VIENNA, Austria -- The ruthlessness of the September attacks against the United States has alerted the world to the potential of nuclear terrorism, making it "far more likely" that terrorists could target nuclear facilities, nuclear material and radioactive sources worldwide, the chief of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday.

"September 11 presented us with a clear and present danger and a global threat that requires global action," said IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, according to a statement released by the agency at its headquarters in Vienna. "Many of our programs go to the heart of combating nuclear terrorism, but we now have to actively reinforce safeguards, expand our systems for combating smuggling in nuclear material and upgrade our safety and security services."

More than 400 experts from around the world have been meeting at the IAEA's Vienna headquarters since October 29 at an international symposium on nuclear safeguards, verification and security. Today, the conferees are holding a special emergency seminar on combating nuclear terrorism.

The IAEA says there have been about 400 cases of nuclear smuggling over the past decade, but none have involved anything close to enough fissionable material to construct a nuclear weapon.

However, ElBaradei warned, the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center point to an additional threat - terrorists willing to die for their cause. The IAEA is no longer convinced that the hazards associated with handling radioactive materials will be enough to deter terrorists.

"If the terrorist is willing to die, that changes the security equation drastically," said ElBaradei.

The IAEA, which helps countries to prevent, intercept and respond to terrorist acts and other nuclear safety and security incidents, has the only international response system in place that would be in a position to immediately react in case of a nuclear terrorist attack.

This week, the agency warned of "the potential of terrorists targeting nuclear facilities or using radioactive sources." The agency noted that "radiation knows no frontiers," and warned that, "safety and security of nuclear material is a legitimate concern of all states."

"An unconventional threat requires an unconventional response, and the whole world needs to join together and take responsibility for the security of nuclear material," ElBaradei said.

To prevent a terrorist nuclear attack, the agency is now proposing a number of new initiatives. It estimates that at least $30-$50 million each year will be needed in the short term to strengthen and expand its programs to meet terrorist threats.

Speaking to reporters at United Nations headquarters in New York, Gustavo Zlaufvinen, director of IAEA's office in the U.S., said efforts were under way to secure funding for the new measures.

"We are thinking of different ways to get that money, taking into account that our budget is limited by the 'zero-growth' policy for the last 10 years," said Zlaufvinen.

The Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), a Washington DC based research and advocacy center specializing in problems of nuclear proliferation, welcomed the IAEA's new focus on nuclear terrorism, but warned that it is "long overdue."

"For more than two decades, we have urged the IAEA and the nuclear power industry to take seriously the risks of terrorists stealing bomb usable nuclear materials and attacking nuclear plants," said Paul Leventhal, president of NCI. "The need for action, not rhetoric, is long overdue."

Leventhal said the IAEA should call for a ban on the production and use of all atomic bomb materials, including separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium, in both nuclear power and research programs. In the U.S., projects are now underway to turn tons of weapons grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.

"More separated plutonium has been produced in civilian than military nuclear programs worldwide," Leventhal added. "Unless commercial reprocessing of spent fuel is halted, there will be nearly twice as much weapons usable plutonium in civilian than military programs by the end of this decade. Civilian plutonium, like plutonium removed from weapons, should be disposed of as waste, not used as fuel."

The NCI charges that the IAEA's safeguards against the diversion of civilian nuclear materials for use in weapons are "ineffective."

A study prepared for NCI by Dr. Marvin Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that bulk handling plutonium facilities, such as large reprocessing plants for spent nuclear fuel, could lose up to 263 kilograms of plutonium a year without detecting the loss.

"That is enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear bombs," said Levental. "The IAEA is supposed to provide prompt detection of the loss of one bomb's worth of plutonium - officially eight kilograms."

NCI called on Director-General ElBaradei to retract his claim that "while we cannot exclude the possibility that terrorists could get hold of some nuclear material, it is highly unlikely they could use it to manufacture and successfully detonate a nuclear bomb."

In fact, Leventhal countered, "Those who have actually designed nuclear weapons do not agree with the IAEA's sanguine assessment."

In a study commissioned by NCI for its International Task Force on the Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism, a team of five former U.S. nuclear weapon designers found that terrorists would be capable of making an effective, first generation nuclear weapon if they could obtain enough reactor grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium, Leventhal said.

Even without the ability to make nuclear weapons, terrorist groups could still use radioactivity as a weapon.

Dr. Edwin Lyman, a physicist and NCI's scientific director, notes that a direct, high speed hit by a large commercial passenger jet on a nuclear plant "would in fact have a high likelihood of penetrating a containment building" that houses a power reactor.
"Following such an assault," Lyman said, "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.

At least seven U.S. states - Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York - have deployed National Guard troops to protect their nuclear power plants.

Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has confirmed that the world's 1,300 nuclear installations cannot withstand a plane impact comparable to those of 11 September.

(557.5332) WISE Amsterdam - With the words "There is no sanctuary any more, no safety zone", ElBaradei sounded more like an anti-nuclear activist than the head of the international organization devoted to promoting the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Although many in the nuclear industry put on a brave face and pretend that it's business as usual, ElBaradei's statement shows the real extent to which ideas about nuclear safety have been turned upside-down following the events of 11 September.

Although concrete evidence is rare and signs are unclear, people around the world dread the possibility that terrorists will attack a nuclear installation - be it a power plant, a reprocessing facility or nuclear waste storage. According to the Vienna based UN-International Atomic Energy Agency  (IAEA), "we have (now) been alerted to the potential of terrorists targeting nuclear facilities or using radioactive sources to incite panic, contaminate property and even cause injury or death among civilian populations." The IAEA calls on countries around the world to take a careful inventory of the security risks at their nuclear power plants and other facilities and to spend the money necessary to ensure that they can prevent or withstand terrorist attacks.

The IAEA estimates that there has been a six-fold increase in nuclear material in peaceful programs worldwide since 1970. There are 438 nuclear power reactors around the world, 651 research reactors, of which 284 are in operation, and 250 fuel cycle plants, including uranium mills and plants that convert, enrich, store and re-process nuclear material. Additionally, tens of thousands of radiation sources are used in medicine, industry, agriculture and research.

According to an IAEA spokesperson "the controls on nuclear material and radioactive sources are uneven. Security is as good as its weakest link and loose nuclear material in any country is a potential threat to the entire world. Nuclear facilities are perhaps the strongest, most robust industrial structures in the world". But the spokesperson added, "none had been designed to withstand the kind of attacks that brought down New York's World Trade Center".

There has been so much in the news recently about nuclear safety issues that we can only give a small selection of the measures and actions taken and words spoken.

No-fly zones in the US

The US Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned private planes from flying near nuclear power plants.  The FAA imposed the restrictions "for reasons of national security." The ban on flying within 11 miles of 86 nuclear plants and other nuclear sites such as the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico expires 7 November.

Commercial airplanes, which fly at higher altitudes, will not be affected.

Public tours halted in Scotland and Japan

Restrictions in access to Japanese nuclear installations challenge the industry's efforts to win public acceptance. Joint utilities have a drive to have 1 million people visit the country's 52 nuclear power stations. Now it has been admitted that this target "cannot be met - we cannot allow that many outsiders into the reactors".

At the Torness (Scotland) nuclear power station public tours have been cancelled. At about the same time this was announced, a security guard of the same station sparked alert when he was spotted in the station's car park with a gun, which he was trying to sell to a colleague.

Jets take off to protect Sellafield

Two Tornado fighter jets raced to Sellafield reprocessing facility on Saturday 27 October. The planes were responding to a security alert triggered by a call. According to a Ministry of Defence spokesman "this demonstrates that the capability is there and these guys can react very quickly if needs be. Fortunately the Tornados were not required". BNFL refused to comment on the events but confirmed that the site remained on amber alert.

US citizens think pills will help

Ten months after the federal government promised "anti-radiation" pills to the 200,000 people in Ohio who live near a nuclear power plant, there are still no pills. But since the 11 September terrorist attacks, some people have begun buying potassium iodide pills on their own.

If taken soon after a radioactive release, the pills can protect the body's thyroid against radioactive iodine gas. "People are just scared of what might happen with nuclear plants after seeing what happened in New York," said Alex Coleman, a spokesman for the American Civil Defense Association.

Last December, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it would spend about $400,000 to buy the pills for states that wanted them.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responsible for protecting people around nuclear plants, is still working on a distribution plan along with the NRC. The plan is being held up while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decides what dose is best for infants, adolescents and adults, and when to take it, said Patricia Milligan, an NRC emergency planning specialist.

Ohio health officials are waiting to see the federal distribution plan before deciding whether to accept the NRC's pill offer. In North Carolina, local elected officials asked a nuclear plant owner there to hand out the pills, and a legislative committee in Massachusetts this week endorsed a bill to distribute the pills to 300,000 people near nuclear plants.

But a spokesman for FirstEnergy Corp., which owns the Perry and Davis-Besse nuclear plants, has said the risk of an accident at the plants is small.

The responsible health commissioner said the county has potassium iodide pills for police and other emergency responders, as well as for people in nursing homes and other institutions who can't be easily evacuated after a nuclear accident.

But Spencer Abraham still thinks the US needs more nuclear power.

The US Energy Secretary says that energy security is now his primary concern and that this underlines the importance of developing a new generation of nuclear power plants. "Technology has changed the nuclear industry. We believe this expansion of nuclear power in the US is essential. New reactor designs show enormous promise, they are inherently safe".

However, many new reactor designs are actually more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than existing designs. For example, the Westinghouse AP600 has only a single instead of a double containment so that heat would be removed more quickly in the case of a loss of coolant accident (see WISE News Communique 492.4881, "New Generations: The AP600"). Increasing the containment thickness to protect against aircraft collisions would put the safety design of this "inherently safe" reactor back on the drawing board.

The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) has no containment at all, making it even more vulnerable. The industry's response was to suggest building it underground (see box "Going underground?" in WISE News Communique 556.5328, "Update from the anti-PBMR campaign in South Africa").

However, the words of Susan Hiatt, a resident living about 12 miles from the Perry nuclear power plant in the US state of Ohio, sum up many people's fears about the nuclear industry in the post-11 September age. "How much longer do you want to wait and keep rolling the dice and hoping that nothing happens?"

Sources:
- New Scientist, 1 November 2001
- FAA press release, 30 October 2001
- Nucleonics Week, 4 October 2001
- BBC Online, 28 October 2001
- Evening News and Star, 30 October 2001
- The Plain Dealer, 24 October 2001
- NucNet News #318/01

For decades the United States has sought international standards to ensure that nuclear facilities and materials are physically protected against theft and sabotage. On September 11, the need for such an initiative became strikingly apparent as analysts pondered the other possible targets of a terrorist attack. What would have been the loss of life if, for example, a hijacker had crashed a fuel-laden jetliner into a nuclear reactor, causing a meltdown and dispersing radioactive material?

Indeed, just days after the attacks, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), made it clear that the attack had dramatic implications for the nuclear industry and for non-proliferation: “The tragic terrorist attacks on the United States were a wake-up call to us all. We cannot be complacent. We have to and will increase our efforts on all fronts—from combating illicit trafficking to ensuring the protection of nuclear materials—from nuclear installation design to withstand attacks to improving how we respond to nuclear emergencies.”

Spencer Abraham, the U.S. secretary of energy, appeared before the IAEA to urge “maintaining the highest levels of security over nuclear materials.” “We need to strengthen international commitments and cooperation on the physical protection of nuclear materials, particularly those that can readily be converted to weapons use,” he said.

If terrorists were willing to kill thousands of innocent people in suicidal attacks against buildings symbolizing America’s economic and military power, they would probably not hesitate to use truck bombs made of conventional explosives to attack nuclear reactors in order to create clouds of radioactivity like those produced by the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl. They would have little trouble acquiring anti-tank weapons that could blow up the heavy canisters in which radioactive spent fuel from nuclear reactors is transported through populated areas. It is even possible that they could acquire fissile material from one of the poorly guarded nuclear facilities around the world and find scientists willing to make nuclear weapons.

Current international agreements do not require that nuclear material and facilities in domestic use be guarded against thieves or saboteurs, including terrorists. This is a dangerous gap in the global barrier against proliferation. The IAEA has taken the first steps toward requiring measures to physically protect nuclear materials, but it is essential that this effort be pursued expeditiously and that countries take all reasonable steps to ensure that nuclear material is not part of the next terrorist attack.

Safeguards Do Not Protect

The 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires non-nuclear-weapon states to accept safeguards administered by the IAEA on all their nuclear activities. But, when the NPT was drafted, nuclear terrorism was not perceived as a significant threat, and the safeguards consist of monitoring and accounting measures designed to prevent non-nuclear-weapon states from diverting nuclear material from peaceful nuclear activities to weapons programs. The safeguards are not intended to prevent theft of nuclear material by outsiders or the bombing of reactors and spent fuel by terrorists.

Today there are threats not foreseen in 1968 that are unlikely to be deterred by NPT requirements: terrorists who want to blow up nuclear reactors with high explosives to kill civilians and create chaos, thieves who want to steal weapons-usable nuclear material to sell to states or terrorists seeking nuclear weapons, and disgruntled employees who want to steal material and sell it on the black market. [A survey for Gosatomnadzor, the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, showed that every nuclear theft from the Russian facilities it regulated during 1990-95 involved an insider (though outsiders were often involved) and none were detected by the existing Russian safeguards and protection systems then in effect. I. Koupriyanova, “Russian Perspectives on Insider Threats,” Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management, July 1999.]

