Energy Probe

Martin Mittelstaedt
Globe and Mail
September 26, 2001

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says atomic power stations in the United States could be vulnerable to attacks by airliners used as missiles, but Canadian nuclear authorities are refusing to comment on whether domestic reactors are similarly at risk.

The NRC, the U.S. atomic watchdog agency, issued a statement on Friday saying that nuclear generating plants are designed to withstand extreme events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, but not terrorist strikes of the kind the United States experienced on Sept. 11.

The statement was issued because of the concern that terrorists might target atomic plants next.

“What would happen if a large commercial airliner was intentionally crashed into a nuclear plant?” the commission asked. “The NRC did not specifically contemplate attacks by aircraft such as Boeing 757s or 767s and nuclear power plants were not designed to withstand such crashes.”

The commission initially denied that stations were at risk from air attacks after hijacked passenger planes were crashed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. However, international nuclear safety authorities disputed that claim, and the NRC later admitted its earlier comments were wrong.

Canadian nuclear authorities are refusing to comment on whether the thick concrete and steel containment domes around domestic reactors are any more secure against attack than the similar structures used in U.S. stations.

“What we’re saying is the units are designed with earthquakes and impact considerations,” said John Earl, spokesman for Ontario Power Generation, the country’s biggest nuclear operator.

But he refused to comment on how a reactor would fare if struck by a big plane.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, this country’s atomic industry watchdog, refused to comment on whether stations could handle an airplane strike, or whether it has acted on a request by Energy Probe, an environmental think tank, for atomic facilities to be guarded by the military.

“I’m not going to talk about specific incidents,” said Jim Leveque, the commission’s spokesman.

Nuclear-safety critics say the stations are huge sitting ducks for terrorist attacks because any strike that disables a station’s emergency shut-down system could lead to a reactor meltdown.

If the meltdown caused radioactivity to escape, it could render huge areas uninhabitable for decades, causing a major economic catastrophe.

In the United States, nuclear critics are also urging beefed up protection at atomic stations. The Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington non-proliferation group, has asked for National Guard troops and air defences to be placed around stations, but it hasn’t had a response.

“As a first step, security against ground attack should be immediately and permanently stepped up,” said Tom Clements, the institute’s executive director.

He said the admission that a station could not handle a big air crash also is troubling. “If the reactors and associated key buildings can’t be protected against a credible threat, then there must be a discussion about the status of those facilities,” he said.

The NRC said that detailed engineering analyses of what a large airliner crash might do to a reactor complex have not yet been performed.

Like their Canadian counterparts, many U.S. nuclear plant owners are storing highly radioactive spent fuel around their stations in concrete storage bins.

The NRC said the ability of the bins to take a direct hit from an airliner hasn’t been analyzed, but it said that if one were breached, it believed the impact would only affect the surrounding area.

Toronto Star
September 26, 2001

Critics say the industry is in denial on the threat of airborne attack OTTAWA (CP) — Canada’s nuclear power plants have stepped up security since the terrorist attacks in the U.S., and the nuclear industry is facing tough questions about the vulnerability of reactors.

A spokesman for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the federal agency that oversees nuclear safety, is playing down concerns, saying there is no identified terrorist threat against Canada.

But critics say the industry is in denial about the threat of airborne attack, which the reactors were never designed to withstand.

Canada’s 22 reactors were placed on “enhanced security” within hours of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, said commission spokesman James Levesque.

He declined for security reasons to say what measures were taken.

“The information we’re getting from the federal people who do intelligence is that there is at this time no identified threat against Canada,” said Levesque.

Atomic Energy of Canada has imposed a secure air space of 3,000 feet and 3.5 nautical miles around its research campus at Chalk River, Ont., said spokeswoman Louise Duhamel.

Any aircraft must request permission to come within that space.

The Crown corporation is in contact with the RCMP and CSIS on a daily basis, said Duhamel. It has also halted all public tours and visits to the Chalk River facility.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has conceded that its reactors are vulnerable to airline crashes, but Canadian officials are not making such admissions.

Pat Breton, a spokesman for Natural Resources Minister Ralph Goodale, would say only that security of the reactors is under review.

“On the issue of, `Could it withstand an attack similar to the World Trade Center?’, the president of the (Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission) has assured us that the measures in place are adequate but are under evaluation.

