RE Query NPPs - NUCLEAR TERROSRISM PART 1-BIN LADEN Etc.
Janet M Eaton
all the best, janet
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From: "Bill Smirnow" <smir...@ix.netcom.com>
Date sent: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 21:56:52 -0400
Subject: [abolition-caucus] NUCLEAR TERROSRISM PART 1-BIN LADEN THREAT TO ATTACK NPPs WITH 150 SUICIDE SOLDIERS
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http://www.tmia.com/sabter.html GREAT NPP
SABOTAGE SITE
In 1993, bin Laden's associates threatened to attack "nuclear
targets" with "150 suicide soldiers" and trained 30 miles from Three
Mile Island.
Hardcopy is pages 44-46 of the September 17, 2001 edition of "US
News & World Report." If you can get a copy, do- it includes a
good layout of an NPP facility.
All representatives and heads of state in all 44 countries with
commercial nuclear facilities should be called upon IMMEDIATELY
to shut their NPPs & introduce the necessary safety precautions
that can withstand an airplane attack[s],shoulder held weapons
and suicide attacks on foot that can easily cause a meltdown that
would make yesterday's attack look like minor. In the United
States, PLEASE call both of your Senators & your rep at: 202-224-
3121. In other countries please use the necessary channels to
lobby. TELL them NOT to ever trust the NRC [http://www.nrc.gov]
with safety & security at NPPs [nuclear power plants]. NRC is and
has always been in bed with the industry they're supposed to
regulate[http://www.mothersalert.org/nrccongress.h tml]. If they
were truely interested in safety, they'd long ago have called for the
immediate installation of wind power facilities and shutting of all
NPPs. There's enough wind power in just 3 US states-Texas,
Kansas & N Dakota to provide enough electricity for the entire
USA.
Statements that US NPPs are on highest alert will do NOTHING to
stop a Chernobyl like radiation attack or several Chernobyls
unleased on humanity if airplanes and/or simple, easily available
shoulder held weapons are used to attack any NPP. They are
nuclear land mines waiting to be stepped on as one US Senator
[Lieberman I believe] has stated.
"Charles Manson could get access to a nuclear power plant," says
former nuclear security officer Richard Kester. But in light of
attacks against fortified targets such as U.S. embassies, threats
against nuclear plants are now considered very real. Classified
reports from Sandia National Laboratories show that a well-placed
truck bomb would not even have to enter a site's property to
destroy vital equipment High on critics' lists of concerns is the
failure rate in the NRC-run mock terrorist assaults-attacks that, if
real, could have released radiation more lethal than the 1986
Chernobyl accident
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/010917/usnews/n ukes.htm
Nation & World 9/17/01
A nuclear nightmare They look tough, but some plants are easy
marks for terrorists
BY DOUGLAS PASTERNAK
He called it Project Worst Nightmare. And in the twisted mind of
Donald Beauregard, commander of the 77th Regiment Militia in St.
Petersburg, Fla., it surely was. Beauregard's plan was simple-
disable the electric power grid feeding the nearby Crystal River
nuclear power plant with explosives stolen from a National Guard
armory. That would shut down the plant, blacking out St.
Petersburg. This was no idle fantasy. When the cops finally caught
up with him, Beauregard and his "strike team" had a 20-mm
cannon, a .50-caliber machine gun, and a few pipe bombs primed
to blow.
Beauregard might have succeeded if an informant hadn't tipped the
police. He was prosecuted and clapped off to prison last year. But
the FBI took Beauregard's plan seriously enough to incorporate it
into a test it ran last May against the Palo Verde nuclear
generating station in Arizona.
And here lies the rub. In the past decade, nearly half the nation's
103 power plants have failed mock terrorist attacks against them.
The plants that failed, in other words, would not have stopped the
Donald Beauregards of the world.
