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CounterPunch
September
14 / 15, 2002
The Fire Next
Time
Nuclear Plants
and Terrorism
by Jeffrey St. Clair
As George Bush and Tony Blair fume timorously
about Saddam Hussein's taking babysteps toward acquiring a primitive
nuclear weapon, it is clear that the real nuclear threat resides
much closer to home.
The original plan for the 9-11 attacks
called for hi-jacked commercial airplanes to be crashed into
at least two nuclear power plants. So say two al-Qaeda operatives
interviewed last week by al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based television
network.
Al-Jazeera's Yosri Fouda interviewed
Ramzi bin al-Shaibah and Khaled al-Sheikh Mohammad in Pakistan's
port city of Karachi. The Sunday London Times identified Sheikh
Mohammad, 38, as head of the al-Qaeda military committee, and
Shaibah, 30, as coordinator of the operation from his base in
Germany. According to Fouda's report for al-Jazeera, Sheikh Mohammad
had devised the idea of targeting "prominent" buildings
in the United States. Mohammad is an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who
is now serving a life sentence in the United States for the first
attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
Ultimately, discretion prevailed, even
among the members of bin Laden's so-called "Department of
Martyrs.". The nuclear plants were taken off the target
list because the men from al-Qaeda feared a doomsday scenario
where the radioactive explosions could "get out of control."
But, the two told al-Jazeera, future attacks on American or British
nuclear reactors would not be ruled out.
The nuclear industry in the US and the
Bush administration continue to push nuclear power as a virtuous
energy source and deny that the nation's 113 nuclear power plants
pose any kind of terrorist threat. But it appears the operatives
at al-Qaeda are at least more honest in this regard that the
flacks for the nuclear lobby or the bumbling Spence Abraham and
his cohorts at the Department of Energy.
Shortly after 9/11 Daryl Kyd, a spokesman
for the International Atomic Energy Agency, laid out the problem
in stark terms. "Reactors have the most robust engineering
of any buildings in the civil sector - only missile silos and
nuclear bunkers are built to be tougher," Kyd said. "They
are designed to be earthquake-proof, and our experiences in California
and Japan have shown them to be so. They are also built to withstand
impacts, but not that of a wide-bodied passenger jet full of
fuel. A deliberate hit of that sort is something that was never
in any scenario at the design stage. These are vulnerable targets
and the consequences of a direct hit could be catastrophic."
Dr. Nicholas Berry, at the Center for
Defense Information, is even more blunt. "Nuclear reactors
are latent nuclear weapons," says Berry. "The plants
are hostages to a potential enemy who could threaten to devastate
them."
If al-Qaeda had stuck to their original
plan and smashed those plans into a commercial nuclear reactor
what may have happened? A direct hit on a nuclear reactor by
a 1,000-pound explosive would cause enough damage to disperse
into the atmosphere tons of radioactive debris. That's bad enough.
But it's likely to be much worse. According
to David Rossin, a nuclear power expert at Stanford's Center
for International Security and Cooperation: "Destruction
of the main feed pump or steam lines could create problems of
decay heat and produce the release of fission products."
In other words, there's the possibility of a core meltdown. Recall
the China Syndrome?
Despite the handwringing from Washington,
all of this has been known for at least a decade. The 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center prompted dozens of popular articles
and technical papers on the vulnerability of nuclear plants to
terrorist assaults, including attacks by kamikaze pilots. These
scenarios were certainly available as a kind of playback to the
al-Qaeda terror planners.
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
the agency charged with safeguarding the nation's 103 reactors,
remained strangely purblind to the threat. Prior to September
11, the NRC had never publicly considered the possibility that
nuclear plants might be attacked by airplanes. Indeed, in 1982,
the NRC caved to lobbying by the nuclear power industry and explicitly
exempted nuclear plant owners from this trifling concern. "Reactor
owners are not required to design against such things askamikaze
dives by large airplanes," the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing
board ruled. "Reactors could not be effectively protected
against such attacks without turning them into virtually impregnable
fortresses at much higher cost."
Now, the agency is flush with ideas,
many of them cranky and some unnerving. One scheme is to install
anti-aircraft batteries around the plants, with orders to shoot
down incoming planes. Another calls for the Air Force to constantly
patrol the reactors with fighter jets. The most low-tech approach
envisions each nuclear plant being entombed behind a bizarre
sheath featuring steel poles linked with a net of steel cables.
