When Richard Meserve, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, heard that terrorists had crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center and that other planes might have been highjacked, he put US nuclear power plants on full alert. Within 40 minutes, the NRC’s regional offices and its emergency response operations center were coordinating data from all 103 nuclear power plants.
While the NRC has typically worried about small leaks, temporary reactor shutdowns, and training exercises, the concern now is that if terrorists crash a 180-ton aircraft loaded with fuel into a nuclear power plant the impact and explosion could breach the reactor containment walls and contaminate a wide area with radiation. “No power plant in the world could withstand an airborne terror attack like the one on September 11,” says a spokeswoman for the association of German electric power utilities. Edwin Lyman, from the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI) in Washington, DC, agrees: “The possibility of an unmitigated loss-of-coolant accident and significant release of radiation into the environment is a very real one.”
Long before 11 September, some experts had raised concerns about the ability of a nuclear power plant to withstand being hit by a commercial airliner. The scenario envisioned an accidental crash, not the intentional use of a plane as a missile. In 1982 the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory conducted a study on the speeds and angles at which a jetliner impact could pierce the thick concrete containment walls that protect reactors. The report said that significant damage to the containment walls and the reactor cooling system would be likely because of a secondary explosion from the airplane’s fuel tanks. Now the NRC is reevaluating and updating the DOE research with new computer simulations, and is planning to publish a restricted report this month. Research into the design of new power plants is also being reevaluated in light of the recent terrorist attacks. “Most of the new reactor designs are at the beginning of their research,” says Neil Todreas of MIT’s nuclear engineering department. “So there’s time to anticipate this type of sabotage into the design.”
US security requirements are defined by regulations that specify the sabotage dangers that a power plant must be protected against to be licensed by the NRC. “We carry out frequent inspections to make sure that [the power plants] have the capacity to defend,” says Meserve. Although ground attacks are part of the protection specification, surviving a deliberate airplane crash is not, a policy that the NRC is now reviewing.
Lessons learned
To see how US plant operators respond to security threats, the NRC regularly stages simulated attacks. “The simulation scenarios are usually kept secret from the participants so that their responses will be real,” says Meserve. Usually they consist of an armed group of four or five assailants who attempt to sabotage a plant or storm its control room. Nearly half the plants have failed these attack tests in the past decade. Even before 11 September, the NRC had decided to increase the frequency of staged attacks from every eight years to every three years. In the future, the mock attacks will be planned and carried out by the nuclear plant operators themselves, not the NRC. “It is not at all clear that the new regimen will be an improvement over the old,” says the NCI’s Lyman.
All US nuclear power plants have remained at the highest alert level since the 11 September attacks. To keep plant operators informed of new security requirements, the NRC has been sending out updates by telephone, fax, and e-mail. “It’s quicker to get action on an information circular than it is to introduce new regulations,” says Meserve. “There are resident inspectors at every plant, monitoring what is going on. If any power plant didn’t comply [with new NRC recommendations], we would know about it more or less immediately,” he says.
Spurred by warnings in mid-October by the FBI of more possible terrorist attacks, the NRC and other agencies have modified their Web sites, significantly decreasing the amount of technical data accessible to the public. Thousands of documents on nuclear power plant engineering specifications and design criteria—including the 1982 Argonne report—have been removed. Exelon and Duke Energy, two major commercial nuclear plant operators, also have removed from the Web technical information regarding their plant designs.
Agencies cooperate
Coordination among federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies has improved as a result of recent events, says Meserve. The NRC has taken steps to link with the FBI’s Strategic Information Operations Center in Washington, DC, which is now acting as chief coordinator among the agencies dealing with terrorist threats. And the intelligence community is passing information to the NRC for risk analysis. How Tom Ridge, head of the new Office of Homeland Security, will interact with the agencies is not yet known. The NRC is also coordinating new discussions about existing power plant security with military officials and state and local authorities. As of early November, 10 of the 32 states that generate nuclear power had deployed small numbers of National Guard and US Coast Guard personnel to power plants.
University reactors, despite being about 600 times smaller than commercial reactors, also operate under NRC guidelines. They, too, have tightened security, stationing armed guards at reactor sites.
At the same time, the heightened security is increasing the number of false alarms. For example, in October a threat against the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania led to the closure of two nearby airports for four hours. As resources become stretched, government authorities worry they won’t be able to meet the demand for increased security. Some state officials, such as Governor George Ryan of Illinois, are trying to get emergency spending bills passed to help pay for protecting their state’s nuclear power plants. Meserve agrees that money could soon be a problem, “In the longer term, it’s a serious question for power plant operators and other critical infrastructure assets over who will pay.”
Another worry for commercial reactor operators is whether a hostile and fearful public climate will dash plans to extend the lifetime of existing nuclear power plants. “We feel that nuclear still has a future, and we believe that we have proved ourselves to the NRC … that we can meet their security and operating standards,” says Tom Shiel from Duke Energy.
Unlike this jet fighter, which vaporized in a collision with a wall similar to those used in nuclear power plants, experts fear a commercial jet could breach reactor containment walls.
Unlike this jet fighter, which vaporized in a collision with a wall similar to those used in nuclear power plants, experts fear a commercial jet could breach reactor containment walls.
