Nuclear Safety (Page 3)

Terrorists Don't Bomb Windmills

Terrorism also has implications for the Great Waste Debate. Our reactors have for fifty years been piling up vast quantities of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. The question of what to do with it all takes on a new urgency. Do we ship it all to a central site like the one proposed for Yucca Mountain--and create a spectacular series of terrorist targets for years, turning trains and trucks of waste into what critics deride as "Mobile Chernobyl"? Or do we keep waste in vast pools on site at reactor complexes--in buildings so frail that David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says they could be pierced "by a Cessna"--and also keep producing more such waste every day?

There is no easy answer--which may explain such a sluggish and bleary-eyed response to potential terrorism against nuclear targets: the NRC and others are in denial. Not so long ago, they were arguing that terrorism was not a very scientific probability, and that terrorists had a moral impediment against taking life on a mass scale. So much for that. But if terrorism is real, then a clear-eyed view would suggest nuclear power is done for.

Nuclear power had been previously discredited on environmental grounds, on public safety grounds and even on financial grounds--don't be fooled, it's immensely costly, even with the public paying for both waste disposal and liability insurance. This week, nuclear power was also discredited on grounds of national security. A country that has nuclear power plants, it turns out, has handed over to "the enemy" a quasi-nuclear military capability.

We get 20 percent of our electricity from our fleet of enormously expensive and dangerous reactors. Regardless of what our vice president may think, through better energy efficiency and conservation alone we could reduce energy demand to the point of not needing any of those plants--of not even noticing that they had been shut down. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a prominent think-tank on energy matters, argues that "up to 75 percent of the electricity used in the United States today could be saved with energy efficiency measures that cost less than the electricity itself."

Given that our national will and purpose are now being mobilized, does anyone doubt that, properly channeled, we could succeed in this? Or that along the way we could also establish wind power, solar power and hydrogen fuel cells--and in so doing, completely wean ourselves from the oil of the Middle East? Surely this--and not open-ended war against every nation that has ever stamped bin Laden's passport--is the path to real victory and national security. After all, as Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted, no one this week is calling his colleagues in the alternative energy sectors to ask about terrorist threats to windmills.

In the meantime, we can follow France's lead and post National Guardsmen around all nuclear facilities. We can restore the NRC's compulsory security drills, and make them even more demanding. Hey, we can even consider anti-aircraft emplacements at each power plant. And we can see how safe that makes us feel when the White House starts trying to punish Afghanistan.

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