Energy Probe

ENN
November 6, 2001

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Reuters)–While the United States steps up security at its nuclear power plants, energy experts warn the plants’ fuel dumps are far more vulnerable than reactors to attack by anyone trying to spread radioactivity.

“Spent fuel has never gotten the same attention as the reactor … as a result you don’t have the same level of security and safety as exists for the reactor,” David Lochbaum, a former nuclear plant engineer now with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Reuters.

“Because it’s a softer target and has greater consequences, terrorists may elect to go after the spent fuel,” he said.

Security has been tightened at the 103 nuclear power plants in the United States, the source of 20 percent of the country’s electricity, since the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks that killed about 4,800 people in New York and the Pentagon.

Amid U.S. calls for increased vigilance at strategic sites worldwide, the head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency warned on Thursday that an act of nuclear terrorism was “far more likely” than previously thought.

Since Sept. 11, much of discussion in the nuclear industry has focused on whether an aircraft could penetrate the steel and concrete containment building surrounding a plant’s reactor.

But nuclear experts are warning that guarding on-site storage facilities for these same reactors’ highly radioactive spent fuel is also a critical issue that must be addressed.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the U.S. nuclear industry, needs to devote more attention to this issue, agency spokesman Victor Dricks said.

DE FACTO WASTE DUMPS

When most of the energy is wrung from the radioactive pellets used to run the power plants, the spent fuel is tightly sealed in water-filled, on-site pools. Water is needed to cool the fuel, which gives off heat and radiation for many years after it is removed from the reactor.

Over the years, the pile of spent fuel from U.S. reactors has grown to more than 40,000 metric tons, enough to bury a football field under 15 feet of waste material, the Washington-based industry group Nuclear Energy Institute said.

About two-thirds of this fuel is kept in underground pools, which provide far better containment than for the third stored in above-ground buildings.

But most of these pools are housed in far less robust structures than the reactor containment vessels, which are designed to contain the equivalent of a small nuclear explosion should things go badly wrong in the reactor core.

Though the walls of waste storage pools are thick, reinforced concrete lined with steel, the roofs are made of “pretty insubstantial material” like sheet metal, Lynnette Hendricks, director of licensing at Nuclear Energy Institute, told Reuters.

And while the pools lie within high security areas, there are fewer locked doors and safety barriers between spent fuel and the atmosphere than surrounds the fuel in the reactor.

Another concern is the vulnerability of the pools’ cooling systems. “If you knock out that system, there are no automatic back-up systems,” Lochbaum said.

If the water boils or drains away, the discarded fuel would overheat, either melting or catching fire, threatening to release a radioactive cloud.

POTENTIAL CONCERNS

The pools, initially designed as temporary containers, can withstand earthquakes, tornadoes and other natural calamities, but were not built to withstand acts of sabotage.

“The pools are not designed to withstand the impact of a jetliner, but they are relatively small … it would be extremely difficult for an aircraft, even if deliberately targeting one, to hit one,” said Dricks of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

When most of the country’s nuclear reactors were designed in the 1960s and 1970s, it was assumed their radioactive waste would be shipped off to a central repository or reprocessing facility.

But commercial reprocessing was never successfully developed in the United States, and plans to open a permanent disposal site in Nevada have already been delayed 12 years until around 2010 — if it opens at all.

While legislators, power companies and environmentalists squabble over what to do with the spent fuel, storage space in the temporary facilities gets ever more crowded.

“Now (pools) hold considerably more (spent fuel) than in a reactor,” said Gordon Thompson, a nuclear scientist and executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, an independent think tank based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It only takes about five to six years of operation for a power plant to produce more nuclear waste than it holds in its reactor, and the biggest of these pools now holds seven to eight times as much fuel as in a reactor, said Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

PlanetArk.org
November 5, 2001

WASHINGTON (Reuters)- A Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives called last week for the Bush administration to post National Guard units at all operating or decommissioned nuclear reactors to protect them against attack.

Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, a longtime critic of the nuclear power industry, also urged the stockpiling of potassium iodide to give to residents who live near such facilities in the event of an accident or attack that results in the release of radioactive material.

Markey also told a news conference the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should drop its opposition to developing new security regulations at the nation’s nuclear plants in wake of the deadly Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

“The time for action is now,” said Markey, who won committee approval earlier this week for his proposal requiring the NRC to write new rules to step up protection of nuclear power plants against a sophisticated, coordinated attack.

The proposal was attached by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to a reauthorization of the Price-Anderson Act, which allocates federal funds to cover nuclear operators in the event of a mishap.

Neither the full House nor the Senate has taken up the measure. The House could take it up in the next few weeks.

Governors of several states have ordered National Guard units to duty to protect nuclear power plants in light of heightened government warnings against an imminent attack.

Markey said the plants were vulnerable to attack, and the nuclear industry had not adopted adequate safeguards.

Toronto Star
November 3, 2001

Terrorism attack worries may prompt Ottawa to tighten security measures

OTTAWA (CP) — The federal government is considering deploying soldiers armed with surface-to-air missiles around Canada’s nuclear facilities to guard against possible terrorist attacks from the air, says Natural Resources Minister Ralph Goodale.

“That is a dimension to this that we obviously have under consideration,” Goodale said yesterday, commenting on a decision by France this week to take similar action.

Goodale said Ottawa believes no-fly zones over nuclear sites, which the United States has imposed for its reactors, would be difficult to enforce because of the time it would take for the military to respond.

“That in itself, unfortunately, is no guarantee when you’re dealing with what would be a suicide bomber,” he told reporters.

Goodale said the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission took steps immediately after Sept. 11 to increase security at the country’s seven nuclear facilities, which include five sites in Ontario, and two in Quebec and New Brunswick.

The U.S. has imposed no-fly zones over its reactors but Canadian officials are still pondering the issue, with no indication of when a decision will be made.

The FAA has imposed a ban on flights within a 10-nautical mile radius of and below 18,000 feet over nuclear reactors. The ban is effective until Nov. 7 and may be renewed.

France has gone even further, placing surface-to-air missiles around its reactors, while protecting them with extended radar surveillance.

In a report issued Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency warned that the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. make it “10 times more likely” that terrorists could target nuclear facilities.

BBC
November 1, 2001

Energy Minister Brian Wilson has confirmed that security at UK nuclear sites is being reviewed.

Following international warnings about the likelihood of an act of nuclear terrorism, Mr Wilson told the BBC that safety at nuclear sites was being closely monitored.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Wilson said: “We are constantly reviewing security arrangements around nuclear sites in the UK and both the security and safety regulators have continued to review all relevant precautions.”

He was unable to divulge specific details for reasons of confidentiality.

Threat

Meanwhile, former Conservative environment minister John Gummer has called for European countries to work together against the threat of nuclear terrorism.

His comments and those of Mr Wilson followed warnings from the United Nations nuclear watchdog that security at some industrial and medical sites housing nuclear materials was “disturbingly weak”.

Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts have called for stricter security at nuclear plants and other centres using radioactive material, in the wake of the US terror attacks.

September 11 has been a real wake up call for the industry.
The BBC’s Christine McGourty

The United States has put “no fly zones” around its nuclear installations.

France’s increased security measures include surface-to-air missiles near its nuclear plant at Cap la Hague

Britain says security and safety at civil nuclear sites are being reviewed since the 11 September attacks, but refuses to detail what steps are being taken.

European issue

Mr Gummer told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that protection of nuclear facilities was a Europe-wide issue.

“The French nuclear establishments are as close to parts of Britain as some British sites,” he said. “We have to make sure we are taking all measures across Europe.”

Mr Gummer, whose Suffolk constituency includes the Sizewell B plant, said UK security had improved since the US attacks.

“Since September 11, because we are aware of the reality of this threat, it is both easier and obviously more important to try to meet it.

“In a sense it was more difficult before September 11 when people didn’t realise and didn’t take it seriously enough.”

