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Article: Split on Nuclear Plants: Weak Spot or Fortress?
It is difficult for me to find where the fault lies in this issue. The
media for hyping the issue? The reactor owners for not being more open about
reactor design and accident response? The NRC for not taking a more forceful
in reassuring the public? No wonder the public is confused and lacks trust
in what is said.
I would not blame the ICRP, NCRP, etc., but I am sure someone will.
-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
3050 Traymore Lane
Bowie, MD 20715-2024
E-mail: jenday1@email.msn.com (H)
-------------------
Split on Nuclear Plants: Weak Spot or Fortress?
October 24, 2002
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 - In the what's-next guessing game that
began after the terrorist attacks last year, a divide has
opened up among experts assessing the risk to the public
from attacks on nuclear power plants.
Many current and former government officials say the
reactors are in Al Qaeda's cross hairs, but inside the
industry, many executives counter that what drives the
issue is politics and unreasoning fear.
Current and former high-ranking officials at Andrews Air
Force Base in Maryland for a recent exercise on how to cope
with terrorism illustrated this divide. Over two days, they
simulated a meeting of the National Security Council and
were fed hypothetical situations in which intelligence,
vague and conflicting at first but becoming more specific
as the hours went by, indicated an attack somewhere in the
eastern United States.
They were also given an assessment that said that the
targets vulnerable to the widest range of threats were not
nuclear reactors, but places where chemicals were
manufactured or stored.
Almost immediately, the role-players shifted the discussion
to how to protect the reactors.
"The players defaulted in that direction," said Dave
McIntyre, the deputy director of the Anser Institute for
Homeland Security, a nonprofit group that sponsored the
exercise with the Center for Strategic and International
Studies.
Mr. McIntyre said he thought the concern with reactors was
an unnecessary detour, because their security had been
improved far more than security for other potential
targets. But the group did not see it that way.
Reporters who were allowed to sit in on the exercise had to
agree not to quote the participants, to allow them, the
sponsors said, "to be as open and candid as possible" in
the drill.
The group included former Senator Sam Nunn, playing the
president; James M. Loy, the head of the Transportation
Security Administration, playing the role of secretary of
homeland security; Charles Curtis, a former under secretary
of energy, playing energy secretary; George Terwilliger,
former acting attorney general, as attorney general; R.
James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, as national
security adviser; Wesley Clark, the former supreme allied
commander in Europe, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
Other participants played the jobs they used to have: James
S. Gilmore III, former governor of Virginia; Shirley
Jackson, former chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission; James Lee Witt, former head of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, and Dee Dee Myers, a former
White House spokeswoman.
They explored creating a 50-mile zone around each nuclear
plant where all flights would be banned, or bringing in
antiaircraft batteries.
On the other side, some people outside the simulation who
are actually in charge of security at nuclear plants say
they do not believe that they are threatened by terrorism,
and are unenthusiastic about security improvements.
Mark P. Findlay, the director of security at the Nuclear
Management Company, which operates six Midwestern reactors,
said in a telephone interview that there had been no
credible threats against nuclear plants, and that he would
prefer not to hire more guards now, for fear of having to
lay them off later.
"How do I deal with staffing levels when I have a
government that's based on politics and not events and
credible threats?" Mr. Findlay said.
The airlines might once have said the same, and there have
been attacks on nuclear plants abroad.
Mr. Findlay is not alone. Last month, 19 current and former
executives in the nuclear power plant field published a
paper in Science magazine that asserted that a reactor
could easily withstand a crash of the kind that destroyed
the World Trade Center, a position disputed by others,
including some on whose work the authors relied. The
Science article argued that talk of vulnerability was
simply wild-eyed conjecture by people who never liked
nuclear power anyway.
That category includes at least some local government
officials who are now uneasy about the reactors in their
midst. In the neighborhood of the Indian Point reactors, 40
miles north of midtown Manhattan, local governments have
passed resolutions against them. In Westchester County,
where the two plants are, the County Board of Legislators
voted on Sept. 9 to close them eventually.
If the plants are so safe, why are so many people worried
about them?
"The news media has made the nuclear industry the poster
child for the post-Sept. 11 world," said Steve Kerekes, a
spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's
trade association. "People who have been inundated for a
year now gravitate toward that topic."
"Some media grad student ought to do a study of air time
and column inches dedicated to the subject," Mr. Kerekes
said.
Peter Stockton, a nuclear security expert who is a former
special assistant to the secretary of energy, drew a
different conclusion. Mr. Stockton, who now works on
civilian power plant security questions with the Project on
Government Oversight, a nonprofit group here, said the
power plant managers were in denial as the managers of
nuclear weapons plants were when he was at the Energy
Department.
"They say, `We've been at this for 50 years and we've never
been attacked yet,' " he said. "They believe a credible
threat is that a terrorist group has targeted that one
plant, and they're coming."
Paul M. Blanch, an engineer who found safety problems a
decade ago at the nuclear utility where he worked, and whom
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission later said was mistreated
by his employer as a result, said the denial was "par for
the course for the nuclear industry."
"The industry has been defensive about every threat,
whether it's security or accident," Mr. Blanch said.
"If something happens, like happened with airlines, maybe
they wouldn't be so defensive," he said, "but it hasn't
happened yet. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/politics/24NUKE.html?ex=1036473428&ei=1&en
=d3b6584220d6763f
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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