The threat that a terrorist might try to blow up a U.S. nuclear facility is frighteningly plausible. Even before the September 11 attacks, conventional high-explosive bombs delivered by car, truck, or boat had been used in numerous terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities: a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996, two American embassies in Africa in 1998, and a U.S. naval vessel in a port in Yemen in 2000.

If such an attack against a nuclear plant were successful, the number of casualties could be extremely high because of the resulting spread of radioactive material. In 1981, an environmental impact statement prepared by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) estimated that a large truck bomb used against a nuclear reactor in a highly populated area could produce 130,000 fatalities. [Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Supplement to Draft Environmental Statement Related to the Operation of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, Units 2 & 3,” NUREG-0490, January 1981. See also Sandia National Laboratories, “An Analysis of Truck Bomb Threats to Nuclear Facilities,” 1984; Sandia National Laboratories, “Summary Report of Workshop on Sabotage Protection in Nuclear Power Plant Design,” February 1977.]

In effect, a simple conventional explosive used against a nuclear facility would serve as a large radiological weapon. The possibility of terrorist attacks on nuclear reactors is, of course, not limited to those in the United States. Attempts to blow up or penetrate nuclear reactors have been reported in Western Europe, Russia, South Africa, Argentina, and South Korea. [Oleg Bukharin, “Problems of Nuclear Terrorism,” The Monitor: Nonproliferation, Demilitarization and Arms Control, Spring 1997, p. 8; Oleg Bukharin, “Upgrading Security at Nuclear Power Plants in the Newly Independent States,” The Nonproliferation Review, Winter 1997, p. 28; Three Mile Island Alert Security Committee, www.tmia.com/sabter.html.]

Despite the danger, no multilateral treaty requires that nuclear material and facilities be protected from such attacks. The IAEA recommends, but does not require, general provisions to protect reactors against sabotage, and IAEA inspectors do not check whether these recommendations are observed. The Nuclear Suppliers Group asks that the recipients of nuclear exports take into account IAEA recommendations, but it does not make them mandatory. [The IAEA recommendations are in IAEA Information Circular 225, Rev.4 (1999). The suggestion from the suppliers that these recommendations “are a useful basis” for physical protection practices appears in Annex C to Nuclear Suppliers’ Guidelines, IAEA Information Circular 254 (1999).]

The NRC’s rules do contain explicit requirements for protection of licensed civilian reactors, and in 1993—after the World Trade Center bombing and after a car that could have contained a bomb crashed through the fences around Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reactor—the commission adopted new standards for protecting U.S. civilian power reactors from truck bombers. However, even before the attacks of September 11, those standards were criticized as being too weak. [Testimony of Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, May 5, 1999.]

And on September 19 an IAEA statement acknowledged that most nuclear power plants are not strong enough to withstand attack by “a large jumbo jet full of fuel” without dispersion of large amounts of radioactive material. [See William J. Cole, “Global Atomic Agency Confesses Little Can Be Done to Safeguard Nuclear Plants,” Associated Press, September 19, 2001.]

It is also difficult to ascertain whether the U.S. departments of Defense and Energy require similar standards for comparable government facilities because many of their rules on protection are classified. Some Department of Energy nuclear facilities appear vulnerable to terrorist attack. A 1999 Energy report states, “Recent tests have shown that barriers and vault systems used by the U.S. Department of Energy are not as robust as once thought…. Although many approaches have been investigated, a promising technological alternative has not yet been identified.” [U.S. Department of Energy, DOE Research and Development Portfolio: National Security, 1999, p. 87.]

Although the danger that hostile states or terrorists will acquire and use nuclear weapons seems smaller than the threat that terrorists will use conventional explosives to destroy nuclear facilities, the consequences could be far greater. There is clearly a market for weapons-usable nuclear material, and inadequately protected nuclear material threatens everyone. It is not just states like Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea that may be seeking nuclear weapons; the Aum Shinrikyo sect and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda group have also tried to acquire nuclear material for weapons. [George J. Tenet, testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, February 2, 2000; “U.S. Indictment: ‘Detonated and Explosive Device,’” The New York Times, November 5, 1998; Gavin Cameron, “Multi-Track Micro-Proliferation: Lessons from Aum Shinrikyo,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, October-December 1999.]

If hostile states or terrorists were to obtain enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) from civilian facilities, the manufacture of a simple Hiroshima-type bomb would be within their ability. [J. Carson Mark, Theodore Taylor, Eugene Eyster, William Maraman, and Jacob Wechsler, “Can Terrorists Build Nuclear Weapons?” in Paul Leventhal and Yonah Alexander, eds. Preventing Nuclear Terrorism, (Lexington Books, 1987), pp. 55-65; U.S. Department of Energy, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Assessment of Weapons-Usable Material Storage and Excess Plutonium Alternatives, 1997, p. 35-39.]

The IAEA safeguards required by the NPT would eventually detect the absence of the stolen material from safeguarded facilities, but thieves, who intend to steal material and disappear, would not likely be deterred by the fact that the theft would be discovered after they had departed. If significant quantities of weapons-usable material became readily available on the nuclear black market, the other actions taken to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons (such as IAEA inspections, export controls, and NPT conferences) would be futile.

A great deal of fissile material exists in civilian facilities around the world, and experience has shown that some of it is vulnerable to theft. According to August 2000 IAEA estimates, a total of more than 1,306 kilograms of highly enriched uranium exists in research reactors in 27 countries, sometimes in quantities large enough to make a bomb. [IAEA, “Nuclear Research Reactors in the World,” IAEA-RDS-3, September 2000.]

Twenty percent of these reactors are in Asia and the Middle East. Plutonium is often better protected than HEU, but 12 countries possess a total of 180,000 kilograms of civilian plutonium, and the amount is growing rapidly.
As of September 1999, the IAEA had recorded 139 reports of illicit trafficking of nuclear material (IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, statement to the General Conference, September 1999), most of which have come from Europe—although it is unclear whether this is the result of more trafficking there or simply more effective police work. Much of the nuclear material in these cases has probably come from Russia or other former Soviet republics. For example, several kilograms of HEU from Russia were seized in Prague from a gang with members in Belarus, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Russia. European security authorities are currently investigating alleged arrangements for the sale of Russian radioactive material by a prominent member of a Russian crime organization to representatives of al Qaeda. But Russia’s troubled nuclear infrastructure is not the only source of at-risk fissile material: HEU stolen from a research reactor in the Congo was apprehended by police in Italy and Belgium in 1998. Earlier this year, 600 grams of HEU of unknown origin was seized in Colombia. [See Fritz Steinhausler and Lyudmila Zaitseva, Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Diversion and Orphan Radiation Sources, Stanford Institute for International Studies, 2001.]

Addressing the Gap

The IAEA refers to securing nuclear facilities against thieves and saboteurs as “physical protection” to distinguish it from the monitoring and accounting “safeguards” required by the NPT. “Physical protection” means providing walls, fences, human guards, sensors, and alarm systems that will detect, warn against, and ultimately help prevent the unauthorized movement of humans, vehicles, or radioactive substances within a protected area.

 Many countries provide some form of physical protection for their nuclear material, but because there is no international standard or requirement for physical protection of civilian nuclear material (as there is for safeguards), countries’ protections vary widely and are often inadequate. For example, of 19 countries with nuclear facilities covered by a 1997 survey, only 11 reported that they had designed their physical protection facilities to deal with terrorism. [Kevin J. Harrington, Physical Protection of Nuclear Material: National Comparisons, Sandia National Laboratories in cooperation with Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, 1999.]

Just as the NPT’s requirement that non-nuclear-weapon states have safeguards is essential to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, so is the requirement that all countries with nuclear material have physical protection for nuclear material. If terrorists can crash large planes into the Pentagon, they can certainly find a way to attack nuclear reactors. And if thieves can steal weapons-usable material in Russia, the Congo, Colombia, or elsewhere, they can use it to make nuclear weapons or sell it to someone who will.

There is one treaty that provides for physical protection of civilian nuclear material: the 1980 Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. But it only applies to the protection from theft of material in international transit—for example, reprocessed plutonium being shipped from England back to Japan. The original draft of the treaty, proposed by the United States, was designed to cover both international transport and domestic transport, use, and storage. However, during the negotiations, important potential parties objected to domestic requirements, and in the end the treaty protected civilian nuclear material only against theft in international transport. It now has 69 parties, including most countries with major nuclear programs.

The convention divides nuclear materials into categories, which receive different levels of protection depending on the amount of material in question and how useful that material would be in making weapons. For example, more than two kilograms of unirradiated plutonium and more than five kilograms of unirradiated uranium (containing more than 20 percent of the isotope U235) are in Category I, which receives the highest protection. The convention requires that Category I material in storage related to international transport be located within a “protected area” with access restricted to “persons whose trustworthiness has been determined,” and it requires surveillance of the material by guards in close communication with response forces.

In 1997, the United States and the IAEA began to consider amending the convention to make it applicable to nuclear material in domestic use, and in 1999 the director-general of the IAEA convened a group of experts to recommend a course of action. [See George Bunn, “Raising International Standards for Protecting Nuclear Materials from Theft and Sabotage,” The Nonproliferation Review, Summer 2000, p. 146, 152.]

Experts in the IAEA working group did not have a lot of information on current country practices for domestic protection because there is no treaty that requires providing that information, which most countries regard as confidential. To compensate, the experts relied in part on a few general observations.

First, they noted that all of the nuclear material involved in the many incidents of illicit trafficking known to the IAEA seemed to have come from domestic use, storage, and transport—not from the international transport covered by the convention. Therefore, they concluded that amending the convention to require domestic protection could help reduce illicit trafficking.

Second, experts in the working group from developing countries reported that they had difficulty persuading their legislatures and other authorities to adopt physical protection statutes and regulations because there was no multilateral treaty requiring standards for domestic protection. This meant that passing legislation and appropriations at home for adequate physical protection was often difficult.

Finally, the experts saw that the amount of nuclear material in peaceful nuclear programs under IAEA safeguards was rapidly increasing—six-fold since the convention was negotiated in the late 1970s. This meant that, without major efforts to provide new funds for physical protection in each country needing improvements—funds that legislatures were reluctant to provide without an international requirement—the risks of theft and sabotage of nuclear material were likely to increase. [M. Gregoric, “Ongoing Efforts to Strengthen the International Physical Protection Regime,” IAEA International Conference on Security of Material, Stockholm, May 7-11, 2001, Paper IAEA-CN-86. (Gregoric was the chairman of the experts working group, and he gave a report on its work at this Stockholm Meeting.)]

The experts concluded that the IAEA director-general should convene a group to draw up the text of an amendment to the convention. They specifically recommended that the amendment make the existing convention applicable to domestic use, storage, and transport of nuclear material. They further recommended that the convention be expanded to require protection against sabotage, not just theft; that the convention clearly state the objectives of physical protection; and that information about how a particular facility is protected be kept confidential.

However, the experts opposed amendments that would mandate any international oversight, reporting requirements, or peer review of how states implemented physical protection measures. Instead, the experts explicitly placed the onus of ensuring physical protection on the national governments. In a set of 12 fundamental principles that they approved in addition to their recommendations for amendments, the experts said that the country with nuclear material should be “responsible for establishing and maintaining a legislative and regulatory framework to govern physical protection” and that that country should provide inspections of physical protection under its authority. Clearly, the experts wanted to avoid international verification of how states would implement the amended convention’s requirements.

The experts also opposed amendments that would permit more changes in protection standards at a later date without once again going through the arduous amendment process, apparently not wanting to make it too easy to raise standards again.
It may seem surprising that some experts opposed principles or amendments that would support some sort of international verification, which would help ensure that agreed-upon measures were actually being implemented. Perhaps the nuclear industries in important developed countries were resistant to changes that would cost them more money. Perhaps some of the European Union countries, which had earlier contributed to improvements in safeguards and physical protection in Russia, could not believe that nuclear material stolen in the Congo or Colombia could threaten them. Perhaps China and Russia feared inspections or a requirement that reports on their physical protection practices be submitted to other countries.

In the end, U.S. experts, who supported verification provisions, could not overcome opposition to any measure requiring any type of international oversight over national protection practices. If the experts’ recommendations are the basis for the negotiation of a treaty amendment, there will be no required international verification and no required reports from parties providing significant information on physical protection practices. This weakens the convention and makes it more difficult to standardize protection procedures internationally.

What Next?

The IAEA’s Board of Governors and the IAEA’s General Conference welcomed the experts’ report on amending the convention, the Board meeting just before and the Conference meeting just after the September 11 attacks. The General Conference accepted the Board’s approval of the experts’ fundamental principles, which state that responsibility for regulation of a system for physical protection “rests entirely within” the state having the system. It commended the IAEA’s programs of training, guidance, and technical assistance to assist states in establishing or improving systems of physical protection. Finally, it requested the IAEA to strengthen all of its work “relevant to preventing acts of terrorism involving nuclear materials and other radioactive materials,” and it urged IAEA members to support all of these programs.
Most importantly, the General Conference unanimously supported the decision by Director-General ElBaradei to convene a meeting of experts to draft an amendment to the convention on physical protection. That meeting is scheduled for December 2001. Given the new concerns about physical protection after September 11, there could be a new effort in the drafting meetings to add some sort of international verification or reporting requirement. Or perhaps an amendment could simply require that each country’s national implementing legislation be reported to the IAEA. This would allow the IAEA to verify whether states-parties had in fact adopted national standards and whether their application is subject to national inspection.

