of fatalities
> within 10 miles of the
> plant. And within 50 to 100 miles of the plant, you could
> have tens of thousands to
> hundreds of thousands of fatalities from cancer over the
> long term. And the
> downwind path for these types of causalities could extend
> for hundreds of miles.
>
> NEXT@CNN: Can spent fuel be used for dirty bombs?
>
> Levanthal: The biggest dirty bomb conceivable is the
> successful sabotage of a
> nuclear power plant. That's the ultimate dirty bomb. And
> that, of course, is the
> ultimate nuclear terrorism threat -- that terrorists could
> obtain atom bomb material
> or even a stolen weapon and detonate it. I am afraid that
> that's something we have
> to be concerned about as well.
>
> NEXT@CNN: Any reason not to be depressed?
>
> Levanthal: Well, I think there are reasons not to be
> depressed, but it's going to take
> some action. One is nuclear power plants probably can be
> adequately protected
> with military resources. But it's gonna take troops, not
> state police, and not the
> "rent a cop" guard forces that are often in place at these
> plants. The industry and
> the NRC talk about highly professionalized, well-paid
> paramilitary forces protecting
> the plants. The truth of the matter is that these plants
> are often protected by
> rent-a-cops whose salaries start at about eight or nine
> dollars an hour. So it's a
> situation not unlike what you find at airports, where you
> find the poorest paid
> employees are those checking your baggage before you get
> on a flight. That has to
> be corrected promptly.
>
>
> RELATED SITES:
> • The Yucca Mountain Project
> • Eureka County, Nevada Nuclear Waste Page
> • EPLevanthal: Yucca Mountain
> • Yucca Mountain Facts.org
> • USGS: Yucca Mountain Geophysical Studies
> • The Study Committee
>
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>
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>
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