“Up until Sept. 11 that sort of thing wasn’t contemplated, so that evaluation is ongoing.”

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ordered “increased patrols, augmented security forces and capabilities, additional security posts and . . . limited access of personnel and vehicles to sites.”

Two U.S. watchdog groups, the Nuclear Control Institute and the Committee to Bridge the Gap, have called for armed troops and anti-aircraft weapons to be deployed around reactors.

The fear is that an airborne attack could rupture the containment buildings designed to isolate radioactive materials in the event of a spill.

“You’d have millions of people potentially exposed to radioactivity,” said a source with experience in the Canadian nuclear industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“If it’s in the drinking water supply, you’d have a disaster of unimaginable magnitude.”

The source said reactors should be defended by ground-to-air missiles capable of intercepting any aircraft entering their secure air space.

“It might have sounded crazy a few weeks ago but it’s not crazy. An unidentified flying object that comes into a secure air space would be blown up.”

The new security measures are bound to increase costs for nuclear operators, and will add to the debate about the economics of nuclear power.

A spokesman for the Office for Critical Infrastructure Protection, a federal agency concerned with emergency preparedness, declined to comment on whether nuclear reactors are adequately protected.

“The plants are privately run, they’re run by provincial authorities and provincial corporations and the actual physical security is the responsibility of the operator,” said Max London.

Reuters
New York Times
September 24, 2001

MIAMI – The Coast Guard has set up a precautionary secure zone in the waters around Turkey Point nuclear power plant south of Miami, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

Coast Guard spokesman Ron LaBrec said boaters would be banned from the area in the event of an incident or threat involving the plant.

The zone was set up as one of a series of security measures taken by the Coast Guard in Florida waters after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Steps include protecting cruise ships entering and leaving ports such as Miami.

The security zone around Turkey Point, which is about 25 miles south of Miami, would mean that in the event of an incident or threat, the Coast Guard could advise boaters and anglers the area was closed.

The zone will remain effect until June, the National Park Service said.

Campbell Morrison
The Moncton Times and Transcript
September 21, 2001

One of Canada’s pre-eminent environmental groups is calling for military protection of New Brunswick’s nuclear power station at Point Lepreau.

Energy Probe executive director Tom Adams said Point Lepreau faces special security risks because of its proximity to the U.S. border and because of the small army of international technicians who have been trained at the station and know it inside out.

That information could be used to sabotage the 635-megawatt power station from the inside, he said.

“We recommended both military protection and intelligence effort be applied to these various risks,” he said.

“Very large numbers of individuals have been in these training programs developing detailed technical knowledge about Candu systems that could be specifically used to guide strategic attacks,” he said yesterday. “Somebody that knows a plant from the inside out would not need a truck bomb.”

People from Romania, Pakistan, India, Argentina and Korea have been trained at Point Lepreau and the Pickering nuclear power station in Ontario.

“We have proliferated detailed knowledge about these facilities. I am not suggesting any particular individuals or that we have any information about these people, I am just saying that there are thousands and thousands of nuclear trained technicians out there in the world and their knowledge represents a potential security risk that has to be accounted for.”

Adams wrote a letter to the prime minister and other cabinet ministers describing the security risks at Canada’s nuclear power stations and recommending means to address them.

“All the nuclear power stations are designed with an inadequate appreciation of risk of sabotage,” he said.

Adams conceded that Energy Probe opposes nuclear power in general, but said its long campaign against it gives it special insight into the risks involved.

“Notwithstanding our opposition in general, we have some detailed knowledge about the operation of these bodies.”

Adams refused to release his letter, arguing that its contents would be helpful to terrorists.

Martin Mittelstaedt
Globe and Mail
September 19, 2001

The military should protect nuclear power plants in Canada against terrorist attacks such as those that occurred last week in the United States, Energy Probe says.

The environmental policy group wrote to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Defence Minister Arthur Eggleton and Solicitor-General Lawrence MacAulay on Saturday, asking for a federal military presence at the country’s five nuclear power complexes in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, and at other atomic facilities.

Such a request, if granted, would increase security dramatically at the sprawling power plants. Guards now don’t even carry weapons, and anglers’ boats often pass nearby.