However, even if it does not include provisions for international verification, an amendment to the convention making its requirements for physical protection applicable domestically and adding provisions on sabotage is essential. Physical protection practices vary a great deal from country to country, and the threat from terrorists, thieves, and saboteurs is all too real.

Adoption of stronger physical protection standards against these threats is essential, and the sooner the better. Unfortunately, putting an amendment into effect will probably take several years. In the meantime, the Board-approved principles for physical protection and the IAEA-recommended standards for physical protection, both of which deal with sabotage as well as theft, should be applied immediately.

If adequately funded, the IAEA can provide guidance, training, advisory services, and technical assistance to help countries improve their protection practices and to implement the new principles and recommendations. For countries that accept an IAEA advisory team and cannot afford the protection that that team recommends, financial assistance could be provided as it already has been to Russia, some former Soviet republics, and a few East and Central European countries. This could be an inducement to the states given assistance not only to provide the protections but to join the convention if they have not yet done so.

The United States and the international community can no longer postpone taking stronger measures to ensure the physical protection of nuclear facilities and nuclear material. Weapons-usable material must be kept out of the hands of states and terrorists trying to make nuclear weapons, and nuclear reactors and spent fuel must be protected from sabotage, lest an attack spread radioactive debris over a large area, killing many and injuring more. Now is the time for the United States and the IAEA to take the lead in securing the world’s vulnerable nuclear infrastructure.

The threat of terrorists acquiring nuclear, biological and chemical weapons is the "greatest danger" facing the world, the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, has warned.

"It is hard to imagine how the tragedy of September 11 could have been worse," Mr Annan said. "Yet the truth is that a single attack involving a nuclear or biological weapon could have killed millions."

Mr Annan made the remarks when he opened a week-long session of the UN General Assembly, which hopes to forge a united global front against terrorism.

He said such catastrophic terrorist attacks could be prevented, but only through true international co-operation.

"Terrorism will be defeated if the international community summons the will to unite in a broad coalition, or it will not be defeated at all," he said.

However, the General Assembly's recent record on fighting terrorism has been marked by fierce words and feeble actions.

Of the 12 anti-terrorism measures passed by the assembly since 1963, only five have become law. The other seven remain noble words filed in the UN archives. Not enough countries have ratified them to give them the effect of law.

The most recent was the 1999 Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. It is wallowing for lack of support. Fifty - not including Australia - of the 189 member nations have signed the treaty but only four have ratified it so far.

Mr Annan said he hoped the terrorist attacks on America would now make it a "point of honour" for nations to support the treaties. "There is much we can do to help prevent future terrorist acts carried out with weapons of mass destruction," he said. "The greatest danger arises from a non-state group - or even an individual - acquiring and using a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon. Such a weapon could be delivered without the need for any missile or any other sophisticated delivery system."

Treaties alone would not prevent such actions, but they would provide a vital legal framework to support the international war on terrorism, he said.

The New York City Mayor, Mr Rudolph Giuliani, told the assembly that "this is not a time for further study or vague directive".

"You're either with civilisation or you're with terrorism," he said. "The evidence of terrorism, brutality and inhumanity is lying beneath the rubble of the World Trade Centre less than two miles from where we meet today."

Mr Giuliani issued a challenge to delegates, while recognising that several of the diplomats there represented governments which, either through their actions or inaction, supported terrorist organisations.

"Let those who say that we must understand the reasons for terrorism come with me to the thousands of funerals we're having in New York City - thousands - and explain those insane, maniacal reasons to the children who will grow up without fathers and mothers and to the parents who have had their children ripped from them for no reason at all," he said.

"Instead, I ask each of you to allow me to say at those funerals that your nation stands with America in making a solemn promise and pledge that we will achieve unconditional victory over terrorism and terrorists."

Australia's new Ambassador to the UN, Mr John Dauth, was due to deliver his address to the session early today.

VIENNA, Austria — Security is being tightened at the world's nuclear power  plants, an international watchdog agency said Monday, but it conceded that  little can be done to shield a nuclear facility from a direct hit by an airliner.

Most nuclear power plants were built during the 1960s and 1970s, and like the World Trade Center, they were designed to withstand only accidental impacts from the smaller aircraft widely used at the time, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said as it opened its annual conference. "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," spokesman David Kyd said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was among delegates from 132 nations who opened the conference with calls to better safeguard nuclear plants and to keep nuclear materials out of terrorists' hands.

Abraham brought a message from President George W. Bush to the Vienna-based IAEA, urging the agency to keep pace with "the real and growing threat of nuclear proliferation." The world "must ensure that nuclear materials are never used as weapons of terror," Abraham said. "We cannot assume that tomorrow's terrorist acts will mirror those we've just experienced."

In the wake of last week's attacks in New York and Washington, governments have tightened security outside nuclear power and radioactive waste facilities worldwide.

But Japan, which is heavily dependent on nuclear energy and has 52 nuclear plants, warned Monday that although tighter security is needed, nothing can shield the plants from attacks by missiles or aircraft.

Conference delegates, who began Monday with a minute of silence and a song from the Vienna Boy's Choir in memory of the victims of the U.S. attacks, met behind closed doors Monday and Tuesday on ways to improve plant security.
In the West, nuclear power plants were designed more with ground vehicle attacks in mind, Kyd said. Although many were designed to withstand a glancing blow from a small commercial jetliner, a direct hit at high speed by a modern jumbo jet "could create a Chernobyl situation," said an American official who declined to be identified. However, the buildings that house nuclear reactors themselves are far smaller targets than the Pentagon posed, and it would be extremely difficult for a terrorist to mount a direct hit at an angle that could unleash a catastrophic chain of events, Kyd said.

If a nuclear power plant were hit by an airliner, the reactor would not explode, but such a strike could destroy the plant's cooling systems. That could cause the nuclear fuel rods to overheat and produce a steam explosion that could release lethal radioactivity into the atmosphere.

The IAEA said it would work more closely with Interpol and other police agencies to minimize the risk of nuclear materials falling into terrorists' hands.

Over the past 12 months, there have been 13 known interceptions of trafficked nuclear material worldwide, the agency said.

Officials said it takes at least eight kilograms (17 1/2 pounds) of plutonium or 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of enriched uranium to produce a single nuclear weapon, but that only miniscule amounts of those metals are known to have been smuggled in recent years.

"A nuclear weapon requires tremendous expertise. We have no indications that any terrorist group is that advanced," Kyd said.

Although nuclear waste potentially could be used to produce a "radiological" weapon, it would take months or years to kill, and it is far cheaper to obtain compounds that could be used to create lethal chemical weapons, he said.

The nuclear industry's reaction to the 11 September attacks was mixed. Some say their plants are designed to withstand aircraft crashes, some say the result of a crash could be an accident on the scale of Chernobyl. However, the consequences for other installations, such as reprocessing plants, could be even worse than this according to certain scenarios.

(554.5316) WISE Amsterdam - The possibility of aircraft crashing into nuclear reactors has been raised from time to time. As a result, containment structures around reactors were often designed to resist impacts of aircraft. However, up until now it was always assumed that a crash would be accidental. Thus, for example, most US plants were designed to withstand the impact of light aircraft; only Seabrook and Three Mile Island (1) were designed with the impact of a large aircraft in mind (2). In Germany, where fighter jets carry out low-flying exercises, the impact of a Phantom fighter jet was used as a design basis for the newer plants, though not for the older plants (3). The direct impact of a large airliner was generally considered so improbable that it was ignored for design purposes.

Moreover, many of the designs were based on old research, such as a 1974 study (4) on the probabilities of an aircraft accidentally hitting a nuclear reactor, which itself was based on a census of the world's aircraft in 1968, before wide-body airliners were developed. It also considers the impact only of the engines, not of the airframe or the additional problems caused by aviation fuel catching fire (5).

Melissa Fleming, spokesperson for the IAEA, confirmed: "It is practically impossible to protect nuclear plants to the extent needed to withstand the sort of attack we saw last week" (6). The last time the IAEA published a guide to designing nuclear plants to withstand "external events" such as aircraft crashes and explosions was 1981, and it is now listed as out of print (7).

Attack scenarios

What could happen in the event of an aircraft collision, bombing or similar attack? Many news reports have compared the situation to Chernobyl. At the IAEA Conference in Vienna, a US official who declined to be identified confirmed that a direct hit by a jumbo jet at high speed "could create a Chernobyl situation" (8).

A 1996 analysis by Gordon Thompson of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies (9) concluded more or less the same: that the maximum release of radioactive substances would be caused if the containment broke and cooling and safety systems were damaged, resulting in a meltdown. This analysis involved a conventional weapon such as a 900kg bomb striking at a distance of a few dozen yards (tens of meters) from the reactor. Ironically, a direct hit which caused the reactor to break up might actually result in lower radioactive releases, since with less fuel remaining in the core, the risk of a meltdown would be lower.

Spent fuel pools are also vulnerable. Though some are located within the reactor containment building, many are not. An attack could cause a loss of the water in the pool, resulting in a risk of the irradiated fuel catching fire, particularly if the aircraft's fuel is already on fire. This could cause substantial releases of radioactivity even if the reactor containment is undamaged.

When irradiated fuel from many reactors is stored in one place, such as at the reprocessing plant at La Hague in France, an accident can have even more severe consequences. The smallest of the spent fuel pools, when just 50% full, contains 67 times as much cesium-137 as was released in the Chernobyl disaster, so a spent fuel fire could quite conceivable release more radioactivity than Chernobyl (10). Although Cogema disputes this, they admit that the plant was only designed to withstand an impact of an aircraft weighing less than 5.7 tonnes (11), whereas the Boeing 767 aircraft used in the US terrorist attacks weigh around 180 tonnes.

The high-level waste tanks at Sellafield (12) and La Hague also contain a huge amount of radioactivity and are less well-protected than reactors, according to Dr Frank Barnaby of the Oxford Research Group (13).

Stores of plutonium represent another risk. The Plutonium Finishing Plant in the US Hanford Nuclear Reservation contains 4 tons of plutonium. Despite being a military facility, it is not hardened against aircraft crashes, which could cause a "catastrophic radiological event" with plutonium-containing fallout (14). Plutonium is extremely radiotoxic, and inhaling just 80 micrograms of plutonium is usually fatal (15).

An aircraft crashing on stores of depleted uranium could also have a large impact. Depleted uranium is a waste material from uranium enrichment, where it is initially produced in the form of uranium hexafluoride (UF6). UF6  is solid at room temperature but tends to sublimate (become a gas), becoming entirely gaseous above 56.4 degrees Celsius, so it must be kept in sealed containers. If these containers break, UF6  gas will escape, which is very chemically reactive as well as being radiotoxic, so an aircraft impact on a UF6 store could have severe consequences (16). Despite this, the US has 739,000 tonnes of UF6 containing depleted uranium (17).

Conclusions

The terrorist attacks have revealed a real danger to nuclear installations that was not considered worth mentioning in probabilistic risk assessment analyses. Nevertheless, a sense of proportion is needed. However dramatic a terrorist attack might be, the slow deaths through cancer that are a consequence of the normal functioning of nuclear installations must not be forgotten: deaths which even the NRC estimates at 1200 in the case of US reactor relicensing (18).

 Sources
 (1) See "US Attacks: The Three Mile Island Connection" in this issue.
 (2) Email from Michael Mariotte, NIRS
 (3) Badische Zeitung, 11 March 1989
 (4) Wall, I.B. "Probabilistic Assessment of Aircraft Risk for Nuclear Power Plants", Nuclear Safety 15(3):276-284, May-June 1974
 (5) See p.155 of Lovins, A.B. and Lovins, L. H. Brittle Power, Brick House Publishing, 1982.
 (6) Quoted in The Guardian, 18 September 2001
 (7) "External Man-induced Events in Relation to Nuclear Power Plant Siting: A Safety Guide". Safety Series No. 50-SG-S5, IAEA. Listed on www.iaea.org as out of print.
 (8) Quoted by William J. Kole, Associated Press, 19 September 2001
 (9) War & Nuclear Power Plants. Chernobyl Paper No. 2, Greenpeace International, March 1996.
 (10) Note d'information: Les installations nuclÈaires exposeÈs aux risques de chute d'avion, WISE-Paris, 18 September 2001 (on web site www.wise-paris.org)
 (11) Le point sur la suretÈ de l'usine de La Hague face au risque de chute d'avion, Cogema, 18 September 2001
 (12) WISE News Communique 543.5242, "Sellafield: Waste tanks incident"
 (13) Quoted in The Guardian, 18 September 2001
 (14) The Spokesman-Review (Spokane), 13 September 2001
 (15) Nuclear energy: a dead end, WISE Amsterdam
 (16) Information from Laka Foundation, Amsterdam
 (17) WISE Uranium website
 (18) WISE News Communique 553.5310, "US: NRC admits 1,200 could die as a result of reactor relicensing"
 Contact: WISE Amsterdam

 RECOMMENDATIONS

Here are some recommendations that the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) has made following the US attacks:
 * Potassium iodide should be distributed to all reactor communities as an intelligent precaution
 * Relicensings and new licensings should consider security/terrorism issues and vulnerability of reactors.
 * Safety authorities should not be blamed for not anticipating such attacks; no one else did either. However, now that we know terrorists are willing to kill large numbers of innocents, we need to look at nuclear facilities in a new light, and be willing to consider security measures -including shutdown and/or no license renewal - that might not have been considered before.
 * Security at reactors has been frighteningly lax in recent years. Much like airports, security at reactors has often been contracted out in the US, with poor results. This has to change, and utilities will have to spend the money necessary.

