|
Archived Articles
Business Needs Rules to Cooperate |
Nuclear Reactors Lack Protection Against Terrorist Attack Excerpts from statement before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, December 5, 2001 My name is Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), a non-profit organization based in Washington and concerned with security against nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. I appreciate the opportunity to testify before you today on behalf of NCI and my colleague Daniel Hirsch, president of the Los Angeles based nuclear policy organization, the Committee to Bridge the Gap (CBG).
NCI and CBG have collaborated for seventeen years in efforts to upgrade the seriously inadequate security requirements at the nation's nuclear power plants. It is about those unresolved vulnerabilities that I have been invited to testify today. Put simply, the nation's nuclear power reactors are vulnerable to attack by terrorists, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other government entities have failed to move decisively to impose the further security measures that are needed to prevent a successful attack and avert catastrophic radiological consequences. Three days after the attacks of September 11, NCI and CBG wrote to NRC Chairman Richard A. Meserve. We cited "the extraordinary and unprecedented threat that now exists inside the United States in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon" and laid out specific proposals for denying terrorists the opportunity to destroy nuclear power plants. These proposals include immediate use of National Guard troops at all of the nation's reactors to deter attacks from land and water, prompt deployment of advanced anti-aircraft weapons to defeat suicidal attacks from the air, and a thorough re-vetting of all plant employees and contractors to protect against sabotage by insiders. In addition, we called on the NRC to significantly upgrade its security regulations to protect against the larger numbers and the greater sophistication of attackers posed by the new terrorist threat. In a brief reply to our specific proposals, Chairman Meserve stated only that the "Commission is evaluating current requirements and statutory authority relating to acts or threats of terrorism, including but not limited to those that you presented in your letter." A Familiar Refrain The Chairman's response is a familiar refrain, and we frankly do not have the luxury of time to allow the NRC and other federal agencies to engage in a prolonged bureaucratic review process that Chairman Meserve has since said is now underway. Iran threatened attacks against U.S. reactors as early as 1987, and recent trial testimony has revealed that bin Laden's training camps were offering instruction in 'urban warfare' against 'enemies' installations' including power plants. It is prudent to assume, especially after the horrific, highly coordinated attacks of September 11, that bin Laden's soldiers have done their homework and are fully capable of attacking nuclear plants for maximum effect.
The immediate danger is underscored by the fact by that nearly half of the nuclear plants tested in NRC supervised security exercises have failed to repel mock terrorist attacks. These exercises involve small numbers of simulated attackers compared with the large number of terrorists who waged the four sophisticated, coordinated attacks of September 11. The NRC's mock terrorist exercises severely limit the tactics, weapons and explosives used by the adversary, yet in almost half the tests they reached and simulated destruction of safety systems that in real attacks could have caused severe core damage, meltdown and catastrophic radioactive releases. Now in response to operator complaints and budgetary constraints, the NRC is actually preparing to shift responsibility for supervising these exercises to the operators themselves. Current events clearly show that nuclear power plant security is too important to be left to industry self-assessment. Dr. Edwin Lyman, a physicist and NCI's scientific director, has performed a straightforward calculation indicating that a direct, high-speed hit by a large commercial passenger jet "would in fact have a high likelihood of penetrating a containment building that houses a power reactor. Following such an assault, the possibility of an unmitigated loss-of-coolant accident and significant release of radiation into the environment is a very real one. Such a release, whether caused by an air strike, or by a ground or water assault, or by insider sabotage could result in tens of thousands of cancer deaths downwind of the plant. A number of these plants are located near large cities, such as the Indian Point facility outside New York City and the San Onofre plant near Los Angeles and San Diego. We submitted Dr. Lyman's analysis to Chairman Meserve with a request for his comments and for an NRC study to evaluate the consequences for each licensed operating reactor that could result from an attack similar to those on September 11. On November 29, Chairman Meserve responded in a letter that our analysis will be considered in the agency's overall reevaluation of security and safeguards, which "will include an assessment of the potential consequences of a large aircraft attack on a commercial nuclear power plant. "The present plan, he said, was that "this assessment will broadly consider the vulnerabilities of operating reactors, followed by a more focused study of a few representative plants."