Energy Probe executive director Tom Adams said the stations, and other nuclear installations, were not designed to withstand attacks. “It’s clear that the nuclear industry has not made anything like adequate precautions,” he said.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the federal watchdog that reviews security arrangements at atomic installations, refused to answer questions about the request, saying to do so might compromise security arrangements.

“We’re not going to talk about specific measures,” Jim Leveque, commission spokesman said.

Energy Probe refused to release the text of its letter, but Mr. Adams said it identified a number of safety oversights that could be useful to terrorists. It didn’t say why it believes military personnel would make reactors safer.

The call for extra protection comes amid worry about the ability of such plants to withstand attacks.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission insisted yesterday that reactors can withstand aircraft impacts such as those that brought down two World Trade Center towers last week.

“It is the considered opinion of the NRC that these are very robust, and it is unlikely that a large airliner could penetrate the containment,” commission spokesman William Beecher said.

That view is disputed by the United-Nations-chartered International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Its spokesman said on Monday that reactors would likely be penetrated if an aircraft hit.

The view that reactors are vulnerable is echoed by independent safety experts, who say atomic power plants haven’t been built to survive an impact from modern, wide-bodied planes of the kind that were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“No nuclear plant anywhere in the world is designed against this kind of event,” said Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Mass.

Although an airplane strike on a nuclear plant wouldn’t kill a lot of people immediately, a burning reactor would contaminate a wide area with radiation, as the Chernobyl plant in the former Soviet Union did in 1986.

Mr. Thompson said some plants in the United States can withstand strikes by planes lighter than those used in the attacks last week.

These plants, such as the Three Mile Island facility in Pennsylvania, are near airport flight paths and were designed with slightly thicker concrete walls in their containment domes, but even these would be no match for a hit by a big plane.

He said military guards wouldn’t be much use in an air attack.

Eugene Carroll
St Paul Pioneer Press
September 18, 2001

In the wake of the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Towers in New York and damaged the Pentagon, American security officials have begun to think in earnest about some of the other targets that future terrorists might attack.

Among those that come to mind are America’s huge oil refineries, which could be set aflame with catastrophic economic and environmental consequences. Also in the crosshairs of terrorists saboteurs are the country’s communication centers and banking systems, which are essential to domestic and international commerce. But by far, the most dangerous, vulnerable and significant targets are the 104 nuclear power plants in the United States.

While these plants are said to be secure, too much evidence suggests otherwise.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission administers a number of supervisory programs to ensure security, chief among them being an Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation inspection program.

Under the OSRE routine, a nuclear plant is warned that a simulated sabotage effort will be made against their installation by a team of would-be saboteurs in a force-on-force exercise. These teams are composed of both NRC and private contractor personnel under the direction of a David Orrik, a retired Navy SEAL.

In approximately half of recent tests, the intruders succeeded in defeating the security measures, even reaching the central control room on occasion. The NRC downplays these security failures by claiming that they always lead to positive improvements and overall security is adequate. Indeed, so sanguine are NRC officials that they are starting a pilot program to allow private reactor operators to conduct their own security evaluations. Since when have private companies voluntarily disclosed security shortcomings and made costly improvements to their security systems and personnel training?

Compare this gentlemanly security program with the fierce determination of a trained team of terrorists attacking a reactor without warning and taking it over long enough to disable the safety controls. At that point, a major Chernoble-syle disaster would be all but assured.

Now that the initial shock and sadness of Tuesday’s horror have given way to anger, many members of Congress are calling for aggressive military action directed against not only the responsible terrorist organization but against the nation providing them shelter and support. Though popular here at home, such action will not provide any protection against further terrorist actions. If anything, it may well intensify the cycle of attack and reprisal.

Whatever action is finally taken, the first objective should be to protect American citizens in the United States. But terrorists are not single minded nor stupid. Seeing a major security effort in process at the airports, they will simply look elsewhere for vulnerable targets — like the country’s nuclear power plants. These need protection — not by their owners but by government forces.

The sad truth is we cannot guard everything in America all the time against terrorist attack. The only realistic hope to reduce the danger of future attacks lies not in violent reprisals by American forces, but in positive preventive programs, taken in concert with other nations to attack the root causes of terrorism by political and economic means.

Only by alleviating abject poverty and hopelessness in the poorest nations in the world can we eliminate the spirit that breeds terrorists — that sense that even death is preferable to life under unbearable conditions. This will not be an easy or inexpensive challenge. But it is far less costly than the perpetual cycle of attack and reprisal and with targets like nuclear reactors to aim at.