 Source and contact: NIRS at [email protected]

Security: Czechs use anti-aircraft units... In response to the US terrorist attacks of 11 September, anti-aircraft missile units have been deployed at Namest nad Oslavou, 10 km from Dukovany, and Strakonice, 35 km from Temelin. A special police unit has also been sent to strengthen security inside Dukovany.
--BBC Monitoring Service, 25 September 2001

...while the US uses F-16's and advertising... The visible signs of additional precautions at US nuclear installations have not been enormously impressive: additional guards, security patrols and reduced access to certain areas. 26 military installations have put combat aircraft on alert ready to intercept a threat. When two F-16 fighters flew to Catawba Nuclear Station in South Carolina after an unidentified helicopter was seen near the plant, they caused mild panic amongst residents. However, according to Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, "So far the industry's main response is to step up their advertising budget..."
--Las Vegas Sun, 25 September 2001; Associated Press, 21 September 2001; Email from Michael Mariotte, 1 October 2001

...and the Japanese use boats. Japan's coastguard has dispatched patrol vessels to keep a round-the-clock watch on the country's 51 nuclear reactors, most of which are on the coast. However, as Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma admitted, "it is difficult to deal with attacks by trained terrorists".
--Reuters, 3 October 2001

Hijacker's friend visits German nuke plant. Police are investigating why a friend of one of the hijackers in the World Trade Center attacks visited Stade nuclear power plant near Hamburg. The student visited with a university trip in May. No charges have been made against the man.
--Reuters, 1 October 2001

LONDON, United Kingdom, Europe's nuclear energy industry is proving to be a victim of September's terrorist attacks in the United States. A rising fear of massive radioactive releases is galvanizing the anti-nuclear movement and raising new questions about the sector's long term future.

First in the firing line are the nuclear fuel reprocessing plants at Sellafield in Britain and La Hague in France, following alarming estimates of potential radioactive releases in the case of an aircraft collision similar to those on September 11.

According to a report by consultancy Wise-Paris released late last month, the potential release of caesium-137 from La Hague's irradiated fuel cooling ponds is 60 times the amount released in the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine.

This month, Britain's "New Scientist" magazine reported the potential caesium release from Sellafield at 44 times that released from Chernobyl.

These dire forecasts were taken up in a debate in the European parliament today, with Irish Green MEP Nuala Ahern calling for "no fly zones" to be established around both plants. "Nuclear plants are a ticking time bomb in our midst and the only logical response is to close them all down and end this terrible threat," she argued.

In a statement September 19, Cogema said that, "A permanent overflight ban is in force at the site. Considering its geographical position, the French armed forces would have time to intervene if any breach of this ban were suspected."

Cogema tried to reassure the public that no plane could deliberately crash into the facility's irradiated fuel storage pools by explaining, "The structures are partially built under ground, and the pools occupy a small area in relation to the total area of the installations around them. It would thus be impossible for an airplane to crash vertically into a pool."

Even strongly pro-nuclear European states have had their nerve tested by the realization that reprocessing and other nuclear plants could be terrorist targets. The French government last week said that anti-aircraft missile batteries are to be stationed at La Hague.

In Germany, the effect has been to cement or even speed up the ongoing nuclear phase-out program, culminating in media reports this weekend that Economic Minister Werner Mueller has called on power firms to phase out their oldest stations ahead of schedule. This follows a pledge by Environment Minister Juergen Trittin to order nuclear plant closures in case of a credible threat of attack.

The new sense of insecurity has pervaded protests from the Irish government and UK environmental groups over the British government's decision to license a new plutonium fuel manufacturing plant.

Austrian protests against the Temelin nuclear power station in neighboring Czech Republic have also been given new wings just as the plant is moving towards full power for the first time.

Only the nuclear industry itself appears oblivious to the sands shifting under its feet, with European association Foratom continuing to focus its arguments on nuclear's potential to avoid greenhouse gas emissions at a conference in Brussels earlier this month.

Nuclear power plants are in operation in eight out of the 15 nations of the European Union and generate about 35 percent of the EU’s electricity. This nuclear share rises to at least 50 percent during off-peak periods, as nuclear plants are mainly used for generating baseload electricity.

A number of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, in line for EU membership, also rely heavily on nuclear generated electricity.

BERLIN. Temporarily closing down some or all of Germany's 19 nuclear power plants as a precautionary measure is a step that the German government could yet take in the struggle against terrorism, according to the country's environment minister.

"There is a legal basis to do this," Jürgen Trittin of Alliance 90/The Greens told a symposium on nuclear power law here on Tuesday.

If the Interior Ministry foresees a concrete danger of an attack, he said, the German Environment Ministry and the state environment ministries would then have to decide whether one or all of Germany's nuclear power plants should be taken off-line for an indefinite period.

"I explicitly rule nothing out in this context," Mr. Trittin said, but at the same time, he added that, as far as is currently known, there is no known threat to German plants.

Mr. Trittin warned that the security measures in the wake of last month's terrorist attacks on the United States should not be limited to tracking down terrorists and closing bank accounts. Efforts must be made in numerous areas to reduce Germany's vulnerability, he said.

But as Mr. Trittin spoke, the nuclear policy of the Social Democrats and Alliance 90/The Greens coalition was again coming under fire from the Free Democratic Party and a leading environmental protection group. The FDP's environmental policy spokeswoman, Birgit Homburger, accused Mr. Trittin of duplicity, saying he was obscuring his own responsibility for a serious security problem.

"Instead of storing nuclear waste deep underground in a central, secure place, the environment minister is forcing the establishment of more than a dozen provisional depots out in the countryside," she said.

Meanwhile, the German Association for Environmental and Nature Protection called on the parliament and the government to look for ways to shift immediately from nuclear to other sources of energy. The association said the terrorist attacks on the United States had clearly shown that continued operation of nuclear power plants was irresponsible.

Mr. Trittin also discussed the decision taken this weekend to shut down the Philippsburg power plant in the state of Baden-Würrtemberg. He said the lax approach to security which had been discovered there was unacceptable. Mr. Trittin said the malfunction in Philippsburg was not the result of decisions by shift supervisors, but a failure of management, and he credited the operators for acting on their own to temporarily shut down the facility.

"This shows that something has changed for the better," he said.

A hearing on revising German nuclear power law is scheduled for Nov. 5. The German parliament's environment committee will end hearings on new bill on Dec. 12 and present it to parliament two days later. Mr. Trittin said he expects the legislative process to be finished by the end of the year.

Several nuclear waste transports are set for Wednesday. They are to converge on the town of Wörth, near the French border, before proceeding to a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in La Hague, France.

France is deploying ground-to-air missiles near a nuclear waste reprocessing plant in Normandy in order to thwart possible terrorist suicide bombers in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The French defence ministry announced yesterday that the Crotale missiles were being deployed near the plant at La Hague as part of security rein forcement measures to protect possible targets which, if hit, could cause massive loss of life and injury.

Alain Richard, the French minister of defence, said France was prepared to use warplanes to shoot down hijacked aircraft and that putting missile batteries in place was a complementary measure. The government had not been informed of any particular threats.

Mr Richard announced that missile batteries and military jets could also be used to protect other nationally important potential targets such as dams and large industrial plants, as well as major cities.

France has 19 nuclear power plants producing 76% of the country's electricity, the highest proportion of any country. French military aircraft have previously been deployed to create a so-called protection "bubble" around sites for special events, such as summits of the G7 group of major industrial nations and the World Cup football finals in 1998.

In Britain, security has been stepped up at all nuclear sites since September 11 but no measures similar to those announced in France are being contemplated.

The most vulnerable and dangerous installation is the Sellafield plant in Cumbria which employs 6,000 people and has vast stores of plutonium, uranium and volatile tanks of high-level radioactive waste in its buildings. A successful attack on the high level waste tanks would devastate a vast area, potentially the whole of northern England if the wind was westerly.

Osama bin Laden's global terrorist network has been trying for some time to acquire materials necessary for chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons and may possess the capability to conduct a crude attack with chemical or biological agents, according to United States intelligence officials.

But the CIA and other US intelligence agencies acknowledge they have little hard evidence that bin Laden's network, al Qaeda, has acquired or developed chemical or biological agents, or successfully made weapons from the materials that could kill large numbers of people.

One intelligence official, however, said recently that bin Laden "has the capability to conduct a crude chemical or biological weapon attack". He said: "I don't know what the lethality of his agent would be, but he would know how to get it together."

Another intelligence official said this assessment was based on "intelligence that shows they have tried to obtain information and material that would be useful in that kind of attack".

Testimony from the trial of four bin Laden operatives convicted this year in the bombing in 1998 of two US embassies in East Africa left little doubt that bin Laden had been serious about acquiring chemical weapons and nuclear material, officials said.

At the trial, the government's main witness, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a former al Qaeda member, testified that he received a $US10,000 ($A20,300) bonus for negotiating with a Sudanese military officer who offered to sell uranium to al Qaeda for $US1.5 million. Al-Fadl said he did not know whether the deal was completed.

He also testified that a fellow al Qaeda member told him the group was trying to help Sudan's ruling National Islamic Front make chemical weapons for use in a civil war against Christian forces in the country's south.

And a convicted terrorist's detailed account of his months in training at a jihad camp in Afghanistan is deepening concerns about the threat of chemical or biological attacks.

According to a confidential assessment report circulating in the US intelligence and law enforcement communities, bin Laden disciple Ahmed Ressam has laid out for FBI agents in recent months - before and after the September 11 attacks - a range of previously undisclosed details about the tools and techniques that he learnt in "tactics classes" in Afghanistan. Among the techniques, he said, were:
* Mixing crude but often lethal chemical compounds that could be applied on door knobs, through ventilation systems or by other means.
* Targeting unidentified airports that the terrorists considered "soft" because they might be more vulnerable to terrorist penetration.
* Hiding a second explosive device "within close proximity" to an initial explosion so that the second bomb would "get the detectives" when they responded to the incident.
* Waiting three or four months after a terrorist attack before striking again to allow the public frenzy - and vigilance - to die down.

Ressam's account may help explain the Bush administration's aggressive response last week to scares about crop-dusters, hazardous material haulers and other possible conduits for chemical and biological weapons. Because of unconfirmed concerns about terrorist links, the administration grounded crop-dusters for two days and arrested at least 18 drivers nationwide for allegedly paying a Pennsylvania examiner to obtain bogus hazardous-material licences.

According to the first comprehensive report on the biological threat since the attacks, the government's plan for responding to bioterrorism is a collection of poorly coordinated, often underfunded, projects that span 11 cabinet-level agencies.

The report, by the US General Accounting Office, warns that state and local health departments appear unprepared to deal with a biological assault, even though they are likely to be the first to respond.

In this year's budget, the Bush administration has allocated $US343 million for dealing with a biological attack, $US113 million of which is for the Pentagon to protect soldiers in the field. The rest, less than $US1 per US civilian, goes to projects as diverse as environmental assessments, pharmaceutical stockpiles and computer upgrades.

CIA director George Tenet has warned repeatedly about the threat of a terrorist attack involving chemical or biological weapons.

He has testified before Congress over the past two years that bin Laden has declared the acquisition of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons a "religious duty" and trained his operatives to conduct attacks with toxic chemicals and biological toxins.

- WASHINGTON POST

Tony Jones speaks to Professor Fritz Steinhausler from the centre for international security and cooperation at Stanford University on the west coast of the US. Professor Steinhausler has made a special study of the threat of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons.

TONY JONES: Fritz Steinhausler, what evidence is there that members of the Al Qaeda network have been trying to obtain nuclear weapons or nuclear material?

FRITZ STEINHAUSLER, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: We have reports of, I would call it two phases in the Al Qaeda approach to obtain nuclear material.

Phase one is when they obviously tried to do it a weapons program, a do-it-yourself type, that was in the early 90s. This is the episode when they apparently tried in Khartoum to obtain supposedly South African nuclear fissile material -- a $1.5 million deal.

Then they seemed to have realised that this was too difficult, too complicated.

And we've entered phase two, which so far had a climax in 1998, where they had several attempts to obtain fissile material or weapons themselves.

The Munich incidents is one of those events that I am referring to.

I think the most important one is the one in Grozny, where they've tried to do the so-called "drug for weapons deal", where we have a $30 million offer to get 20 nuclear warheads in exchange and sort of top it off with two tonnes of opium.

TONY JONES: It seems to me from what you're saying there are several options for the terrorists - one is to attempt to make - which they appear to have put to one side - or buy nuclear weapons, which they still appear to be trying to do, and the other is that they simply obtain radioactive nuclear material which they would put in a conventional weapon and create a so-called 'dirty' bomb?

FRITZ STEINHAUSLER: My feeling would be that phase one has definitely been dropped - it is doing-it-yourself all the way - too expensive, too complicated, takes too long.

Phase two is something that I think they may consider as still promising and may still be continuing to do so, particularly if the physical protection of nuclear material in the former Soviet Union may be lacking the standard that we would like it to have.

And the third attempt that you mentioned, the radiological bomb, is what I would put my cards on as the most probable way to go for them, because it is relatively easy, you can cause mass panic with simple terms such as packaging a not-wanted nuclear material, nuclear waste or hospital source with conventional explosives and thereby you contaminate large areas and, as I said, you cause mass panic among the population at relative ease.

