Security Already "Privatized"

David Orrik, a former US Navy Seal, until recently ran a program that tested the security at civilian nuclear plants by organizing mock attacks against them. His exercises don't sound terribly ambitious--they pit a small team, moving on foot, against a nuclear plant security force that would be warned six months in advance of the test. Even so, half of all plants tested failed--and in at least one case, Orrik's men were able to simulate enough sabotage to cause a core melt. And remember, these tests did not simulate, say, the Osama bin Laden truck bombs so successful in demolishing US embassies in Africa in 1998.

The nuclear industry did not enjoy failing, and did not enjoy shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for Orrik's tests--or to install security upgrades as the penalty for not passing. So it began to lean on the NRC to gut the program. This fall, the NRC is doing just that--phasing out Orrik's program in favor of one in which nuclear power plants will carry out "self-assessments." An NRC spokesman could not say if that plan would now be scrapped, and neither could Orrik. Asked on Friday if NRC was considering any dramatic new security measures, Orrik said he had "no sense at all" what would happen next. "I'm curious myself--will it be a sea change? Or business as usual?"

Sleeping in a Coffin

Ironically, one of the first real critical looks at the NRC's decision to let nuclear plants who failed security tests make up their own tests instead appeared in U.S. News & World Report's Monday edition--the day before, well, Tuesday.

That article quotes a representative of the Nuclear Enterprise Institute--the nuclear power industry's Washington-based trade group--as arguing that nuclear power plants "are overly defended at a level that is not at all commensurate with the risk." On Friday, the NEI's offices were closed. But a statement on the NEI website [www.nei.org] trumpeted the "extensive security measures" insisted on by the NRC, including employee background checks. These are the same background checks that let a man named Carl Drega work at three nuclear power plants throughout the 1990s. Shortly after leaving the third plant, Drega went on a 1997 killing spree that left dead two state troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor. Nor did such background checks blackball a computer programmer who worked at the Maine Yankee nuclear plant and slept in a coffin. That man goes on trial next year for the murder of seven co-workers at a Massachusetts technology company.

The NEI statement on nuclear plant security states that the reinforced concrete containment buildings that surround US reactors--they are there to prevent the spread of radiation in case of an accident--are "designed to withstand the impact of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and airborne objects up to a certain force." In reality, as even the NRC conceded on Friday, reactor containment buildings were not built with the idea of resisting an intentional assault by a modern-day jet--certainly not the monster 767s that crashed into the World Trade Center. The literature is actually strangely silent on this point--so much so that experts interviewed all named the same study, published in 1974 in Nuclear Safety, about probabilities of a plane accidentally hitting a nuclear reactor. That study concluded that some reactor containment structures had zero chance of sustaining a hit by a "large" plane, defined as more than 6.25 tons. The 767s that hit the trade center weighed 150 tons, and were probably moving at top speed.

In fact, the security vulnerabilities at nuclear plants are so ghastly that almost everyone contacted for this article balked at discussing them in any detail. Paul Gunter, an expert with the anti-nuclear power Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), recoiled when asked about one possible scenario. "Oh, I don't want to prescribe that. It's too terrifying to imagine." NRC spokesman Jasinski also refused to discuss that scenario. Bennett Ramberg, author of a sixteen-year-old book called Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: an Unrecognized Military Peril, turned away some questions, saying, "I feel a little discomfort talking about that now." Later Friday, after Ramberg saw Wednesday's report of Pakistani terrorists threatening to target nuclear installations in India, and Tuesday's report of Israel thinking of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, he felt freer to talk. "The cat's out of the bag," he observed.

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