Change of perception

The threat of terrorist targeting nuclear materials should not be concentrated on nuclear installations, he added.

“When one thinks of water supplies and the way anthrax has been used…we have got to recognise that terrorism is something civilised societies have to deal with and have to deal with it together,” he told the BBC.

BBC science correspondent Christine McGourty said the UK’s nuclear power plants were industrial sites, not military and not hardened to withstand the intentional impact of a fully fuelled jet aircraft.

She said the nuclear industry was very aware of the dangers of radioactive material falling into terrorist hands and there are very strict procedures in place to make sure material is not smuggled out of them

“But September 11 has changed everyone’s perception of nuclear terrorism because no one had ever thought this sort of attack would take place,” she said.

One fear is that terrorists could use radioactive materials from industrial or medical sources to create a low-tech “dirty bomb” which would not cause devastation of nuclear bomb but could cause widespread radioactive contamination, she said.

No threat

At a special session on nuclear terrorism in Vienna on Friday, the IAEA is expected to ask for up to £20m for a new worldwide initiative to widen security and improve responses to any nuclear attack.

Security measures at the UK’s civil nuclear sites are regulated by the Office for Civil Nuclear Security which works closely with the Health and Safety Executive.

They provide advice on the safety implications of events, including the possibility of plane crashes at nuclear installations.

A spokeswoman for the BNFL, which runs seven of the UK’s nuclear plants, said its power stations were on increased security, in accordance with government advice.

“But we feel that there is no reason to believe our facilities are under threat,” she told BBC News Online.

A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry told BBC News Online: “Both regulators are reviewing all relevant precautions in the light of the recent terrorist attacks in the USA.

“It is not Government policy to disclose details of security measures taken at civil nuclear sites.”

Louis Charbonneau
National Post
November 1, 2001

Experts discuss security: Access to radioactive materials is ‘deeply troubling’

VIENNA (Reuters – The ruthlessness of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States shows that an act of nuclear terrorism is “far more likely” than previously thought, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said yesterday.

“The willingness of terrorists to sacrifice their lives to achieve their evil aims creates a new dimension in the fight against terrorism,” said Mohamed el-Baradei, the agency’s director-general.

Mr. el-Baradei, whose Vienna-based UN agency sets world standards for nuclear security, said the concern was no longer limited to the possibility of governments diverting nuclear materials into clandestine weapons programs.

“Now we have been alerted to the potential of terrorists targeting nuclear facilities or using radioactive sources to incite panic, contaminate property and even cause injury or death among civilian populations,” he said.

Experts from around the world have gathered at the IAEA’s headquarters this week to discuss security. In the light of the Sept. 11 attacks, they have added an extra session tomorrow devoted solely to the issue of nuclear terrorism.

Mr. el-Baradei’s remarks came as John Bolton, the U.S. Undersecretary of State, expressed similar fears in a meeting with journalists in Washington.

Answering questions at a breakfast with defence writers yesterday, Mr. Bolton predicted that if extremists possess weapons of mass destruction — the term encompasses nuclear, biological and chemical arms — they will use them.

“I’m concerned about weapons of mass destruction everywhere and my concern … has gone up since the [U.S.-led anti-terrorism] war began,” said the State Department’s top official dealing with arms control and international security affairs.

Sept. 11 proved that anybody willing to fly a jet airplane into the World Trade Center is “not going to be deterred by anything,” Mr. Bolton said. “Had these people had ballistic missile technology, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would have used it.”

Mr. Bolton refused to say if the United States knows whether Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network of Islamic extremists have nuclear weapons.

Iran, Iraq and North Korea have long been key states of U.S. concern in regard to weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Some administration officials have urged including Iraq as a target in the war on terrorism but so far they have not prevailed.

Mr. Bolton sidestepped a direct answer on whether the United States believed Pakistan could lose control of its nuclear arsenal in any political instability that might result from its alliance with Washington in the anti-terrorism war.

Mr. el-Baradei called on countries around the world to take a careful inventory of the security risks at their nuclear power plants and to spend the money necessary to ensure they can prevent or withstand terrorist attacks.