TONY JONES: Now, what would be the effect of exploding a dirty bomb with nuclear material inside a city like New York for example?

FRITZ STEINHAUSLER: If it was a refined dirty bomb, you would lace it with fissile material to give the first impression that you have indeed attempted a nuclear atomic device to be detonated.

That, of course, wouldn't last very long because experts could tell from the signature of the fissile of the product, the fission products, that it wasn't really a nuclear bomb.

But the first reaction I think would be pretty chaotic if you found plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

Then, of course, you would have the contaminated victims themselves, who would either be inhaling radioactive particles or have skin contamination and second you would have the environmental contamination, property damage, it could be quite excessive because of cleanup of contaminated areas is an expensive item to do as we've learned from around Chernobyl where a whole city had to be given up because it simply was not feasible to do the cleanup.

TONY JONES: Getting down to concrete cases if you like, it appears from reports over the past few days that an operation by members of the Al Qaeda network to purchase highly enriched uranium was stopped by security forces in Prague?

FRITZ STEINHAUSLER: The HEU component of that deal, I think, is secondary to the attempts to obtain components for nuclear weapons, and I think both aspects of that Munich deal should be looked at very carefully because it may be indicitive of more finesse in their approach in the future.

TONY JONES: The FBI have reported that bin Laden's former finance chief, who was arrested, I think, in Munich in 1998, was indeed trying to do that, buy components for nuclear weapons?

FRITZ STEINHAUSLER: Correct, and I think it is this dual approach of getting your hands on either on ready-made nuclear weapons that are either reshaped or modified by their own nuclear experts, to have five nuclear experts from Turkmanistan at their hands to make them into smaller nuclear devices such as the infamous suitcase bombs that are talked about is one way.

Or the other way is to combine nuclear fissile material with the right components.

I personally think that the way of modifying existing ready-made nuclear war heads is the more likely way for them to go.

TONY JONES: Now you have just suggested that it appears that the network may have in its control a series of nuclear scientists from Turkmanistan. How do we know that?

FRITZ STEINHAUSLER: We have a database at Stanford where we collect international information available from many parts of the world and one part of that information indicates that.

TONY JONES: The cases that we have spoken about are the ones that we know of because the police or the security forces have uncovered them.

Is there a chance that some of these attempts to get material like this, or even components or even weapons may have slipped under the observations of our security forces?

FRITZ STEINHAUSLER: I don't think it would happen without involvement of the security forces per se.

That means you would need an insider-coordinated action in order to get such highly valuable material out.

But there have been incidents when this indeed has been accomplished.

I just want to remind you of nuclear submarine fuel, fresh fuel which has been able to be smuggled out of closed compounds, so the possibility as such cannot be excluded provided there is enough insiders involved in the deal.

Before September 11, stories of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons, at least as far as most of the public is concerned, were confined to airport potboilers and Hollywood thrillers. But now the world's paying attention to what's been going on in reality. And evidence is emerging that Osama bin Laden has been trying for nearly a decade to get his hands on nuclear weapons or the components to make them. There've also been attempts by his network to buy highly radioactive nuclear material that could be devastating if embedded in a conventional explosive device.

Compere: Tony Jones
Reporter: Suzanne Smith

OSAMA BIN LADEN (TRANSLATION): We declared a jihad, a holy war against the United States Government because it is unjust, criminal and tyrranical.

SUZANNE SMITH: Investigations into Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network have produced drastic implications for the nuclear industry.

An inquiry underway into the devastating bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1993 and the USS Cole in Yemen last year has produced the strongest evidence yet that bin Laden is acquiring a nuclear weapon.

An ex-bin Laden operative now turned informant has told the US courts that he was involved in an attempt to purchase uranium in Sudan.

Now a litany of other reports are emerging which are still being investigated.

The most chilling of which is bin Laden's apparent connection with the Chechen rebels who in turn have links with the Russian mafia.

One report claimed that bin Laden was negotiating with Chechen rebels in Grozny to buy 20 nuclear war heads in exchange for two tonnes of opium and $20 million.

Just how close terrorists have come to successfully assembling a bomb is difficult to gauge.

But with 139 reports to date of illegal trafficking in nuclear waste across the globe it is likely they are getting closer.

Lost amid the commotion surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks were alarming comments made earlier in the month by former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu urging Israel to openly deploy nuclear weapons and abandon its long-held policy of strategic ambiguity. Though the world’s focus has understandably shifted toward examining the doctrine and stability of fellow nuclear-capable, non-NPT member Pakistan, it must not be forgotten that how Israel and the world deal with the Israeli "bomb in the basement" at this critical point in time could have lasting affects on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East and beyond.

According to a September 17 article in Defense News, Netanyahu’s comments about the need to deploy nuclear weapons emerged in a private conversation with some close colleagues. Citing the failure of diplomatic measures to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons development program and the likelihood of Iran deploying weapons in the future, he urged the open deployment of the country’s nuclear forces to ensure a clear second-strike capability. Though Netanyahu later retracted these statements following a rebuke from current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and recent $300 million a year arms sale agreement between Russia and Iran could provide new incentive for a push toward open nuclear deployment in Israel.

Such a move, however, would likely only exacerbate the proliferation threats in the region. By openly deploying its own nuclear weapons Israel might only speed the development of nuclear weapon and advanced missile technology in Iran. This would set a perilous precedent in a tense region with several WMD - capable countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Egypt . It could also have repercussions around the globe, impacting Indian and even Chinese nuclear decisions.

The situation in Central Asia is extremely delicate. There are serious concerns about the security of Pakistan's nuclear complex, should the war in Afghanistan fracture government controls. But a successful resolution of the war on terrorism could open new avenues with Pakistan that could contain or even reduce the nuclear risks from regional arsenals. Iran is currently exploring a promising (if perhaps marginal) interest in cooperating with the U.S. and its allies in the war on terrorism. This, too, could lead to reductions in proliferation threats, post-war. A destabilizing move by Israel toward open nuclear deployment is the last thing the world, much less an already tense region, needs.

In his first State of the Union address, president Bush said diagrams of American nuclear power plants had been found in computers seized in Afghanistan.

"Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and show us the true scope of the task ahead. We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred in videos where they laugh about the loss of innocent life.

"And the depth of their hatred is equalled by the madness of the destruction they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world," he said.

The question immediately arose on September 11 and has persisted: As horrific as the terrorist attacks were, what might have happened if the terrorists who seized jumbo jets and used them as weapons against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had aimed them at nuclear power plants instead? And if more attacks are likely, as government officials have said, are nuclear facilities on the terrorist target list?

The Sunday Times of London reported in October that some intelligence assessments suggest that the intended target of the fourth plane, the one downed in Pennsylvania, was a nuclear power reactor. The plane had descended much too soon for Washington to be its intended destination, these assessments indicate, suggesting that the true target may have been one of several nuclear plants in its flight path, with the single still-operating unit at Three Mile Island seeming the most likely. This assessment cannot be confirmed, of course. But if it is correct, we owe even more to those brave passengers who succeeded, at the cost of their own lives, in bringing the plane down before it reached its intended target.

Misleading statements

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the nuclear industry issued statements asserting that U.S. reactor containments were designed to withstand the crash of a fully loaded jumbo jet. Within days, both had to recant and admit that the opposite was the case. Just hours after the terrorist attacks, NRC spokesperson Breck Henderson said U.S. nuclear plants were safe because “containment structures are designed to withstand the impact of a 747.”

Ten days later he admitted that “the initial cut we had on that was misleading.” In a formal statement, the agency conceded that it “did not specifically contemplate attacks by aircraft such as Boeing 757s and 767s, and nuclear power plants were not designed to withstand such crashes.” A similar pattern of assurance followed by retraction characterized the behavior of public relations personnel for a number of specific nuclear sites.

Early on, however, David Kyd, spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was quoted as saying that most nuclear plants, built during the 1960s and 1970s, were designed to withstand only accidental, glancing impacts from the smaller aircraft used at the time. “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,’’ he said. In reporting Kyd’s comments, the Associated Press quoted an unnamed U.S. government official to the effect that a direct hit at high speed by a modern jumbo jet “could create a Chernobyl situation.”

The press has focused on the vulnerability of reactor containment buildings to airborne attack. But there are also “soft targets” outside containment, and their protection is critical to preventing radioactive release. Excessive emphasis on the risk of air attack obscures the far larger and more frightening possibility of ground assault or the threat from insiders. Security at the nation’s nuclear plants has been grossly inadequate for decades, and the nuclear industry and its captive regulatory agency, the NRC, have refused to do anything about it—both before and after September 11.

1,000 times more

A typical nuclear power plant contains within its core about 1,000 times the long-lived radioactivity released by the Hiroshima bomb. The spent fuel pools at nuclear power plants typically contain some multiple of that—several Chernobyls’ worth.

Any analogy with the dropping of a bomb is imperfect, of course, because much of the destruction caused by an atomic bomb comes from blast effects, and the damage caused by a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant would stem almost exclusively from the release of radioactivity. However, the potential casualties from an atomic attack and those resulting from using conventional explosives to produce a radiological release from a nuclear facility would be surprisingly similar. For example, the NRC estimated years ago that a meltdown at one of the San Onofre reactors in Southern California could produce 130,000 “prompt” fatalities, 300,000 latent cancers, and 600,000 genetic defects. Analyses for other reactors performed by Sandia National Laboratories for the NRC estimated damages up to $314 billion in 1980 dollars (the equivalent of about $700 billion today).

Because there is an immense amount of radioactivity at a reactor, and because the fuel must be constantly cooled to prevent it from melting and releasing that radioactivity, it is not difficult to understand why nuclear facilities might be a tempting target. As Bennett Ramberg pointed out in 1984 in his seminal book on the subject, Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril, any country that possesses nuclear energy facilities gives its adversaries a quasi-nuclear capability to use against it. Conventional explosives—a truck bomb, for example—could cause a massive radiological release, with terrorists turning their adversaries’ own technology against them. And just as simple box-cutters were used to convert U.S. jumbo jets into guided missiles, conventional means could turn U.S. nuclear plants into radiological weapons. The need to protect nuclear facilities against terrorist attack should be obvious.

Minimal protection

Yet for decades, NRC regulations have required only minimal security. Fifteen years ago in the March 1986 Bulletin (“Protecting Reactors from Terrorists”), two colleagues and I warned even then that terrorist trends were rendering the NRC security rules inadequate. But with only a single, partial exception, the agency’s primary security regulations are unchanged from a quarter century ago. And despite September 11—when the NRC’s assumptions crumbled at the moment the Twin Towers fell—both the industry and the agency that regulates it continue to resist making any significant improvement to dismally inadequate and outmoded security regulations.

We reported in 1986—and it is still the case today—that NRC regulations require nuclear reactor operators to protect against no more than a single insider and/or three external attackers, acting as a single team, wielding no more than hand-held automatic weapons.

Security personnel at power reactors are not required to be prepared for:
• more than three intruders;
• more than one team of attackers using coordinated tactics;
• more than one insider;
• weapons greater than hand-held automatic weapons;
• attack by boat or plane; or
• any attack by “enemies of the United States,” whether governments or individuals.

For years, reactor sites were not even required to provide protection against truck bombs. But after a decade of efforts by the Committee to Bridge the Gap and the Nuclear Control Institute to get the agency to strengthen security and repeated refusals by the NRC to require greater protection, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and an intrusion event at Three Mile Island finally propelled the agency to amend the rules. But the truck bomb rule is still a concern because of the limited size of the explosion that operators must protect against. It apparently requires protection against truck bombs of roughly the size used at the World Trade Center in 1993, but not the larger quantities of explosives that have been used in similar attacks since then. The NRC is behind the curve, “fighting the last war” rather than protecting against threats that can materialize without warning.

To deal with the limited threat that the NRC does recognize—called the “design basis threat” (DBT)—the agency requires a nuclear power plant to be guarded by a total of five individuals. It may seem incomprehensible in today’s world that targets capable of producing tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties and hundreds of billions of dollars of damage are protected by a mere five guards, but that is the minimum the NRC mandates.

The events of September 11 demonstrated the inadequacy of the agency’s quarter-century-old security rules. There were 19 terrorists on the planes, and possibly additional participants in the conspiracy—far in excess of the three external attackers the NRC envisages. They acted as four coordinated teams, but the NRC rule requires the nuclear industry to guard against only a single team. They used jumbo jets filled with jet fuel as their weapons, far more lethal than the hand-carried automatic weapons and explosives contemplated in the regulation. They were very sophisticated, training for months to fly big jets, and willing to die—a level of motivation and capability far beyond that upon which the NRC rules are predicated.

None of the details of the agency’s DBT are secret. With a single exception discussed below, they can all be found in the Code of Federal Regulations, available in most libraries and on the Internet. Any potential adversary can immediately learn that the required security arrangements that protect these high-value targets are inadequate.

Three external attackers . . .

The only aspect of the DBT that is not explicitly stated in the Code is the famous number “three”—the maximum number of external attackers against which reactor owners must provide protection. The Code indicates that reactors must be protected against an attack by “several” intruders, and that “several” is less than the number required to operate as more than one team. This is enough to give a pretty clear indication of exactly how small the DBT is, but other publicly available documents make it clear that “several” means three.