Carroll, a retired rear admiral, served as director of U. S. military operations in Europe and the Middle East.

Dick Chapman
Toronto Sun
September 18, 2001

The Canadian military should protect all nuclear power plants in this country 24 hours a day because of vulnerability to World Trade Center-type terrorism, says Energy Probe.

The Toronto-based watchdog group has asked Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, as well as Canada’s defence minister and solicitor-general, that nuclear power plants be protected around-the-clock from terrorist attacks.

“We’ve asked the Canadian military be deployed to protect the stations,” Energy Probe’s Tom Adams said yesterday.

Adams said a kamikaze-style terrorist attack on a Canadian nuclear reactor could spark an uncontrollable meltdown.

Adams said he doesn’t doubt terrorists could figure out how best to wreak massive destruction at a Canadian nuke plant – by crippling the cooling systems that jointly service four reactors at each station.

“We just have to make the assumption they know where the cooling pumps are, because it’s public knowledge,” Adams said. “If we could figure this stuff out, somebody who meant to do harm could figure it out.”

Ontario Power Generation, which operates the nuclear generating stations, would not comment on Energy Probe’s claims. OPG’s John Earl reiterated that “appropriate additional security measures” have been taken.

International intelligence analyst John Thompson said yesterday any past threat assessment of nuclear plants is “outdated.”

“The United States is deploying 50,000 troops to protect its infrastructure,” he said. “Canada should be doing the same thing.”

John Emshwiller, Michael Orey, Daniel Machalaba and Rebecca Smith
The Wall Street Journal
September 17, 2001

Measures to keep weapons from terrorists found to be weak

Oct. 17 — In February, Jamal Ahmed Mohamed al-Fadl, a longtime member of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida organization, gave some unsettling testimony in New York federal court: He helped arrange meetings in Khartoum, Sudan, in the early 1990s with the aim of helping al-Qaida acquire uranium. AL-FADL, WHO testified that he was told that “it’s easy to kill more people with uranium,” said he didn’t know whether the deal ultimately went through. His testimony came in connection with the federal indictment against bin Laden and others for their alleged roles in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The evidence that bin Laden’s group has tried to obtain weapons-grade nuclear material is sketchy and unverified. But it has sent authorities around the world rushing to shore up security measures that are in some cases surprisingly weak. The armed guards at nuclear-weapons depots often lose in exercises with mock assailants. Materials for making a nuclear bomb are accessible enough to support a black market.

The first reaction after Sept. 11 was to tighten security. Kansas officials are keeping fishermen off a lake near the Wolf Creek nuclear plant. Japan ordered round-the-clock patrols of the waters near its nuclear plants. France, which even encouraged school trips to its many nuclear-power plants to promote acceptance, has severely restricted access to facilities. Authorities in the Czech Republic tightened airspace restrictions over nuclear power stations.

The U.S. Department of Energy briefly halted shipments of nuclear materials. Just last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission temporarily closed its Web site, saying that it had to review all the material as part of “our mission to protect public health and safety.”

Corbin McNeill Jr., the chairman of the Chicago-based power company Exelon Corp., has a plan for making future nuclear plants more resistant to an airborne assault by terrorists: Bury them. He’s thinking that if and when Exelon builds a new-generation nuclear plant, most of the structure and equipment will be housed below the surface of the earth. “There should be no vital components above ground,” he says.

“The whole world has been turned upside down” by the events of Sept. 11, says Richard Meserve, chairman of the NRC, which oversees commercial security measures for nuclear-power plants. “We have to re-examine our entire capability to withstand a terrorist attack.” The means for carrying out nuclear attacks are scattered around the globe — in the form of hundreds of commercial nuclear plants, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and tons of stored uranium and plutonium that could be fashioned into bombs. Efforts to make nuclear materials more secure have been hampered by tight budgets, geopolitical squabbling and inertia.

While security has frayed in many places, authorities believe that a nuclear assault by terrorists remains unlikely. Since Hiroshima, 56 years ago, there have been few significant breaches of security anywhere in the world that could have produced a nuclear weapon or incident, and there have been no incidents. Besides the technical barriers to making a nuclear bomb, nuclear weapons and bomb-grade material have always been relatively well-guarded.

