Nuclear Plants Are Still Vulnerable, Panel Says

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040705Y.shtml

 

Nuclear Plants Are Still Vulnerable, Panel Says

By Shankar Vedantam

The Washington Post

 

Thursday 07 April 2005

 

Three and a half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the

government has failed to address the risk that a passenger plane

flying at high speed could be deliberately crashed into a commercial

nuclear plant, setting off fires and dispersing large amounts of

radiation, a long-awaited report by the National Academy of Sciences

has concluded.

 

Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have maintained

that such an attack is improbable and that detailed analyses of the

consequences of such attacks are unnecessary. Experts at the nation's

premier scientific body said those judgments are flawed.

 

" There are currently no requirements in place to defend against

the kinds of larger-scale, pre-meditated, skillful attacks that were

carried out on September 11, 2001, " a panel of scientists said, even

as it agreed such an attack would be difficult to pull off.

 

Academy officials battled the government for months to make their

declassified conclusions public -- and the version released yesterday

charged that federal secrecy edicts designed to keep information from

terrorists were paradoxically hurting efforts to defend against such

attacks.

 

Restrictions on sharing information imposed by the NRC had kept

the industry from addressing vulnerabilities, the report said.

 

As a result, government labs and independent researchers have

sometimes worked at cross-purposes, searched for solutions that others

had already found and duplicated complex analyses.

 

NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the agency " respectfully

disagrees " that there are no provisions to deal with major attacks.

 

Security measures have been upgraded since 2001, and the agency

continues to analyze risks, he said. But he emphasized that such

attacks are improbable and that other agencies are guarding against them.

 

" We do believe that the possibility of a successful attack using

commercial aircraft is very small, " he said. It is impractical to ask

commercial plants to defend against such attacks, Burnell concluded.

But he said plants are aware of the risk and are implementing measures

to deal with worst-case scenarios.

 

As to the complaint of excessive secrecy, Burnell said the

commission has to implement the law, which requires controls on

information that could be misused. The debate is not over classified

information but rather over sensitive data that ought not to be

publicized.

 

In an earlier interview, E. William Colglazier, executive officer

of the academy, said the nuclear agency's guidelines for this

classification are vague. Even when officials agreed that certain

details in the report are not secret, he said, they had argued that

chunks of non-secret information, when presented together, constituted

" Safeguards Information. "

 

The report said government scientists and independent researchers

had conducted analyses of threats without knowing that others were

doing the same.

 

Burnell acknowledged that " the system was not perfect " but said

that as more people receive security clearances such bottlenecks could

be reduced. The commission has indicated it is seeking to increase

access to information.

 

To the relief of the industry, the academy report disputed a

characterization that the commission used in a letter to Congress on

March 14. The letter implied that the academy was recommending moving

spent nuclear fuel from large pools to dry storage casks. Industry

believes that the pools are as safe as the casks and that moving the

fuel is not worth the expense.

 

Louis J. Lanzerotti, chairman of the academy's report, said that

his panel had called for analyses of large attacks and that those

results might prompt the commission to move fuel to dry storage at

some plants.

 

Although dry storage has advantages, the risk of major attacks

could be sufficiently addressed by changing how spent fuel is stored

in pools and by installing water sprays to control fires, said the

academy's Kevin Crowley, the study coordinator.

 

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