The number was publicly revealed as a consequence of the licensing hearings for the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California in the early 1980s. The Governor of California was a party in the hearings, in which the adequacy of security at the plant was a key issue. The state’s security experts testified that a dozen attackers was a credible number to safeguard against. But the utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), and the NRC staff argued that irrespective of any threat that might exist, NRC requirements were far more modest. The precise number in the DBT became a key issue in the hearings.

The NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Appeal Board decided in favor of PG&E and the NRC staff, expressly ruling on how many attackers a reactor operator is required to protect against. The ruling was not immediately published on the theory that it contained sensitive information. The specific number for the DBT, according to the Diablo decision, was withdrawn at the last minute from the published regulations and replaced with “several,” not for any security reason, but because the commission thought it would have trouble explaining to the public why it was requiring a lesser level of protection against sabotage for reactors than against theft at non-reactor sites. This remains the case today—NRC nervousness about public discussion of the DBT of three external attackers is not motivated by a security concern, but by fear of embarrassment were it widely known that it only required reactors be capable of protecting against no more than a trivial terrorist challenge.

The Governor of California, however, asked that an expurgated version of the decision be published, and the agency agreed. When the “sanitized” Appeal Board decision was released, the actual number had been deleted. But ironically, the remaining text explained what “several” meant, and other underlying documents cited in the text—which had been publicly released—gave away the actual number.

The Appeal Board ruling cited a number of NRC documents it relied on in concluding that the DBT should be limited to three attackers. And although the ruling was redacted, all of the underlying documents were available in the NRC’s public reading room. Those documents, the “SECY Memoranda,” are the agency’s actual decision documents on adopting the rule. Over and over again the SECY Memoranda state that the DBT in the rule is “an external threat of one to three persons armed with pistols, shotguns, or rifles (including automatic weapons), and who may be assisted by an insider (employee or unescorted person).” This is the so-called “three-and-one” threat described in publicly available NRC documents.

The Appeal Board decision discloses some of the rationale for settling on three external attackers. First, the board states, power plants by rule are not required to protect against more than one team of attackers—only fuel-cycle facilities with weapons-grade material must do that. Because the minimum number of attackers who could operate as more than one team is obviously four, three is the maximum number of attackers who cannot act as more than one team.

. . . and five guards

Second, and perhaps most astonishingly, the Appeal Board discloses how the regulation’s minimum force of five guards was derived:

“A response force ratio (i.e., ratio of guards to attackers) must be equal to 1 [1 to 1] to protect power reactors. The report [the NRC staff report that formed the basis for the numerical determination for the design basis threat] then states: ‘Given the above response force ratio modified by a measure of conservatism, the minimum number of guards available for response to an assault may be determined. Therefore, for the presently specified threat, the minimum number of guards available for response at a nuclear power plant is judged to be 5’” (emphasis added).

The Appeal Board decision went on to indicate that the “presently specified threat” referred to was the external threat (of three) along with a single insider capable of participating in a violent attack. This three-and-one threat created a maximum total of four attackers. A 1:1 ratio of guards to attackers would require only four guards. But modifying the ratio “by a measure of conservatism” (giving the guards a one-person advantage) resulted in the regulations requiring a minimum of five guards.

(The actual regulation mentions a “nominal” number of 10 guards, with a minimum of five. But the Diablo decision and underlying documents indicate that this “nominal” number was employed to “camouflag[e] the exact threat.”)

Thus, the NRC security regulations, unchanged except to require protection against small-sized truck bombs, require operators to protect against an attack by three outsiders, perhaps aided by one insider, with no team-maneuvering tactics, no attack by boat or air, and minimal hand-held weapons.

This rule made little sense when it was first adopted, and it makes even less today. The September 11 attacks—with at least 19 attackers, four times as many teams, and a level of sophistication far beyond that contemplated by the agency—blew away the NRC’s security regulations. Yet those regulations remain unchanged.

Seventeen years of trying

For 17 years, my group, the Committee to Bridge the Gap, joined by the Nuclear Control Institute, has worked quietly behind the scenes in a largely futile effort to convince the NRC to upgrade its security requirements. With one partial exception, the truck bomb rule, we have failed.

In 1984, in the wake of truck bombings in the Middle East, the NRC staff decided to consider requiring protection against truck bombs at U.S. power reactors. It commissioned Sandia National Laboratories to study the vulnerability of plants to truck bomb attacks. The results were frightening—small truck bombs could cause “unacceptable damage to vital reactor systems,” and larger truck bombs could have the same effect, even if detonated off site, because the exclusion zone surrounding many facilities is small. Inexplicably, after the study was conducted, the agency dropped the idea of a truck bomb rule.

In 1985, the Committee to Bridge the Gap testified before the Safeguards and Security Subcommittee of the NRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, pointing to data showing increasing terrorist capabilities and actions, urging the agency to upgrade the regulations to deal with larger attacking forces and with truck bombs. The response was unenthusiastic, with many subcommittee members indicating that there were so many ways to destroy a reactor that, if you protected against truck bombs, you’d have to protect against all those other vulnerabilities as well.

Over the next few years, both the Committee to Bridge the Gap and the Nuclear Control Institute continued to push the NRC to upgrade security regulations, to no avail. In 1991, at the time of the war with Iraq and the prospect of terrorist attacks against U.S. targets, we formally petitioned the NRC to upgrade its regulations. In addition to urging protection against truck bombs, the petition called for a new DBT with 20 external attackers (ironic in light of the 19 terrorists on the planes on September 11) capable of operating as two or more teams, with weapons and explosives more significant than hand-held rifles. The NRC denied the petition, ruling that “there has been no change in the domestic threat since the design basis threat was adopted that would justify a change.”

Finally, after the truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and an event at Three Mile Island in which an intruder drove a station wagon through the perimeter and into the turbine building, where he stayed for hours while security tried to figure out if he had a bomb, the NRC adopted a new rule requiring some measure of protection against truck bombs. However, the rule may not be sufficient to protect against truck bombs of the size that have been used since 1993.

The rest of the DBT remains unaltered, despite the NRC’s promises in 1994 that in a second phase it would consider upgrading the rest of the security regulations.

In fact, a number of actions have weakened security. For example, in 1996 the NRC issued Generic Letter 96-02, “Reconsideration of Nuclear Power Plant Security Requirements Associated with an Internal Threat.” It permitted “reductions in unnecessary or marginally effective security measures,” granting licensees the option, for instance, to keep “doors to vital areas . . . unlocked.”

One counterterrorism program, killed

In late 1998, I received a plain manila envelope in the mail. Inside were documents indicating that the NRC had recently terminated its only counterterrorism program, called the Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation program, (OSRE). The program evaluated nuclear plant security by undertaking mock terrorist attacks—“black hat” force-on-force exercises. The documents contained astonishing information: Given six months advance warning, including the date on which the security test would occur, plants prepared by increasing their guard force by as much as 80 percent. Even so, security failed the tests. In nearly half of the tests conducted at the the country’s reactors, mock terrorists penetrated security and reached at least one “target set” that, had the intruders been actual terrorists, could have resulted in a meltdown and massive radioactivity release.

This failure rate is extraordinary. No terrorist group is going to give notice six months in advance of when and where it intends to attack. And these tests were against the existing DBT—against only three intruders.

Other publicly available NRC documents from the early 1990s indicate that in an OSRE test at the Peach Bottom reactor, it took only 17 seconds for the mock terrorists to penetrate the perimeter fence and breach the access control barrier. It took intruders 18 seconds at San Onofre, 30 seconds at Duane Arnold, and 45 seconds at Maine Yankee.

And what was the response to this dismal failure rate? The NRC killed the program—there could be no more failures if there were no more tests.

My organization passed the OSRE documents along to the Los Angeles Times, which ran a major story about the program’s termination. The agency was sufficiently embarrassed that a couple of days later Shirley Jackson, then NRC chair, reinstated the program. Since then, however, the industry and the agency have worked together to gut the tests. Earlier this year, the NRC approved the industry’s proposed self-evaluation program that would replace NRC-run force-on-force tests. Companies failing the independent tests are now able to test themselves! The problems inherent in self-regulation should be obvious.

After September 11

Our two organizations have persisted in so-far-fruitless attempts to get the DBT upgraded. Last year, we met with NRC Chairman Richard Meserve, trying once again to get the NRC to fix gaping security problems. Nothing came of the meeting. As we were leaving, Meserve said we should feel free to see him again, adding something to the effect that he meets with industry “all the time,” and there is no reason he can’t meet with public groups from time to time as well. (And indeed, as we left we saw a number of industry lobbyists sitting outside his office waiting to go in.)

After September 11, we wrote to Chairman Meserve, urging him to recommend that the National Guard be called out to protect all the nation’s reactors, that air defenses be deployed to protect them, and that employees and contractor personnel be thoroughly re-vetted.

We also asked the NRC to upgrade its security regulations immediately to protect against attacks involving greater numbers, operating as multiple teams, with more than one insider; require a strong two-person rule and other enhanced measures to protect against insiders; require protection against a truck bomb as big as a large truck can carry; require protections against boat and airplane attacks; require full security protection of spent fuel storage pools and dry cask storage, including after reactor closure; and that the Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation program be reinstated and expanded.

The NRC response was business as usual. The agency is continually reviewing the DBT, we were told, just as we have been told for the last 17 years.

But no improvements were promised and none has been made. Both the Committee to Bridge the Gap and the Nuclear Control Institute have decided that after years of quiet work it is time to go public about these problems. It is clear that the United States has sophisticated adversaries out there and everything we know is available to them as well. The only people not taking the danger seriously are the ones who should be required to do something about it—the nuclear industry and the agency that is supposed to regulate it.

All the NRC has done in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is to recommend—not even require—that licensees go to a higher state of alert within their existing security system and within the existing DBT. A no-fly-zone excluded small planes from flying near power reactors, but after a week that restriction was lifted. The federal government has failed to call out the National Guard—although in the absence of federal action, some governors have taken that step on their own. The NRC and the industry strongly oppose legislation introduced by Sens. Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Jim Jeffords, Joe Lieberman, and Cong. Ed Markey that would have required the agency to upgrade security regulations.

In 1981, the NRC and industry argued against the Governor of California’s contention in the Diablo case that there should be protection against up to a dozen terrorists, saying such an attack wasn’t credible. In 1991, the NRC and industry argued against our rulemaking petition that the DBT be increased from three to 20 external attackers operating as several teams, against asserting that there was no evidence there could ever be an attack of more than three as a single team. Protections against attacks by boats, large truck bombs, or from the air remain beyond the design threat. On September 11, 19 attackers in four teams using planes caused the worst terrorist event in U.S. history. Yet the NRC and industry refuse to upgrade the DBT regulations to a level consistent with the now-evident threat.

The industry’s response is shocking. Rather than conceding the vulnerability of its facilities and the need to upgrade security, at a press conference on September 25 a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute took the extraordinary stand that greater security isn’t required because Chernobyl wasn’t that bad.

Why does the industry continue to ignore the need to protect its facilities? First, more security means more expense, and its every instinct is to avoid current expenses. Second, if it admits its reactors are vulnerable, the industry’s dream of a nuclear renaissance is diminished.

Having received a big boost from the Cheney energy plan, the industry had been hoping to build new reactors, supposedly of the new pebble-bed design. In order to save money, these “passively safe” reactors would be built without a containment structure. In addition, they are made of graphite, which burns readily, as evidenced by Chernobyl and the earlier Windscale accident in Britain. As poorly resistant to terrorism as today’s reactors are, pebble-bed reactors would be far worse. Furthermore, the industry-Cheney proposals involve a revival of the idea of reprocessing spent fuel to separate plutonium, which would then be used in civil reactors, creating a massive additional risk that terrorists might acquire nuclear weapons materials from poorly guarded civilian power plants. The nuclear industry hopes that its post?September 11 problems will go away, without having to upgrade security.

And why has the NRC not imposed upgraded security requirements? Put bluntly, the NRC is arguably the most captured regulatory agency in the federal government, a creature of the industry it is intended to regulate. Efforts to separate its promotional and regulatory functions, which led to the breakup of the Atomic Energy Commission in the mid-1970s, have failed utterly. The NRC’s principal interest is in assisting the industry, keeping regulatory burdens and expenses to a bare minimum, and helping to jumpstart the nuclear enterprise.

But the risk of terrorist attack at one or more nuclear plants is simply too great to allow this failed agency and the industry it allegedly regulates to continue to ignore the need to provide reasonable protection. The industry’s short-term economic or political concerns pale in comparison to the damage that would occur if attackers turn the nation’s reactors into radiological weapons.

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania -- The Harrisburg and Lancaster airports were closed for four hours yesterday after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant received what officials are calling a credible threat of a terrorist attack.

Federal officials declined to describe the nature of the threat, but said the warning, which was received Wednesday night from U.S. intelligence services, seemed credible. Although the plant's one functioning nuclear reactor was shut down earlier this month for routine maintenance, plant workers and local law enforcement remain on high alert.

Plant workers were not evacuated, and maintenance work continued throughout the night, said David Carl, spokesperson for Exelon Nuclear, which operates the plant.

The closures of two area airports were lifted at one o'clock this morning after federal authorities determined that there was no immediate threat to the Three Mile Island plant. No other nuclear power plants received specific threats, officials said.

Security at all of the nation's nuclear power plants - 103 reactors at 64 sites in 31 states - has been increased since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11. National Guard troops are on duty to protect reactors in some states, and the U.S. Coast Guard has created no entry zones around plants located next to water.

