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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BirdDog who wrote (6582)	10/22/2001 2:03:26 PM
From: Jill	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

tompaine.com Excerpt: In the aftermath of September 11, a great deal of attention has been paid to nuclear power plants themselves, which are vulnerable to a World Trade Center type of attack. Like the Twin Towers, reactor containment buildings were designed to withstand hurricanes, floods, or accidental aircraft collisions of a certain scope. They were not designed with homicidal 767 operators in mind. "If you postulate the risk of a jumbo jet full of fuel, it is clear that their design was not conceived to withstand such an impact," International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman David Kyd told reporters in Vienna, Austria. Such a strike could disrupt a plant's cooling systems, triggering a steam explosion and releasing a radioactive cloud. The consequences of a serious spent fuel pool accident "could be comparable to those for a severe reactor accident." But spent fuel facilities are far softer targets. They are generally located outside the containment structure, and are thus more vulnerable to attack. A recent report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that the consequences of a serious spent fuel pool accident "could be comparable to those for a severe reactor accident." The NRC analysis, published in February, also assumed that in the event of an accidental direct hit by an aircraft, there was a 45 percent chance it would breach a five-foot thick containment structure. Dry-cask storage facilities -- like the one under development at Wiscasset -- are probably even more vulnerable. There are 16 such facilities already in operation and many more planned or under construction. They are usually unenclosed and, in the case of decommissioned plants, are not subject to the same level of security. Each has guards, fences, and motion detectors to repel an infantry-style assault or an attempt to steal waste; but the two-story tall casks stand in even rows under the open sky. Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the industry-funded Nuclear Energy Institute, said dry cask facilities are "fairly robust sites" but that questions about their vulnerability to terrorist attack were "a bit ahead of the curve." "These facilities are designed to survive more serious events than the average building, but they haven't been designed to survive a direct hit from a large commercial airplane," says Kelley Smith, spokesperson for two other decommissioned power plants -- Connecticut Yankee and Yankee Row -- which are also building dry cask sites. All the more reason, she says, for the government to take the waste to Yucca Mountain nirs.org Excerpt: The assault would not require a large jet. The safety systems are extremely complex and virtually indefensible. One or more could be wiped out with a wide range of easily deployed small aircraft, ground-based weapons, truck bombs or even chemical/biological assaults aimed at the operating work force. Dozens of US reactors have repeatedly failed even modest security tests over the years. Even heightened wartime standards cannot guarantee protection of the vast, supremely sensitive controls required for reactor safety. Without continous monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of radioactive rods in the cores and the thousands more stored in those fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately, the Hudson. ---- If you want more citations & links, let me know.