Authorities have long counted on the technical barrier — namely, that designing and fabricating a nuclear device remains a formidable challenge. Despite the sophistication of bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, the prospect of terrorists going nuclear is still “highly unlikely,” says Graham Andrew, a senior official at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations-related body created to prevent the proliferation of atomic weapons. But the possibility remains. A draft report for an IAEA conference in May cited intelligence-agency and other reports of bin Laden efforts to obtain small nuclear weapons, with the devices to be possibly stored in Afghanistan. The draft report, prepared by Alex Schmid, officer-in-charge of the United Nations’ Terrorism Prevention Branch, stated that while he hadn’t seen evidence that the terrorist had succeeded, “it’s clear that bin Laden is actively seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction.” Schmid declined to be interviewed. A U.S. intelligence official says intelligence sources also have reported efforts by bin Laden’s organization to acquire nuclear weapons.

The technical barrier also seems to have gotten lower. A 1998 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign-policy think tank in Washington, found that “a number of American college students have come up with plausible designs based on unclassified information.” The simplest bomb to build would resemble the one used over Hiroshima. It essentially involves placing two slugs of highly enriched uranium in a tube and driving them together with an explosive charge — a design that is considered so reliable that bomb experts say it doesn’t even have to be tested. Weapons experts say this sort of bomb could be built with about 125 pounds of uranium — though more-sophisticated designs require far less material.

Such a bomb would produce a blast equivalent to about 15,000 tons of TNT and, in a city, could kill more than 100,000 people, says Robert Gallucci, dean of the Georgetown University foreign-service school who worked on nuclear-proliferation issues for the State Department. Scientists estimate that the explosions and subsequent fires that took down the World Trade Center released energy the equivalent of about 1,000 tons of TNT.

BUILDING A ‘DIRTY BOMB’

Far easier to build, and much less deadly, is a “dirty bomb,” in which conventional explosives are used to spread radioactive material. The key to averting this and any other nuclear threat, security experts say, is keeping nuclear material out of terrorists’ hands, particularly plutonium or highly enriched uranium, which are what is needed to create nuclear fission.

That means wiping out the shadowy black market for nuclear materials. The biggest potential source of such material is Russia and other parts of the old Soviet Union — though the IAEA considers all the ex-Soviet Republics, except Russia itself, free of nuclear weapons. Here, too, information can be incomplete and even contradictory. Take the Russian “suitcase” bombs. Republican Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania recalls that in hearings held in 1997, retired Russian Gen. Alexander Lebed testified that Russian authorities couldn’t account for dozens of portable nuclear bombs once in the Soviet arsenal and designed for use behind enemy lines to blow up specific objects, such as tunnels or power stations. Weldon said other top Russian military officials, including former Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev told him directly that such devices existed. More recently, both U.S. and Russian officials have issued statements denying the Soviets ever built such weapons. Portable atomic demolition devices produced by the U.S. military were all dismantled by 1989, a Defense Department official adds.

Watchdog groups such as the nonprofit Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., which attempt to verify reports of nuclear proliferation, keep track of various incidents in which nuclear materials may have escaped the grip of governments. In the Monterey files is an example from 1998 when the Russian Federal Security Service announced that it had thwarted an attempt by employees at a facility in the Chelyabinsk region to steal around 40 pounds of nuclear material. Matthew Bunn, a nonproliferation expert at Harvard University, says an official with the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy told him the material had been highly enriched uranium. Vladislav Petrov, a spokesman for Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy, maintains that this incident “did not happen.”

Some bomb-grade material does seem to have made its way out of Russia. In 1994, Czech officials seized nearly six pounds of enriched uranium from a car in Prague. Investigators in that case believed that the material came from one of two Russian facilities. Petrov, however, says the Czechs never allowed Russia to test the material to determine its origin. The information about the theft “was created by their special services,” he says, “to show that Russia isn’t in control of its uranium.” One of the suspect facilities in the Czech case is the Mayak nuclear materials production complex in the Chelyabinsk region, which is home to a number of nuclear facilities. In a visit to Mayak last year, former Energy Department official Rose Gottemoeller says she found several tons of plutonium “stored in simple bucketlike containers.” It would be “easy to carry,” she notes, “if you could get through the wooden door or nonbarred window.” Although a joint Russian-U.S. venture was in the process of upgrading security at Mayak during her visit, Gottemoeller notes, it was just starting to install a perimeter fence. That fence has now been completed, according to Sarah Lennon, a DOE official. She also says windows have been bricked up and that other security improvements are in progress.