Although there are no confirmed cases of terrorists using a nuclear weapon, Mr. el-Baradei said there was concern at reports some militant groups attempted to acquire nuclear material. Since 1993, there have been 175 known cases of trafficking in nuclear material and 201 cases of trafficking in other radioactive sources, such as those used for medical or industrial purposes.

But only 18 of these cases have actually involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the material needed to produce an atomic bomb. The IAEA believes the quantities involved to be insufficient to construct a nuclear explosive device.

“However, any such materials in illicit commerce and conceivably accessible to terrorist groups is deeply troubling,” Mr. el-Baradei said.

The IAEA estimates there has been a sixfold increase in nuclear material in peaceful programs worldwide since 1970.

There are 438 nuclear power reactors around the world and 651 research reactors, of which 284 are in operation.

While the level of security at nuclear facilities is generally considered to be very high, the IAEA believes the security of medical and industrial radiation sources is disturbingly weak in some countries.

“The controls on nuclear material and radioactive sources are uneven,” said Mr. el-Baradei. “Security is as good as its weakest link and loose nuclear material in any country is a potential threat to the entire world.”

While the IAEA is concerned about the threat of nuclear terrorism, Mr. el-Baradei said it would be easy to exaggerate the consequences of an attack on a nuclear plant.

“Nuclear facilities are perhaps the strongest, most robust industrial structures in the world,” he said.

He said the soundness of nuclear facilities had been demonstrated in U.S. experiments in which a military jet was slammed into a concrete and steel structure identical to that of a nuclear power plant. The structure held.

Nevertheless, security at all nuclear plants must be kept tight: “After Sept. 11, we realized that nuclear facilities — like dams, refineries, chemical production facilities or skyscrapers — have their vulnerabilities,” Mr. el-Baradei said.

“There is no sanctuary any more, no safety zone.”

Richard Brennan
Toronto Star
October 31, 2001

$4.5 million for rapid-response OPP unit to protect nuclear plants

Premier Mike Harris has announced a $9-million package of security measures that will include rapid response and anti-terrorism units.

“Sept. 11 was a wake-up call for governments the world over. It was a reminder that we cannot take cherished freedoms and security for granted,” Harris told the Legislature yesterday.

The Premier said a $4.5 million rapid-response OPP unit will be equipped to protect nuclear facilities and water treatment plants, while the anti-terrorism unit, which will receive $3.5 million, will track down suspected terrorists and their supporters.

In addition, Harris said front-line police officers will be given $1 million for the “necessary equipment” to respond to chemical, biological and other kinds of attacks.

Ontario will also host a counter-terrorism summit “to allow the best minds in law enforcement and emergency services to share ideas and develop new strategies,” he said. A date for the summit, estimated to cost $500,000, has not been set, but more details are expected today from Solicitor-General David Turnbull.

The new measures were condemned by opposition critics who called the funding paltry and the measures little more than feel-good public relations.

“It has been 48 days since the horrific events of Sept. 11 (and) the fact of the matter is they (the Tories) have done very, very little,” charged Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty.

He estimated it would cost closer to $100 million — one-tenth of the money the government has set aside for infrastructure improvements — to properly protect the province against terrorism.

“This horrific event weighs heavily on the minds of our families … and has a dampening effect on our economy, and the best they can do today is to come up with some paltry supports for police measures,” he said.

New Democratic Party Leader Howard Hampton scoffed at the government’s measures to fight terrorism, reminding the Legislature it was the Tories who recently fired five top scientist in the microbiology field, saying Queen’s Park was more concerned with testing than research.

In a related matter, Attorney-General David Young called on Ottawa to create a new Criminal Code offence to specifically deal with terrorist hoaxes.

“The despicable acts of cowardice are diverting emergency personnel from true emergencies and are putting lives and personal safety at risk,” Young said, as he vowed to vigorously prosecute those responsible for hoaxes under existing mischief laws.