In effect, a conventional attack - be it a truck bomb, plane crash, attack by terrorists on foot, or an insider-can turn a nuclear reactor into a radiological weapon. At the very least, hundreds to thousands of square miles could be placed off limits to human habitation due to the lingering impact of long-lived radioactive elements. The economic consequences would be devastating. Our organizations have long been troubled by the dilemma of speaking about the present vulnerability of nuclear power plants. We have tried to work quietly for a decade and a half in a largely unsuccessful attempt to get the NRC to upgrade reactor security. To illustrate this longstanding effort, I submit for the hearing record an article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of March 1986, "Protecting Reactors against Terrorists," by the Committee to Bridge the Gap's Daniel Hirsch and colleagues Stephanie Murphy and Bennett Ramberg, as well as the recommendations the same year by the International Task Force on Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism for "Securing Nuclear Facilities. "This Task Force, convened by the Nuclear Control Institute, included senior nuclear officials from industry, the military, and the national laboratories. Our principal success came in 1994 when the NRC agreed to require nuclear plant operators to erect barriers and establish setback distances to protect against truck-bomb attacks.But this reform came only after the lesson of the bombing of the World Trade Center the year before, and the NRC has refused our appeals to upgrade protection to defend against the much larger bombs used by terrorists since. The horrendous attacks of September 11 have now made NRC foot dragging intolerable. The new threat should now be evident to all, and the country can afford to wait no longer. The vulnerabilities at these plants can and must be closed, now. The American people have a right to know the dangers and to demand the prompt corrective actions that we propose to protect nuclear power plants from terrorist attacks and the unthinkable consequences that could follow. We are concerned with the longstanding history of inaction on this issue by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a pattern continuing to this day despite the urgency of the situation posed by the attacks of September 11. The NRC's security regulations are designed for a terrorist threat a small fraction of what was made evident to all two months ago. Yet despite the President saying we are at war and should expect further terrorist attacks at domestic targets, the NRC has done nothing concrete but recommend that plants increase their alertness level and coordinate security with state authorities. The NRC's grossly inadequate security rules remain unchanged. Each of the nation's 103 operating nuclear plants contains in it an extraordinary amount of radioactivity. An attack by a truck bomb, insider, armed group, or hijacked airliner at one of our civilian nuclear facilities could result in sufficient radioactivity released to produce tens or hundreds of thousands of latent cancers and contaminate hundreds of miles downwind. A Sandia National Laboratory report concluded that a successful truck bomb attack at a civilian nuclear plant could result in "unacceptable damage," i.e., a meltdown. Further, NRC and the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry lobby, now concede that containment structures were not designed to withstand a 757 crash of the sort witnessed on September 11. In addition, the safety systems necessary for keeping the fuel cooled and preventing melting are of special concern, and represent "soft targets" if reached by terrorists, as are the spent fuel pools. The latter are generally outside of containment and hold several Chernobyl's worth of long-lived radioactivity.The zirconium cladding on the spent fuel in those pools can catch fire if terrorists succeeded in damaging the pools and causing them to lose their water coolant. The spent fuel pools are even more poorly protected than the reactors themselves, particularly at shut-down reactors. Nor has the defense of spent-fuel pool ever been tested in the mock-terrorist exercises supervised by the NRC. What Needs to be Done To summarize what we believe should be done to protect the public from the catastrophic consequences that could arise from a successful terrorist attack, here are our recommendations in brief:
A number of our proposals have been incorporated into the House and Senate versions of the Nuclear Security Act, which were introduced last week. We will submit our detailed views on this legislation when hearings are held to consider it. Emancipating A Captured Regulatory Agency The NRC is obligated by the Atomic Energy Actof 1954, as amended, to uphold safety and security interests, and by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 to serve as an independent regulator without regard to the industry's economic interests when it comes to establishing or enforcing adequate protection. Statutory considerations aside,if the industry and the NRC continue to refuse to adequately protect these facilities, Americans will demand - as they should - that the reactors be shut down.
Indeed, there is now a petition drive, in which Nuclear Control Institute is participating, to shut down the two reactors still operating at the Indian Point plant, located 25 miles from New York City, where 20 million people live within a 50-mile radius of the plant. The petition calls on the NRC to shut down the plant for the purpose of overhauling and testing the defenses and to permit restart of the plant only if physical protection can be demonstrated to be effective against the new threat environment. The NRC now acts as a captured regulatory agency - captured by the industry it is obligated to regulate. A quarter century ago, Congress fissioned the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) into two separate agencies in order to end the inherent conflict in the old AEC between promotion and regulation of nuclear energy. As a member of the staff of the Senate Government Operations Committee, I was intimately involved in preparing the law that created the NRC and the present day Department of Energy, so I am familiar with what Congress intended. Today, sadly, the NRC has come full circle and closely resembles the atrophied Regulatory Division of the old AEC. In the current threat environment, this presents a dangerous situation. Congress needs to revisit the overall role and performance of the NRC, but at this moment it must tell NRC in absolutely clear terms: upgrade the security of nuclear power plants,now, to levels sufficient to protect against an attack of the scale and sophistication of September 11, or be prepared to face legislation mandating the shutdown of these plants.The danger to the public is too high to permit a captured and intimidated agency to take a business as usual approach in these extraordinary times. We have concluded, as noted, that we needed to go public with the vulnerabilities to terrorist attack and the failure of the NRC to responsibly address them. It is prudent to assume that the terrorist adversary knows that the plants are vulnerable. The training camps in Afghanistan included instruction and drills on attacking power plants. We are dangerously past the time for the public and elected officials to wake up to this vulnerability and to demand prompt action to remedy it. We must move quickly to prevent attacks on nuclear power plants that could release immense amounts of cancer causing, radioactive contamination over large, densely populated areas. We all would have trouble living with ourselves if the worst happened and we had we not taken every possible step to prevent it. We must act now. {Paul Leventhal founded the Nuclear Control Institute in 1981 and serves as its president after having held senior staff positions in the United States Senate on nuclear power and proliferation issues. On June 1, will become president emeritus, and Dr. Edward Lyman, NCI's scientific director will assume the presidency. Mr. Leventhal's testimony was abridged for length. Please see the full version on the Nuclear Control Instutite website.} |
Paul Leventhal (Photo courtesy NCI)
Richard Meserve was sworn in as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on October 29, 1999. Prior to that, he was a partner in the Washington, DC law firm of Covington & Burling. (Photo courtesy 
San Onofre nuclear power plant (Photo courtesy NRC)
Indian Point nuclear power plant (Photo courtesy 