Gottemoeller also visited Russian Naval facilities in 1999 and 2000, where she said that nuclear weapons being moved on and off of ships were kept in shacklike buildings on the base. The DOE’s Lennon says there is an “aggressive program under way” to improve security measures for the Russian Navy’s weapons.

BEHIND ON UPGRADES

For the past eight years, the U.S. government has been helping the Russian government shore up security at its nuclear installations. So far, though, upgrades have been completed for less than 40 percent of the more than 660 tons of enriched uranium and plutonium not contained in Russia’s nuclear-weapon stockpiles, says Bunn, who is also a former Clinton adviser on nuclear proliferation. In a Sept. 19 letter to President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bunn wrote that “over the past five years, many of the major U.S.-Russian cooperative nuclear security programs have slowed” and “had their timelines unnecessarily extended into the future.”

Jonathan Kiell, a spokesman for the DOE, insists that major strides have been made in helping Russia secure its nuclear material and in redirecting the activities of Russian weapons scientists. However, he says, “following the attacks of Sept. 11, [the DOE] is evaluating possibilities of accelerating its [security program], based on guidance from the administration.” As the U.S. has pondered the post-Cold War nuclear threat, attention has focused on a “rogue” nation attacking the continental U.S. with a missile. But many national-security experts worry about a much simpler scenario, particularly now that the efficacy of suicide attacks in the U.S. has been proven. If overseas terrorists wanted to get a nuclear weapon into the U.S., the most likely means would be by ship, they say. About nine million shipping containers, typically 20 or 40 feet long, enter American ports each year.

For years, U.S. Customs Service inspectors have worn small devices to detect radiation in containers. So far, the searches have found radioactive cheese from Ukraine’s Chernobyl region and medical devices that use radioactivity for diagnostics. Officials also routinely review shipping documents looking for suspicious cargo, which are then subject to X-ray or physical searches.

But tearing apart containers is time-consuming and labor-intensive. On Oct. 5, for example, two customs inspectors in a warehouse at the port in Elizabeth, N.J., strained to lift and heave bags of birdseed out of a container that had arrived from Ethiopia. Another inspector removed boxes of sweatpants from Pakistan. An X-ray check had showed an oddly shaped object near the trailer door. “It could be a booby trap or a trigger for a device,” said Kevin McCabe, chief inspector for the Port of New York and New Jersey. It turned out that one of the pants boxes had fallen and wedged itself against the door.

Since Sept. 11, the Customs Service has increased the number of inspectors and inspections nationally. At the New York/New Jersey port, the inspection force has expanded by more than a third to 100. The number of containers X-rayed has had an “appreciable increase” to about 500 daily, says McCabe. However, more than 5,000 containers enter that port daily. Given this river of cargo, officials admit something could slip by. “If you can smuggle heroin in containers, you may be able to smuggle a nuclear bomb,” says Charles Raymond, chief executive officer of CSX Lines, the container-shipping subsidiary of Richmond, Va.-based CSX Corp.

Some people argue that would-be nuclear terrorists can find what they need at U.S. weapons plants. With the end of the Cold War, security budgets shrunk at the weapons facilities, which are operated by the Department of Energy.

Since 1992, the number of guards at DOE facilities nationwide dropped about 40 percent to around 3,500, according to Edward McCallum, former director of the DOE’s Office of Safeguards and Security, in a statement last June to a congressional committee. The reductions have made it “questionable at some facilities whether the DOE Protective Force could defeat an adversary,” wrote McCallum, whose outspoken criticism of security measures contributed to his departure from the Energy Department in 1999.

For years, the DOE has used mock terrorists in simulated attacks to test security at weapons plants. Often, U.S. military personnel and plant guard forces do battle with harmless laser weapons as the attackers try to make off with objects that represent containers of plutonium or uranium.