Liberal critic Michael Bryant (St. Paul’s) said there are already federal laws prohibiting things like bomb threats and anthrax hoaxes. “The government again seems to be making it up as they go along,” he said.

Young said the Tories also intend to introduce legislation to help families who need to obtain a death certificate as a result of Sept. 11. in order to probate wills and collect on life insurance policies.

Government plans also call for a special counter-terrorism task force of specialized crown attorneys to prosecute terrorist offences.

Stephen Graham, Associated Press
ENN
October 25, 2001

BERLIN — Germany’s environment minister on Wednesday urged a review of security at the country’s 19 nuclear power stations after it emerged that safety rules at one plant were broken for years. Lawmakers seized on the revelations to demand the delay of a contested shipment of radioactive waste next month. The convoy’s route to a north German dump was hit by an overnight arson attack.

The debate comes amid concern in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington that nuclear installations could become terror targets. German officials acknowledge power stations here wouldn’t withstand the impact of a hijacked plane laden with fuel.

Confidence in atomic safety was shaken further Tuesday when Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg admitted that fluid in an emergency cooling system at its Philippsburg plant was knowingly kept below regulation levels for years.

Ordering Germany’s 16 states to review safety at the plants, Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said electricity firms must move fast to restore trust. The operator of the Philippsburg plant “has demonstrated irresponsible deficiencies in its security culture,” he said. The reactor, taken offline Oct. 8, must stay out of operation until “full transparency” is established on the cause of the lapse and steps are taken to prevent a repeat, he said.

Trittin, a member of Green party, negotiated an agreement this year with the electricity companies to phase out nuclear power completely within about 20 years. But antinuclear activists want a quicker shutdown. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Trittin has urged power companies to shut older, less robust, plants sooner and suggested the plants can be switched off quickly if authorities think they are threatened.

But the government has rejected the idea of deploying missiles to bring down hijacked planes, saying the power stations are too close to major airports for the danger to be recognized in time. Officials also stress that they have no current grounds to fear an attack.

The French military has stationed surface-to-air missiles at the La Hague plant, where Germany sends much of its nuclear waste for reprocessing.

Environmentalists warn that the waste shipments, long the target of protests by Germany’s militant antinuclear lobby, also are vulnerable.

German police said Wednesday that they suspected an overnight arson attack on a railroad bridge was linked to an upcoming waste transport from La Hague to Germany’s main storage dump. Tires and straw were rolled under the bridge on a trailer and set ablaze. The bridge, just a few kilometers from the Gorleben storage site, remained closed to train traffic Wednesday as authorities assessed the damage.

Lawmakers from Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s party stepped up calls for the shipment to be delayed to relieve police already working overtime to guard against terrorism. The deputy leader of the Social Democrats’ parliamentary group, Michael Mueller, said putting off the shipment would also help restore the image of the power industry after the security lapses at Phillipsburg and two other plants in recent months.

The exact date of the transport hasn’t been released for security reasons, but antinuclear activists have announced protests for the first week of November.

In April, demonstrators blocked rails and roads to delay the last shipment to Gorleben, despite the efforts of thousands of police officers. Police reported several attempts to sabotage rails and overhead power cables ahead of that shipment.

Matt Bivens
The Nation
October 24, 2001

Go to the website of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and you’ll find an apology for how thin the information is there. On October 11 the website was closed; now bits and pieces are slowly re-emerging. Susan Gagner, an NRC press spokeswoman, says the site is being “scrubbed” of information that might be useful to terrorists. She said the NRC had been asked to take that action by “another government agency,” but would not say which one. Another NRC spokesman told Reuters they were removing, for example, latitude and longitude coordinates of nuclear reactors, plant schematics and so on. Note that a full month after September 11, the NRC had to be told to do this by someone else!

Well, better late than never. As The Nation has reported, the terrorists who in 1993 bombed the World Trade Center trained beforehand at a remote site not thirty miles from Three Mile Island — and afterward threatened to send 150 suicide bombers into America’s nuclear plants. [See “Nuclear Safety,” September 16]. Given that Al Qaeda terrorists active in America have been thinking about nuclear terrorism for eight years now, it seems likely that much of the NRC’s now-secret information–assuming it was of interest and is not still obtainable on any AAA road map–was downloaded long ago.