In the parlance of counterterrorism, nuclear power plants are
among the world's most "hardened" targets. Barbed wire,
surveillance cameras, motion sensors, armed response teams-all
are designed to make the plants impenetrable to even the most
determined saboteur. But interviews with current and former
Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors, security experts, and
plant guards paint a very different picture. Often, security measures
at nuclear plants don't work as they should or don't work at all. A re-
view of recent incidents by U.S. News reveals numerous
breakdowns in plant security, from criminals being granted access
to sensitive areas to inadequate security that places vital
equipment within easy reach of an attacker who never even enters
the plant's perimeter.
Security experts say a terrorist is far more likely to attack a so-
called soft target- such as a government building-than a nuclear
power plant. Indeed, argues Lynnette Hendricks of the Nuclear
Energy Institute, the nuclear power trade group: "We believe the
plants are overly defended at a level that is not at all
commensurate with the risk." But in light of attacks against fortified
targets such as U.S. embassies, threats against nuclear plants are
now considered very real. And concerns about security are likely to
mount as the Bush administration calls for greater use of nuclear
power. Last year, for instance, Japanese police arrested a man
with seven pipe bombs who was planning to blow up a uranium
processing plant. Last September, Ukrainian police arrested a
group planning to sabotage the Chernobyl reactor. And in the
United States, officials list at least 30 threats against nuclear
plants since 1978. Most have been hoaxes, but in the mid-1980s,
for instance, three of four power lines leading to the Palo Verde
plant were sabotaged. And in 1989 four members of Earth First!, a
radical environmental group, were charged with conspiring to
disable three nuclear power plants in the Southwest.
Rating risks. Despite the threats and the documented security
flaws, the nuclear industry has convinced the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission-the federal agency that oversees nuclear power plants-
that security at these sites would function better with less federal
oversight. So starting this fall, the NRC will launch a pilot program
allowing the power companies to design their own security
exercises-a function formerly performed by federal terrorism
experts. The industry says the new program will cost the plants
less, yet allow for more frequent tests. But opponents, including
many within the NRC, say the industry's track record has hardly
earned it the right to looser regulation. In the past year alone, NRC
inspectors have discovered alarms and video surveillance cameras
that don't work, guards who can't operate their weapons, and guns
that don't shoot. "I am very skeptical about the nuclear industry's
ability to regulate itself," says Rep. Edward J. Markey, a vocal
critic of nuclear security.
High on critics' lists of concerns is the failure rate in the NRC-run
mock terrorist assaults-attacks that, if real, could have released
radiation more lethal than the 1986 Chernobyl accident that
resulted in an estimated 32,000 deaths. These exercises, called
Operational Safeguards Response Evaluations, or OSREs, have
been run by an outspoken former U.S. Navy SEAL captain named
David Orrick. In a typical exercise, a team of three "terrorists"
armed with small weapons and basic knowledge of how a plant
works attempts to penetrate the facility. They evade or disable
security equipment and destroy a set of targets in an effort to
damage the plant's nuclear core, causing a radioactive release. In
some cases, the mock terrorists make it all the way to the
sensitive control room-even though they give plant operators ample
advance notice of when they intend to strike.
Proponents of the NRC's mock attacks say they teach valuable
lessons. In 1999, the Waterford 3 Nuclear Plant in Taft, La., failed a
preliminary mock attack, but the plant's managers said that the
exercise did not reflect the plant's true capability. So Orrick's team
returned last year to conduct a more rigorous exercise against the
plant. "We [the NRC team] just ate them alive," says one NRC
inspector. The Waterford 3 site then hired more guards, improved
training, and fortified physical barriers. They finally passed an NRC
exercise last January. And in May, security guards easily
apprehended a man with a history of mental illness who scaled a
10-foot, barbed-wire fence surrounding the site.
Still, critics charge that even the NRC's mock terrorist attacks do
not reflect today's real-world scenarios. "There is nothing about
protecting against a helicopter assault or a missile taking out one
of our positions," says one plant security guard. Last September,
for instance, an anti-nuclear demonstrator landed a motorized
parafoil on the roof of a nuclear reactor in Bern, Switzerland, before
being apprehended by security guards.