In a Sept. 13 letter to Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Peter Stockton, a former top Energy Department security consultant, said the DOE guard forces “lose well over 50 percent” of the time in these mock battles — “a clear indicator that a number of facilities cannot protect” their weapons and weapons-grade material. In one case cited by Stockton, attackers at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory brought along a garden cart to haul off their booty. The Project on Government Oversight, a private watchdog group, issued a report earlier this month recommending that the government consolidate the tons of bomb-grade material from the 10 sites in two underground facilities, possibly to be protected by the U.S. military. Currently, the Energy Department contracts with private security firms.

Glenn Podonsky, a senior DOE security official, says the agency believes its weapons-grade material is adequately guarded. While there have been some reductions in guard forces, these partly reflect changing government security requirements and the closing of some facilities, Podonsky says. As for the mock attacks, “we don’t track the results on a win/lose basis,” he says. Rather, they are used to evaluate protection strategies and individual responses by guards.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, DOE facilities went to a heightened state of alert and the agency is reviewing what further steps might be needed. “Sept. 11 changes a lot for everybody,” says Podonsky.

At commercial nuclear-power plants, the main worry is that terrorists would turn a reactor into a sort of giant radiation-dispersal device. Disabling a plant’s safety systems could lead to a catastrophic radiation release, similar to the one caused by the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. There, radiation releases contaminated a huge swath of land, quickly killed several dozen people and exposed tens of thousands of others to dangerous doses of radioactivity.

Like the Energy Department, the NRC runs mock terrorist raids against power plants. The NRC won’t reveal specific results, but “there have been instances where infiltrators have gotten far enough inside and stayed long enough where they could have planted bombs,” says an agency spokesman.

But the NRC has halted the mock terrorist attacks, at least temporarily. “This is not a wise time to be holding exercises,” says Meserve, the NRC chairman. “It could be used as the cover for an actual attack.”

Matt Bivens
The Nation
September 16, 2001

What happens if a suicide bomber drives a jumbo jet into one of America’s 103 nuclear power reactors? What happens if a fire fed by thousands of tons of jet fuel roars through a reactor complex–or, worse, through the enormous and barely-protected containment pools of spent nuclear fuel found at every such plant?

These questions are even more obvious and urgent than they may seem at first glance. Russian television reported on Wednesday: “Our [Russian] security services are warning the United States that what happened on Tuesday is just the beginning, and that the next target of the terrorists will be an American nuclear facility.” [See www.nci.org.] Meanwhile, eight years ago, in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the terrorists themselves wrote to the New York Times to warn that nuclear attack would follow.

That letter, judged authentic by federal authorities, talked of “150 suicide soldiers” who would hit “nuclear targets.” As if to drive home the point, those same terrorists had trained beforehand at a camp in Pennsylvania thirty miles from Three Mile Island. US law enforcement had them under surveillance at least a month before they struck–and at one point observed them conducting a mock assault on an electric power substation. That very same weekend, a man later judged to be mentally unwell drove his station wagon through the security barriers at Three Mile Island and parked next to a supposedly secured building. [See www.tmia.com.]

There are nuclear power plants outside many urban areas. There’s Indian Point on the Hudson River, some twenty-five miles northwest of New York City; Limerick Plant some twenty miles outside of Philadelphia; Calvert Cliffs, forty-five miles from the nation’s capital; and a handful of nuclear plants ringing Chicago, from Dresden to Braidwood. A terrorist strike at any such plant could not bring about a nuclear explosion–but there are a number of scenarios that would spread deadly radiation clouds across, in the NRC’s famous phrase, an area the size of Pennsylvania. On top of the tens of thousands of eventual radiation-driven deaths, there is the mass panic such an attack might cause. And if we can clean up and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing, a radiological attack would force us to write off huge swathes of land as national sacrifice areas.

So given the extraordinary events of this week, we’re taking extraordinary measures to protect our nuclear plants, right?

Well, in France, the defense minister has stationed troops around nuclear power plants… But in America, not much is being done.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday in a statement said it had “recommended” that plants tighten security. Bob Jasinski, an NRC spokesman, said Friday that nothing had changed since then. (What about Wednesday’s Russian TV report? Or the repeated insistence by authorities that there are more terrorist cells out there?) The NRC also says there have been “no credible general or specific threats to any of these [nuclear] facilities”–and does not seem interested in reconsidering the specific and, it now seems, very credible 1993 threats of 150 suicide soldiers headed the NRC’s way.