In any case, one needs minimal inspiration from the NRC website to brainstorm half-a-dozen ways a handful of motivated individuals could turn a nuclear power plant into an American Chernobyl. (Or forty-four Chernobyls. That’s the sort of deadly radiation cloud New Scientist magazine predicts England and Ireland would see if a commercial jetliner plowed into the spent fuel pool of Britain’s Sellafield plant. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., Sellafield’s parent company, called the report “irresponsible.”)

The 1986 fire at Chernobyl threw radiation across Ukraine, Belarus and much of Europe. The death-and-injury toll is a matter of debate; of 300 volunteer firefighters who immediately showed up to battle the six-day blaze, thirty-one were dead within the week. As the fire burned on, thousands more volunteers arrived, but estimates vary as to how many died how rapidly. The Ukrainian government this year estimated that more than 4,000 of those volunteer firefighters have since died a young death, and that more than 70,000 Ukrainians have been “disabled” by radiation sicknesses. The radiation has also created national sacrifice areas in Ukraine and Belarus, where hundreds of thousands deserted their homes in minutes, many of them never to return. Kiev has declared an area the size of the Netherlands unsuitable for agriculture; in neighboring Belarus, nearly a quarter of all farmland is contaminated, and the Health Ministry recorded a 161 percent increase in birth defects in babies born between 1986 and 1993. The World Health Organization says thousands of children have contracted or will contract thyroid cancer over the next decades, an ailment treatable with medication if caught early enough.

US government action is being taken to defend some of America’s 104 nuclear power plants from such a fate. National Guardsmen have been called out to patrol some reactors, and others along the Great Lakes are being watched by the Coast Guard. But the NRC remains tight-lipped and looks like a spectator–in public never moving from its initial September 11 “recommendation” that commercial nuclear plants adopt high-level security–while state governors, national security officials and Congressional critics drive the action.

The NRC could demand or order instead of just recommending. But it has not done so–even when its recommendation looks to have been ignored. For example, it took well over a month after the World Trade Center fell–and weeks of complaints by citizens, media and politicians–before the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant could be bothered to post a guard and a gate at the road leading into its complex. Maine Yankee is being “decommissioned,” but it’s still home to an enormous pool of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. A spokesman for Maine Yankee, Eric House, said that despite the complaints that the place looked like a ghost town, security has been there all along–just “focused” on the metal warehouse over the spent fuel pool. Some locals say they’ve heard there are armed men inside that building, but House would not comment on that. So there’s no way for the public to know whether those armed men have increased in number since September 11; or whether they could handle five or ten or twenty armed kamikaze terrorists; or what they could do to prevent, say, a truck bomb from trundling through the open gate, parking next to the pool house and then making most of Maine uninhabitable after it blows up.

NRC officials counter that there has been no “specific or credible” threat to Maine Yankee, or to any other American nuclear plant. Apparently they were waiting for delivery of an Osama-gram with a big hissing fuse attached. And apparently they finally received something like that on Wednesday, when the NRC announced that a “credible” threat had been made “very specifically” against Three Mile Island. (So just as someone called them to tell them to clean up their website, someone–the CIA? the terrorists?–called them to suggest they look to Three Mile Island.) No details were offered, but some Pennsylvania airports were closed for several hours. By Thursday, the threat was “no longer credible.”

There is nothing new in this lackadaisical approach to nuclear plant security. Daniel Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap–the gap in question being that between the public and the jargon-filled world of nuclear power–has recounted how he and others spent a dismaying fifteen years trying to get the NRC to insist on forcing the power plants it licenses simply to set up barriers to potential truck bombs. In 1982, after a suicide bomber killed 241 US Marines stationed in Lebanon, the NRC began to hear Hirsch’s pleas, and to re-examine its 1970s-era security regulations for nuclear facilities. Those rules required that reactors be prepared for the following worst-case scenario: three lightly armed attackers moving together on foot, assisted by a fourth attacker inside the plant’s work force. No cars, no planes, no grenades, no truck bombs, no gases, no multiple teams.