While nuclear plant operators design much of their security to
prevent attacks from the outside, the record suggests that the
greater danger lies within. "If somebody got a job as a janitor and
got access to the plant, that's the real threat," says Erik Pakieser,
former nuclear security officer at the Prairie Island nuclear
generating plant in Minnesota. For instance, at the same time
Donald Beauregard was cooking up his Project Worst Nightmare, a
maintenance technician at the Crystal River site discovered that
someone had intentional- ly disabled one of the plant's |emergency
diesel generators. Some nuclear security experts also believe that
sabotage should not have been ruled out so quickly as a possible
cause of the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory found striking
similarities between the incident and a computer-generated
sabotage scenario they had run several months earlier.
Two decades later, critics remain troubled by the sorts of
individuals who can gain access to a nuclear plant. In the early
1990s, a carpenter named Carl Drega got jobs at three nuclear
power plants in the Northeast despite an arrest record and a job
reference that described him as "volatile." Two months after Drega
left the third plant, in 1997, he shot four people to death, including
two state troopers, a judge, and a newspaper editor. An NRC
investigation of the incident found that none of the three plants had
violated their regulations by hiring him.
Easy access. Another insider, a computer programmer who once
worked in the control room at the Maine Yankee nuclear power
plant, goes to trial next year for murdering seven of his coworkers
at a small Massachusetts technology company. Plant coworkers
said the programmer, Michael McDermott, slept in a coffin and told
a colleague he was sometimes so angry he felt like killing
someone. In 1998, a worker at the Turkey Point nuclear plant in
Florida had free access to critical areas of the plant for more than a
month before officials learned of his 14 arrests. And at the Calvert
Cliffs plant in Maryland, officials took eight months to learn that a
worker was an illegal Mexican immigrant with fake identification
papers and an arrest record. "Charles Manson could get access to
a nuclear power plant," says former nuclear security officer Richard
Kester.
But some experts worry that attackers can succeed even without
getting inside. Classified reports from Sandia National Laboratories
show that a well-placed truck bomb would not even have to enter a
site's property to destroy vital equipment, leading to a possible
release of radiation. In addition, experts say, the water-intake
systems at some plants are particularly vulnerable to sabotage by
either cutting off the water supply by clogging the intake valve or
introducing volatile chemicals into the reactor's cooling system.
An even more accessible target may be spent nuclear material
piling up at these plants. Large cooling pools inside reactor
containment buildings were designed to store this fuel, but several
years ago the pools began to fill up. Now, at many plants, the
highly radioactive fuel is stored in cooling pools outside the
containment building. "A lot of the spent nuclear fuel casks can be
hit with a shoulder-fired missile by someone standing outside the
fence," says Dave Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer at the Union
of Concerned Scientists. Yet at plants that are being
decommissioned, the nuclear fuel is even less closely guarded.
The Maine Yankee plant, which has stored 700 tons of spent fuel in
outside cooling pools, has removed all of its vehi- cle barriers and
received the NRC's permission to eliminate its armed guard force
once the fuel is placed into dry casks.
The chairman of the NRC, Richard Meserve, says that no matter
who runs the security drills, the plants remain among the world's
most heavily guarded sites. And he says that the NRC mock
attacks are expensive for both the commission to run and the
plants to prepare for. "The reason we are making a big deal about
this," says the Nuclear Energy Institute's Hendricks, is that the
corrective actions resulting from these exercises " can have a
tremendous impact" on a plant owner. "It can cost a million dollars
to make these upgrades [of plant security]," she says. In any
case, says Meserve, the new self-assessment pro- gram is only a
trial: If it doesn't work, he says, it will be scrapped.