Three Mile Island, located outside Harrisburg, was the site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear reactor accident in 1979, when about a third of the fuel inside one of the plant's three reactors melted, and radiation was released into the atmosphere. Just one reactor is operational at Three Mile Island today.

Though few are now talking about it, atomic power is high on the list of realities forever transformed by the terrorist nightmare of September 11.

Despite saturation media coverage, both the Bush administration and mainstream commentators have been ominously silent about the most obvious terrorist target of all: our 103 licensed commercial nuclear plants.

The four jetliners hijacked September 11 flew perilously close to at least a dozen operating reactors, from Pilgrim, Millstone and Indian Point, between Boston and New York, to Surry, North Anna and Calvert Cliffs near Washington, to Peach Bottom, Limerick and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.

Though the industry has claimed the containment domes on such plants might withstand a jet crash, no credible engineer would agree. In fact, it's inconceivable any of them could survive a direct hit followed by a long jet-fueled fire such as the ones that destroyed the World Trade Center.

And had the terrorists chosen to target one of those reactors instead of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, we would be talking about tens of thousands of dead, hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of long-term cancers, and hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage.

In short, a holocaust from which this nation might never recover.

Such fearful realities have been integral to the debate over nuclear power since its inception. Early reactor opponents argued as early as the 1960s that reactors in populated areas might be terrorist targets. In the 1970s an airline hijacker talked about crashing into a nuclear facility. In the 1980s the Ayatollah Khomeini threatened to hit "nuclear targets" inside the U.S. In the early 1990s followers of Osama Bin Laden are believed to have trained within a hundred miles of Three Mile Island.

In recent years, ground-level security at U.S. reactor sites has become notoriously lax. Journalists and anti-nuke activists have easily penetrated the environs of operating nukes. In many cases, a simple bomb or someone wrecking random havoc inside a hijacked control room could do Chernobyl-scale damage.

But now the prospect of an attack from the air has taken things to a new level. Even in the unlikely event a containment dome could withstand a hit from a jetliner, the ensuing fire would almost certainly lead to a meltdown or explosion. Nor would it be necessary to hit the dome at all. Pools holding thousands of tons of high-level fuel rods sit at most reactors sites with no containment whatsoever. Merely disrupting their cooling systems could cause a melt-down, as might an assault on turbine housings, emergency power generators, communications systems and many other parts of the immensely complex and fragile infrastructure that keeps nuclear plants from turning rogue.

At least one type of newly proposed reactor -- the pebble bed design -- is being offered with no containment at all. Small wonder those proposing to build new atomic plants want Congress to approve an extension of federal liability insurance, insulating them from the consequences of a catastrophic accident. In other words, because no private insurer will take them on, the industry wants taxpayer protection against paying for a disaster, one we now see could all-too-easily come from terrorism even on a far less demanding scale than what happened September 11.

And what would be the real consequences of such a disaster? Most American reactors sit in areas that were once isolated, but which have now been surrounded by suburban sprawl. Evacuation planning is threadbare and essentially unworkable. Most mass escape schemes are built around the expected lead-time offered by a mechanical failure, a luxury no terrorist attack would provide.

Chernobyl Unit Four, which spewed an apocalyptic radioactive cloud over much of Europe and into the jetstream (the fallout was detected across the northern U.S. within 10 days), had been operating only for four years. Its internal radioactive inventory was thus comparatively small.

Most U.S. reactors have operated far longer, and have accumulated far more deadly radiation, both inside their containments and in the nearby spent fuel pools. An explosion in any one of them would almost certainly throw far greater quantities of lethal radiation downwind and into the planet's atmosphere.

At Chernobyl, the death toll has been impossible to calculate, but may ultimately stretch into the millions due to the long-term effects of cancer, malformations and stillbirths. Hundreds of square miles remain permanently uninhabitable. The financial cost estimates run in the range of $500 billion, and growing.

But in the U.S., surrounding population levels are far higher, and property values are in another range of magnitude. In short, it is virtually impossible to calculate the damage that could be done. But it would dwarf what we have just experienced at the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Today the U.S. gets about 20 percent of its electricity -- less than 10 percent of its total energy -- from atomic power. Ironically, the recent electricity crisis in California has shown that a focused public can rapidly cut into its use of power. Since prices skyrocketed, Californians have used conservation and efficiency to chop as much as 10 percent of their consumption, with more savings still coming in. Safe alternative forms of generation, particularly wind power and photovoltaic (solar) cells, are also now cost effective on a mass scale.

In short, we could turn off our nuclear plants today and get by. There may be some short-term inconveniences. But nothing that would compare with the ultimate horror of a nuclear disaster caused by the kind of terrorism we have just seen.

Indeed, even though this administration doesn't seem to want to talk about it, the unthinkable has now become tangible. In the name of national security and of basic sanity, all U.S. reactors must be shut as quickly as possible.

WASHINGTON (Kyodo) -- The Defense Department has recommended to President George W. Bush the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a military option to retaliate for last week's terrorist attacks in the United States, diplomatic sources said Tuesday.

It is unknown whether Bush has made any decision. Military analysts said the president is unlikely to opt for the use of nuclear weapons because doing so would generate a backlash from the international community and could even trigger revenge from the enemy involving weapons of mass destruction.

However, the Pentagon's suggestion shows the determination of U.S. officials to retaliate for the first massive terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland, the analysts said.

The recommendation appears intended to deter terrorists, they said.

On ABC television's "This Week" program Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Rumsfeld, who is notoriously tight-lipped with the press, avoided answering a question on whether their use could be ruled out. To a similar question, a Pentagon official also replied, "We will not discuss operational and intelligence matters."

The diplomatic sources said the Pentagon recommended using tactical nuclear weapons shortly after it became known that the terrorist attacks caused an unprecedented number of civilian casualties.

On Sept. 11, hijackers seized four commercial U.S. aircraft. Two of the planes slammed into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, while a third hit the Pentagon near Washington. The fourth plane crashed outside Pittsburgh. More than 5,000 people were left dead or missing in the attacks.

Tactical nuclear weapons have been developed to attack very specific targets. The military analysts said Pentagon officials are apparently thinking of using weapons that can reach and destroy terrorists hiding in an underground shelter, limiting damage to surrounding areas.

In 1986, the U.S. conducted an air raid on Libya, attempting to target Col. Moammar Gadhafi. In 1998, Washington fired a cruise missile into Afghanistan in an attempt to kill Osama bin Laden.

Analysts said that since these attempts failed, U.S. officials may be mulling the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which can cause much greater destruction than conventional weapons.

The U.S. has indicated that it does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons if a country attacks the U.S., its allies, or its forces with chemical or biological weapons.

WASHINGTON, DC, September 26, 2001 (ENS) - Attorney General John Ashcroft warned Tuesday that terrorists operating in the United States may attempt to use trucks to transport chemical or biological weapons to their targets.

The warning came as Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General of the World Health Organization, urged nations to strengthen their capacity to cope with the consequences of biological or chemical agents used as weapons.

"Terrorism is a clear and present danger to Americans today," Ashcroft told the House Judiciary Committee.

"Intelligence information available to the FBI indicates a potential for additional terrorist incidents."

"Today I can report to you that our investigation has uncovered several individuals, including individuals who may have links to the hijackers, who fraudulently have obtained, or attempted to obtain, hazardous material transportation licenses," Ashcroft added.

Ashcroft told the committee that about 20 people who have been detained since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had applied for hazardous materials trucker's licenses. The licenses, which some of those arrested had obtained, would allow them to transport poisonous or explosive chemicals and other types of hazardous materials.

So far, they have not been directly linked to the September 11 attacks, but Ashcroft testified that the detainees "may have links" to the 19 men who hijacked four passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The warning came at the end of a two day ban on flights of crop dusting planes. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all such aircraft on Sunday on the advice of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), which warned that the planes could be used to deliver biological or chemical agents.

Some of the terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks reportedly spent time learning about the capabilities of crop dusting aircraft.

"I urge Americans to notify immediately the FBI of any suspicious circumstances that may come to your attention regarding hazardous materials, crop dusting aircraft or any other possible terrorist threat," Ashcroft said Tuesday.

Federal officials have now tightened inspection criteria at U.S. border crossings, and New York City officials have increased the number of random inspections of large trucks entering Manhattan.

Still, the United States remains vulnerable to attacks with biological or chemical weapons. Dr. Brundtland of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday that proper surveillance and a quick coordinated response were vital in order to contain any deliberate use of agents such as anthrax or smallpox before they infected large numbers of people.

"We must prepare for the possibility that people are deliberately harmed with biological or chemical agents," Brundtland told a meeting of health ministers from the western hemisphere in Washington, DC on Monday.
Brundtland said WHO has stepped up its own ability to assist nations in the event of attacks.

"During the last week we have upgraded our procedures for helping countries respond to suspected incidents of deliberate infection," she told the 43rd Directing Council of the Pan-American Health Organization.

"Guidelines for containing the resulting disease outbreaks - whether caused by anthrax, haemorrhagic viruses, other pathogens, biological toxins or noxious chemicals - are available to the medical profession through the WHO website."

Any infectious agents or toxic chemical could in theory be engineered for deliberate use as a weapon, according to WHO. Experts in this field believe that smallpox, anthrax, botulism and plague are the pathogens most likely to be used.

However, most if not all outbreaks of infectious disease, whether natural or deliberate, would quickly be detected by the "Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network." This overarching network of 72 global and regional networks of laboratories, public health experts and Internet based information systems monitors reports and rumors of disease events around the world.

"These networks are linked together as a global system, backed by WHO, with expertise, pre-positioned resources and support from more than 250 laboratories," Bruntland said. "The global network is linked to the International Health Regulations - the legally binding instrument which governs the reporting of epidemic prone diseases and the application of measures to prevent their spread. It also has the capacity to work with countries - investigating dangerous pathogens and confirming case diagnoses."

Brundtland said the world had the capacity and the experience to control serious disease outbreaks, but stressed that national capacity and contingency plans, especially in countries where infectious disease outbreaks are rare, should be strengthened.

What happens if a suicide bomber drives a jumbo jet into one of America's 103 nuclear power reactors? What happens if a fire fed by thousands of tons of jet fuel roars through a reactor complex--or, worse, through the enormous and barely-protected containment pools of spent nuclear fuel found at every such plant?

These questions are even more obvious and urgent than they may seem at first glance. Russian television reported on Wednesday: "Our [Russian] security services are warning the United States that what happened on Tuesday is just the beginning, and that the next target of the terrorists will be an American nuclear facility." [see www.nci.org]

Meanwhile, eight years ago,in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the terrorists themselves wrote to The New York Times to warn that nuclear attack would follow.

That letter, judged authentic by federal authorities, talked of "150 suicide soldiers" who would hit "nuclear targets." As if to drive home the point, those same terrorists had trained beforehand at a camp in Pennsylvania 30 miles from Three Mile Island. U.S. law enforcement had them under surveillance at least a month before they struck - and at one point observed them conducting a mock assault on an electric power substation. That very same weekend, a man later judged to be mentally unwell drove his station wagon through the security barriers at Three Mile Island and parked next to a supposedly secured building. [see www.tmia.com/threat.html]

There are nuclear power plants outside many urban areas. There's Indian Point on the Hudson River, some 25 miles northwest of New York City; Limerick Plant some 20 miles outside of Philadelphia; Calvert Cliffs, 45 miles from the nation's capital; and a handful of nuclear plants ringing Chicago, from Dresden to Braidwood. A terrorist strike at any such plant could not bring about a nuclear explosion - but there are a number of scenarios that would spread deadly radiation clouds across, in the NRC's famous phrase, an area the size of Pennsylvania. On top of the tens of thousands of eventual radiation-driven deaths, there is the mass panic such an attack might cause. And if we can clean up and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing, a radiological attack would force us to write off huge swathes of land as national sacrifice areas.

So given the extraordinary events of this week, we're taking extraordinary measures to protect our nuclear plants, right? Well, in France, the defense minister has stationed troops around nuclear power plants...But in America, not much is being done. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday in a statement said it had "recommended" that plants tighten security. Bob Jasinski, an NRC spokesman, said Friday that nothing had changed since then. (What about Wednesday's Russian TV report? Or the repeated insistence by authorities that there are more terrorist cells out there?) The NRC also says there have been "no credible general or specific threats to any of these [nuclear] facilities" - and does not seem interested in reconsidering the specific and, it now seems, very credible "93 threats of 150 suicide soldiers" headed the NRC's way.

David Orrik, a former U.S. Navy Seal, until recently ran a program that tested the security at civilian nuclear plants by organizing mock attacks against them. His exercises don't sound terribly ambitious--they pit a small team, moving on foot, against a nuclear plant security force that would be warned six months in advance of the test. Even so, half of all plants tested failed - and in at least one case, Orrik's men were able to simulate enough sabotage to cause a core melt. And remember, these tests did not simulate, say, the Osama bin Laden truck bombs so successful in demolishing U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

 The nuclear industry did not enjoy failing, and did not enjoy shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for Orrik's tests--or to install security upgrades as the penalty for not passing. So it began to lean on the NRC to gut the program. This fall, the NRC is doing just that - phasing out Orrik's program in favor of one in which nuclear power plants will carry out "self-assessments." An NRC spokesman could not say if that plan would now be scrapped, and neither could Orrik. Asked on Friday if NRC was considering any dramatic new security measures, Orrik said he had "no sense at all" what would happen next. "I'm curious myself--will it be a sea change? Or business as usual?"