"Any cruise missile, warplane, or airliner would be shredded,
its fuel ignited, and any explosive on board either detonated
early or dispersed," says Nicholas Berry.
But even if the NRC can concoct some
scheme to protect the reactor, there's little that can be done
to keep terrorists from striking the nuclear power industry's
weakest link: spent fuel ponds. "Reactors are inside steel
vessels surrounded by heavy structures and containment buildings,"
said Gordon Thompson, a senior at the Institute for Resource
and Security Studies. "Spent fuel pools, containing some
of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet,
can catch fire and are in much more vulnerable buildings."
These fuel ponds, which are rectangular
pools about 40 feet deep, will catch fire at about 1,000 degrees
Celsius. Even the NRC admits that once one of these ponds ignites,
the fire will be difficult if not impossible to put out. It will
burn for days, spewing radioactive particles into the air.
These pools are chock-full of cesium-137,
a particularly lethal radioactive isotope. If a fuel pond catches
fire, the NRC estimates that nearly all of the cesium 137 (on
average between 20 to 50 million curies) will be released into
the environment.
According to Robert Alvarez in an excellent
report in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "A single spent
fuel pond holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric
nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined."
In the 1990s, several nuclear plants
looked at the extent of the fallout from a pond fire. A fuel
pond fire at the Millstone Reactor in Connecticut could contaminate
nearly 30,000 square miles of land, an area 6 six times the size
of the state of Connecticut. A review conducted by Brookhaven
National Labs predicted that a spent fuel fire at that plant
outside New York City could cause 28,000 cancer deaths and do
more than $59 billion in damage.
The only plan the NRC has come up with
to alleviate this problem is to ship the waste and fuel rods
via rail and truck to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Of course, this
doesn't solve the problem, so much as it compounds it: exposing
the fuel rods to terrorist attack on easily identifiable routes
that travel through nearly every major American city. Meanwhile,
Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge and Spence Abraham shrug their
shoulders. Nothing to worry about.
The nonchalance of Ridge and Abraham
has not trickled down to the people who actually work at the
nuclear plants, who, according to a new report by the Project
on Government Oversight, remain understaffed, undertrained, overworked
and underpaid.
POGO investigators interviewed 20 security
guards from 13 different nuclear plants, harboring 24 nuclear
reactors. Prior to 9/11, the NRC required utilities to deploy
five to ten guards per reactor. Shortly after the attacks, the
NRC upped this requirement. But at most plants this hasn't resulting
in the hiring of additional guards. Instead, the utilities have
simply increased the overtime of the existing force, who are
now compelled to work up to six consecutive days of 12-hour shifts.
It's hard to imagine that this is a cost-saving
measure, since the guards are paid so shabbily. POGO found that
at six nuclear facilities the security guards were paid anywhere
from $1 to $4 less per hour than custodians and janitors working
at the same plant.
On top of that, they are understandably
very anxious. Even prior to 9/11, the job was so stressful than
more than 70 percent of the workforce quit after less than 3
years on the job. "If an attack took place, most of the
guards would run like hell," a security guard told one of
POGO's investigators.
It's hard to blame him.
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September
12, 2002
Paul de Rooij
A Glossary
of Occupation
James C.
Faris
Riefenstahl
at 100:
The Fascist Aesthetic
Gary Leupp
Presidential
Honesty on Iraq
Tarif Abboushi
A Conversation
with My Arab-American Self
Ron Jacobs
Shelter
from the Storm
Rick Giombetti
Paxil
and Addiction
Krystal Kyer
From NAFTA
to CAFTA
Another Rotten Trade Deal
John Jonik
Overcome
in Philly
September
11, 2002
Anis Shivani
How to
Survive in Ashcroft's America
Pierre Tristam
Abusing
the Sorrows of 9/11
David Krieger
Resisting
Bush's
"Relentless War"
Jerre Skog
9/11 One
Year Later:
Remember the Others, Too
Dave Marsh
Illegal
Music?
A Sampler's Delight
Norm Dixon
How the
Warmongers Have Exploited 9/11
September
7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim
and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
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Threat"
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Resources:
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About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Read
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