Terrorists seeking to cause a meltdown or a catastrophic release of radiation could overwhelm the inadequate defenses at one of 104 US commercial reactors. Or they could steal highly enriched uranium (HEU) from one of three civilian research reactors still fueled with the bomb-grade material, the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project (NPPP) warns in a recent report.
Twelve years after 19 terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires commercial nuclear plant operators to defend against an assault by a maximum of six attackers, according to the NPPP, a nuclear watchdog group. The NRC standards, known as design basis threat, don’t consider the possibility of several plant insiders colluding with the terrorists, the group’s report says. And they do not mandate defenses against 50-caliber sniper rifles or rocket-propelled grenades, both of which terrorist organizations have access to. The Department of Energy standards, which apply to reactors and other nuclear facilities owned by DOE, assume an attack force three times the size given in the NRC standards, the report says, and include the heavy weaponry excluded by the NRC.
Moreover, says the NPPP report, the NRC doesn’t require existing nuclear plants to provide defenses against airborne attacks, although newly built plants must do so. And despite the possibility that terrorists could shut off a plant’s cooling-water intake and thereby potentially induce a meltdown, there is no NRC requirement to guard against an attack from the sea.
“The NRC’s rationale for this low-level protection is the enemy of the state doctrine,” says Alan Kuperman, coordinator of the NPPP. “In other words, what the utility doesn’t provide in terms of protection, the US government will provide. The problem is, the government doesn’t provide that level of protection. Terrorists could induce a meltdown in a matter of minutes, and the SWAT team would arrive an hour and a half later.”
Industry assurances
The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry group, issued a statement dismissing the report as the work of a graduate research assistant and as an “academic paper developed for discussion among academia of the appropriate security levels at nuclear energy facilities.” The author, NPPP graduate research assistant Lara Kirkham, didn’t have access to confidential information that would be needed to make a complete assessment of plants’ security, the NEI statement says; it adds that NPPP didn’t explain how attackers might be able to move highly radioactive fuel contained in bundles weighing 360–540 kg from reactors, spent fuel storage pools, or multi-ton concrete dry casks.
Since 2001 the industry has spent more than $2 billion for security upgrades, and the number of guards has increased by 60%, to a total of 9000. Every reactor design has been assessed for potential aircraft impacts, and no damage to reactor fuel and stored spent fuel would occur in the event of a crash, according to the NEI statement. Still, as Kuperman told reporters, the NRC only requires that new reactors be designed to withstand a deliberate 9/11-style airliner crash.
Robert Lewis, the NRC’s director of preparedness and response, said the agency does require that nuclear plants guard against waterborne attacks. In a blog post, Lewis said the threat scenarios outlined in the NRC standards include an assault by one or more adversary forces attacking by land or water, truck bombs, boat bombs, insider threats, and cyberattacks. The NRC requires each plant to test its security force annually, and the agency itself tests the security forces at each plant every three years. The NRC works with the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense to guard against 9/11-type air attacks. Existing plants are required to implement measures similar to those for new reactors to mitigate the effects of an airplane crash, he added.
Research reactors
The nation’s three HEU-fueled, NRC-regulated research reactors, located at MIT, NIST, and the University of Missouri, are exempted from the NRC standards. Although there is too little HEU located at any of those reactors to fashion a simple gun-type nuclear device—the design used for the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima—Kuperman notes that a more sophisticated implosion-type weapon, which makes much more efficient use of fissile material, would require far less HEU. By various estimates, the amount of HEU needed to fashion a gun-type weapon is between 35 kg and 50 kg, but the mass necessary for a sophisticated implosion design could be as little as 9 kg. Thomas Cochran, a nuclear expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, estimates that the weapons labs in the US, Russia, China, France, and the UK could build an implosion device with an explosive yield of 1 kt using just 3–4 kg of weapons-grade uranium (93% or greater 235U).
The MIT reactor uses 8 kg of weapons-grade uranium annually; the University of Missouri reactor, 24 kg; and the NIST reactor, 13 kg, according to Kuperman’s book Nuclear Terrorism and Global Security: The Challenge of Phasing Out Highly Enriched Uranium (Routledge, 2013). A program to develop low-enriched fuels for the three reactors and for two other HEU-fueled reactors operated by DOE has been delayed repeatedly. Kuperman says the conversions aren’t expected to be completed until 2025. But a spokesman for DOE’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which is responsible for developing the low-enriched fuels, said the reactors will be converted as soon as new fuels can be developed and qualified, which could take until 2030.
Nuclear plants aren’t adequately defended against an attack by a large number of terrorists, a nuclear watchdog group contends.
Nuclear plants aren’t adequately defended against an attack by a large number of terrorists, a nuclear watchdog group contends.
