AJC Article: Nuclear plants can withstand attacks

The group argued that "there seems to be no credible way" an airplane could penetrate the steel-lined, 5-foot-thick concrete walls surrounding a nuclear reactor.

"No airplane, regardless of its size, can fly through such a wall," the group of 19 nuclear experts said.

Likewise, they said, a terrorist would have little success in seizing high-level nuclear waste en route to a proposed Nevada repository, the experts said. The casks in which the waste would be shipped "are nearly indestructible."

Their views are being published today in Science, the leading publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The article "is an attempt to try to set the record straight," said co-author Zack T. Pate of Atlanta, former chairman of the World Association of Nuclear Operators.

He and his 18 colleagues noted that much of the public's fear of nuclear power stems from the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986.

The Three Mile Island meltdown, however, caused no significant environmental damage or injury to any person, they wrote.

"Even if containment had been severely breached, little radioactivity would have escaped," they pointed out.

The Chernobyl accident caused 30 deaths and spewed radioactivity high into the atmosphere.

But "the terrible and widespread consequences of that accident --- increased suicide, alcoholism, depression, and unemployment, plus 100,000 unnecessary abortions --- were caused by fear of radiation and by poor planning based on that fear," the group wrote.

Anti-nuclear groups disagreed with much of the article.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out that the federal government protects the plants from liability because no insurance companies will cover them.

"It's the only industry that the federal government protects this way," Lochbaum said. "If the nuclear plants are so safe, why do they need this special protection?"