According to a paper Hirsch wrote in the mid-1980s, NRC safeguards staff saw post-Lebanon truck bombs as a serious danger, and in 1984 publicized their intent to put out new rules. The NRC contracted with the Sandia National Laboratories to study the truck-bomb threat–and Sandia concluded that it was worse than all had feared. A reasonable-sized charge set back beyond even the protected area for most plants could cause “unacceptable damage.” (In other words, it could rip things apart sufficiently to cause reactor safety systems to fail, radiological releases, etc.–the sort of thing that a 1982 US Congressional Committee study had just concluded might bring thousands of fatalities, millions of poisonings and billions of dollars in damages.)

Oddly, Hirsch writes, two weeks after they got that terrifying Sandia research back, the NRC postponed all action on a new truck-bomb-defense ruling–“pending the results of research.” If it’s more dangerous than ever, why postpone? Hirsch writes that the NRC was taken aback at the cost to the industry of real security and plunged into a paralyzing internal debate. “As long as the proposed NRC truck-bomb rule involved only a few extra concrete barricades on-site, the cost to the licensees [nuclear power plants] would have been minimal and the political cost to the NRC acceptable,” he wrote. “When research revealed that the problem was considerably more serious than previously thought and the solution therefore more expensive, the regulatory agency apparently felt it could not afford to require action proportionate to the problem.” Other government agencies were all putting in truck-bomb-defense policies (at taxpayer expense); the NRC contented itself with studying truck-bomb-defense policies rather than requiring them.

In 1993, nine years later, after talk of new rules had begun, a deranged man drove his station wagon through the gates of Three Mile Island, crashing it into the turbine building and disappearing for four hours. Weeks later, terrorists tied to Al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center, and afterward wrote to the New York Times that they would send 150 suicide bombers against US nuclear targets.

Suddenly Hirsch and others who had written about security weaknesses at nuclear plants–among them Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute and Bennett Ramberg, author of Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril–found their truck-bomb fears shared by Congress. Under pressure, the NRC and the industry built new truck-bomb defenses.

But other concerns of Leventhal, Ramberg and Hirsch–for example, the danger of terrorists infiltrating a nuclear plant’s work force — were less satisfactorily handled. All three participated in a post-September 11 press conference in Washington to advocate, among other things, US military troops and antiaircraft weaponry posted at every nuclear facility. They also called for plant operators to aggressively recheck employee backgrounds, and for a government moratorium on plans to ship spent nuclear fuel to a central depository tentatively planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada–a plan critics deride as “mobile Chernobyl.”

Is that really what it takes to protect nuclear plants? If so, then some see in this a logical conclusion, and new currency for an old argument: that nuclear power is incompatible with democratic freedoms. If one has to scrub the websites, polygraph the employees, call out the guard and shoot down civilian aircraft that stray too close–does that sound like the USA, or the USSR?

And if it sounds too Soviet, then isn’t it more sensible to just shut the nuclear plants down?

The Belgian government thinks so, and promises a bill by December 2002 to phase out its seven nuclear power reactors. Germany has already inked such a deal, and plans to replace the lost energy capacity with offshore windmill parks. It’s easier than one might think. In America, despite all of the billions invested in it, nuclear power provides a mere fifth of the nation’s electricity–far less than what five leading national laboratories say could be saved almost immediately with a national energy efficiency program, one that could unfold with most citizens never even noticing.

Given this logic, it’s not hard to see why the industry would be in a state of denial about security: The very discussion is a lethal Pandora’s box. Perhaps this is why a full month after September 11 the gates to Maine Yankee lay open, the NRC website was still packed with design schemata, and it was up to governors, not slow-moving NRC officials, to call out the guard. A clear-eyed discussion of how to defend these plants just might conclude that they are indefensible.