But the chorus of nuclear industry critics continues to grow. "The
overall focus [at these sites] is not to protect the public but to get
the NRC's blessing and ensure profits," says one nuclear security
officer. Starting next week, the Waterford 3 plant, which had
boosted security to pass the NRC's terrorist exercise, will begin to
reduce its training programs and its guard force. "As soon as the
NRC leaves," says one guard, "they downgrade security."
NRC Alters Oversight Rather Than Fix Security Problems
Because 50% of US nuclear plants fail "force on force" security
testing, many plants would have received a RED rating for its
security performance indicator. The number of mock attackers for
these tests is embarrassingly small and will not be disclosed here.
Rather than fix the problem, the NRC originally tried to do away
with these tests.
Since that plan drew strong opposition from watchdogs and
Congress, the NRC reinstated the testing. Plants continue failing at
the same rate. (Originally, we were led to believe that a RED rating
of any performance indicator would require a shutdown until
corrected. But, the NRC actually can allow multiple RED safety
indicators by one plant and permit continued operating. This is one
of several reasons the new color-coded regulatory system does not
adequately define safety.)
Now, the NRC has decided to just accept these failed tests and
designate nuclear plants as secure by giving ratings higher than
RED. They justify this course by claiming that there is no
increased risk because there is no reason to believe that a
terrorist(s)would target a nuclear plant.
This comes just one day after learning terrorist bin Laden tried to
purchase uranium. In 1993, bin Laden's associates threatened to
attack "nuclear targets" with "150 suicide soldiers" and trained 30
miles from Three Mile Island. Here is the NRC's statement from
yesterday:
http://www.nrc.gov/OPA/gmo/nrarcv/01-013.html
No. 01-013 February 8, 2001
NRC REFINES PROCESS FOR ASSESSING RESULTS OF
SECURITY EXERCISES AT NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
The Commission has approved interim guidance to be used by the
staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in assessing the
results of security exercises at nuclear power plants.
NRC regulations ensure that commercial nuclear power plants are
among the most secure industrial facilities in the United States
with a capable and well-trained security force to serve as a
deterrent to any potential adversary. The guidance will not change
this requirement. As part of NRC's inspection effort to verify
compliance with these regulations, mock terrorists engage in a
force-on-force exercise which tests the security of nuclear power
plants. But some problems have arisen in assessing the
significance of security exercise findings under the agency's
revised Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) since its initial
implementation in April 2000.
Under the ROP, a Significance Determination Process is used
which incorporates risk-informed insights to assess the safety
significance of inspection findings. When applied to security
exercises, the significance determination process over-estimated
the significance of findings, leading to a higher level of NRC
response than was warranted. The interim guidance approved by
the Commission classifies findings from force-on-force exercises
so that the level of significance more appropriately reflects the
associated increase in risk to public health and safety.
Although the general nature of the threat nuclear power plants must
protect themselves against is defined in NRC regulations, some of
the provisions are difficult to interpret and the details and
expectations have not always been communicated clearly and
consistently by NRC to licensees participating in security
exercises. As a result, some inconsistencies have existed.
Progress has been made by NRC in addressing these issues. But,
the Commission has directed the staff not to issue violations
arising from force-on-force findings at this time. The Commission
expects, however, that deficiencies identified during force-on-force
exercises will be promptly addressed by the licensees' corrective
action programs. In addition, licensees will remain subject to
enforcement action if they fail to comply with their security plan
commitments.
The staff will continue to work with stakeholders in an open forum
to resolve remaining challenges involved in evaluating security plan
exercises and clarifying and revising NRC regulations through the
rulemaking process.
The Commission continues to believe that a strong safeguards and
security program is a central and important obligation of NRC
licensees. During this interim period NRC licensees will be
expected to continue to meet the regulatory requirements for the
physical protection of nuclear power plants and to take corrective
action for deficiencies identified during exercises. Typically,
corrective actions are taken by licensees before NRC inspectors
leave the facilities at the conclusion of a security exercise.
# # #
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