Ironically, one of the first real critical looks at the NRC's decision to let nuclear plants who failed security tests make up their own tests instead appeared in U.S. News - World Report's Monday edition--the day before, well, Tuesday.

That article quotes a representative of the Nuclear Enterprise Institute - the nuclear power industry's Washington-based trade group - as arguing that nuclear power plants "are overly defended at a level that is not at all commensurate with the risk." On Friday, the NEI's offices were closed. But a statement on the NEI website [www.nei.org] trumpeted the "extensive security measures" insisted on by the NRC, including employee background checks. These are the same background checks that let a man named Carl Drega work at three nuclear power plants throughout the 1990s. Shortly after leaving the third plant, Drega went on a 1997 killing spree that left dead two state troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor. Nor did such background checks blackball a computer programmer who worked at the Maine Yankee nuclear plant and slept in a coffin. That man goes on trial next year for the murder of seven co-workers at a Massachusetts technology company.

The NEI statement on nuclear plant security states that the reinforced concrete containment buildings that surround U.S. reactors - they are there to prevent the spread of radiation in case of an accident - are "designed to withstand the impact of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and airborne objects up to a certain force." In reality, as even the NRC conceded on Friday, reactor containment buildings were not built with the idea of resisting an intentional assault by a modern-day jet - certainly not the monster 767s that crashed into the World Trade Center. The literature is actually strangely silent on this point - so much so that experts interviewed all named the same study, published in 1974 in Nuclear Safety, about probabilities of a plane accidentally hitting a nuclear reactor. That study concluded that some reactor containment structures had zero chance of sustaining a hit by a "large" plane, defined as more than 6.25 tons. The 767s that hit the trade center weighed 150 tons, and were probably moving at top speed.

In fact, the security vulnerabilities at nuclear plants are so ghastly that almost everyone contacted for this article balked at discussing them in any detail. Paul Gunter, an expert with the anti-nuclear power Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), recoiled when asked about one possible scenario. "Oh, I don't want to prescribe that. It's too terrifying to imagine." NRC spokesman Jasinski also refused to discuss that scenario.

Bennett Ramberg, author of a 16-year-old book called "Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: an Unrecognized Military Peril," turned away some questions, saying, "I feel a little discomfort talking about that now." Later Friday, after Ramberg saw Wednesday's report of Pakistani terrorists threatening to target nuclear installations in India, and Tuesday's report of Israel thinking of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, he felt freer to talk. "The cat's out of the bag," he observed.

This week's events have changed the national landscape for nuclear power. For starters, they make the industry's gushy talk about the next-generation Pebble Bed Reactor - the reactor so safe it won't even need a containment building - seem ghastly and ridiculous.

Terrorism also has implications for the Great Waste Debate. Our reactors have for 50 years been piling up vast quantities of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. The question of what to do with all takes on a new urgency. Do we ship it all to a central site like the one proposed for Yucca Mountain - and create a spectacular series of terrorist targets for years, turning trains and trucks of waste into what critics deride as "Mobile Chernobyl" Or do we keep waste in vast pools on site at reactor complexes - in buildings so frail that David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says they could be pierced "by a Cessna" - and also keep producing more such waste every day?

There is no easy answer - which may explain such a sluggish and bleary-eyed response to potential terrorism against nuclear targets: the NRC and others are in denial. Not so long ago, they were arguing that terrorism was not a very scientific probability, and that terrorists had a moral impediment against taking life on a mass scale. So much for that. But if terrorism is real, then a clear-eyed view would suggest nuclear power is done for.

Nuclear power had been previously discredited on environmental grounds, on public safety grounds and even on financial grounds - don't be fooled, it's immensely costly, even with the public paying for both waste disposal and liability insurance. This week, nuclear power was also discredited on grounds of national security. A country that has nuclear power plants, it turns out, has handed over to "the enemy" a quasi-nuclear military capability.

We get 20 percent of our electricity from our fleet of enormously expensive and dangerous reactors. Regardless of what our vice president may think, through better energy efficiency and conservation alone we could reduce energy demand to the point of not needing any of those plants - of not even noticing that they had been shut down. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a prominent think-tank on energy matters, argues that "up to 75 percent of the electricity used in the United States today could be saved with energy efficiency measures that cost less than the electricity itself."

Given that our national will and purpose are now being mobilized, does anyone doubt that, properly channeled, we could succeed in this? Or that along the way we could also establish wind power, solar power and hydrogen fuel cells--and in so doing, completely wean ourselves from the oil of the Middle East? Surely this--and not open-ended war against every nation that has every stamped bin Laden's passport - is the path to real victory and national security. After all, as Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted, no one this week is calling his colleagues in the alternative energy sectors to ask about terrorist threats to windmills.

In the meantime, we can follow France's lead and post National Guardsmen around all nuclear facilities. We can restore the NRC's compulsory security drills, and make them even more demanding. Hey, we can even consider anti-aircraft emplacements at each power plant. And we can see how safe that makes us feel when the White House starts trying to punish Afghanistan.

Nuclear facilities worldwide are on a state of alert in the wake of the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and severely damaged the Pentagon on 11 September.

It is likely that the attacks will upset plans for a revival of the nuclear power industry.

US energy secretary Spencer Abraham warned the IAEA conference last month that terrorists could target nuclear plants or attempt to steal materials to make bombs. He said they will use any method and that “the terrible events demonstrate in the clearest possible fashion the importance of maintaining the highest levels of security over nuclear materials.”

Mr Abraham brought a message from President Bush urging the agency to keep pace with “the real and growing threat of nuclear proliferation.” Following the attack, all US nuclear power plants, non-power reactors, nuclear fuel facilities, and gaseous diffusion plants heeded the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s advice to go to the highest level of security as a precautionary measure.

NRC spokesman William Beecher commented: “While there was no credible general or specific threats to any of these facilities, the recommendation was considered prudent.” The heightened security measures included, among other things, increasing patrols to the perimeter areas of the plants, inspecting all barriers, and increasing the number of security personnel. Beecher said containments at US nuclear plants are designed to withstand a direct hit from an airliner.

Nuclear critics predicted Congress would take a closer look at the safety of nuclear waste transportation by roads and rails.

The heightened security measures are likely to remain for some time and could have permanent effects. The cost of the additional security measures remains unclear, but federal regulators have indicated they are ready to approve requests for electricity rate increases, should they be requested.

American Nuclear Insurers said the terrorist attacks help make a case for renewal of the federal Price-Anderson nuclear insurance law, which is due to expire in less than 11 months. If a nuclear plant had been the target of the terrorists, rather than the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, up to $9.5 billion in financial support would have been immediately available, a spokesman said. There would be no need for injured parties to wait for courts to decide who was negligent. Under Price-Anderson, the money would come from a fee all US nuclear facilities pay, plus post-event assessments on nuclear operators if the damage were severe. Congress would decide how to provide financial support beyond the liability limit, if necessary.

Nuclear plants are designed to withstand the impact of an aircraft crash. But the IAEA admitted that plants were only designed for accidental impacts from the smaller aircraft widely used during the 1960s and 1970s, when most nuclear plants were built.

NRC's web site no longer provides the geospatial coordinates for U.S. nuclear facilities. Two weeks ago, anyone could tap into a computer and get the latitude and longitude for a site. Now that kind of information is viewed as a road map for terrorists. The site simply says "no longer available.''

Also gone, for many, is the trust that defense-in-depth -- the multiple layers of protection including design duplications, engineered physical barriers, and operator actions -- would protect plant workers and the public, a trust demolished in the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks.

Nuclear plants in the U.S. were not built to survive the full impact of large commercial jetliners and ensuing fire, and neither the NRC nor the industry has done comprehensive analyses on what would happen under such a scenario. Passenger planes as large as a Boeing 767 didn't even exist when most operating nuclear plants were on drafting boards.

But the Sept. 11 suicide terrorist attacks in New York and Washington have reopened public debate on the safety of nuclear plants and called into question the durability of plant containments, the last barrier to restrain a radioactive release.

And the possible targets don't stop at there: new questions are being raised about the vulnerabilities of spent fuel pools and on-site spent fuel facilities.

The Nuclear Control Institute and Committee to Bridge the Gap are calling for the installation of anti-aircraft weapons at every plant and keeping up to 40 National Guard soldiers circling the facility, including the plant's water access, because they say the possibility of a boat bomb, as unthinkable as a plane bomb once was, cannot be ruled out.

NRC has clamped down on the security of its own facilities, strengthening screening of visitors and vehicles at its headquarters and installing hip-high concrete barriers around its two high-rise buildings in Rockville, Md., which sit on a major highway in a bustling Washington, D.C. suburb. An NRC spokeswoman says the barriers are "temporary." But the May 1995 road closure in front of the White House, executed just weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building, was said to be a temporary measure. The barriers still stand.

No one knows what the final costs of the terrorist strike will be and whether nuclear plants will resemble military zones. And few are venturing a guess on what it means to the future of nuclear energy, which many believed had been on the cusp of a rebirth with a new generation of more inherently safe designs. But the industry is not standing silent. It says it will do everything it can to protect its facilities, considered "valuable assets." And that may be the bottom line.

--Jenny Weil ([email protected])

It could have been, and may still be, much, much worse. This is the unpalatable view of the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, who told envoys of 156 countries on Monday night that the world faces the real possibility of a terrorist group gaining control of a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon. Addressing the UN General Assembly, Mr Annan stated what few have dared voice for fear of belittling the suffering of the victims of the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks, or stoking public panic. "The truth is that a single attack involving a nuclear or biological weapon could have killed millions," he said, opening the special assembly debate on measures to combat terrorism.

Mr Annan used the warning to argue in favour of tighter international measures against nuclear, chemical and biological arms. It was a pointed warning. In the wake of the New York and Washington attacks, urgent global co-operation on arms controls would appear to be commonsense. Unfortunately, global arms control remains a vexatious and complex issue for the UN, requiring lengthy negotiations and achieving only precarious results. While the United States is demanding the world's support for its war on terrorism, it has not recently offered the same support for international arms control protocols.

Just days before the terrorists attacks, The Washington Post revealed that the US had embarked on a secret biological weapons program, including the partial construction of germ bombs banned under a 1972 global accord. US officials argues that the bombs were not fitted with fuses and were thus not weapons, and were used only to understand a potential attack. In July this year, Washington derailed 10 years of arduous negotiations by refusing to ratify a new global accord to monitor chemical and biological weapons, despite the backing of 142 nations. Several weeks earlier, the US opposed a UN bid to reduce the number of small arms, which have killed 4 million people worldwide over the past decade. The Bush Administration's proposed national missile defence program also threatens to scuttle international arms treaties, experts say.

There is a fine line between possessing weapons for a nation's legitimate defence and possessing an offensive arsenal. In the war against terrorism, the greatest danger lies in the availability of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological or so-called portable nukes - to well-funded transnational terrorists. International arms control agreements are limited in their effectiveness, but they are a vital first step. The US must not just call for the world's co-operation, but must co-operate with the world. This may require it to submit to the same scrutiny applied to other less powerful nations.

The World Trade Center was the target of a previous terrorist bombing in 1993, by a group that trained near the notorious Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Evidence was later found in Manila, Philippines, that the group also had plans to hijack planes and crash them into the Pentagon and other buildings. Now that such attacks have happened, what is the response to the additional threats of the same group to attack "nuclear targets"?

(554.5315) WISE Amsterdam - Soon after the recent attacks, nuclear installations in many countries announced that they were stepping up security. The actual security measures taken were in almost all cases described as "classified" or "secret".

Nuclear installations could be considered by terrorists both as potential targets and as sources of raw materials. Even if a site contains no bomb-grade nuclear material, or material such as MOX fuel from which plutonium could be separated by straightforward chemical means, any kind of radioactive material in the possession of terrorists could strike fear into the public.

Protecting nuclear installations against terrorist attack must therefore be seen as a top priority. However, the response of one particularly notorious nuclear power plant -Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg in the US State of Pennsylvania - shows just how lax the security at nuclear installations had become after years of complacency.

The Three Mile Island Connection

Mention nuclear accidents, and many Americans will think of the 1979 accident in Reactor 2 at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant. That accident alone would be enough for TMI to earn a place on the list of targets for terrorists wanting to stir up as much fear as possible in the American people.

However, according to Three Mile Island Alert, there is also concrete evidence linking TMI to terrorist attacks. The World Trade Center had previously been bombed on 26 February 1993 by terrorists who trained only 30 miles (50 km) from Three Mile Island, where they practiced a night-time mock assault on an electrical power substation. Four days after the bombing, the New York Times received a letter, subsequently authenticated by federal authorities, in which the terrorists threatened to attack additional targets including "nuclear targets" with "150 suicide soldiers". The local action group Three Mile Island Alert had collated this information and put it on the Internet years before the recent tragedy (see www.tmia.com/threat.html).

When, therefore, Scott Portzline of Three Mile Island Alert saw the first aircraft crash into the World Trade Center, he immediately called the plant to tell them to post armed guards by the entrance and close their vehicle barriers, which are designed to stop a truck bomb. As he was on the phone, he and the TMI employee saw the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center. Since it was then clearly a terrorist attack, TMI then took his suggestion very seriously. However, closing the vehicle barrier took at least 3 hours "because there was no electricity to power it closed!"

The situation was made all the more urgent by the fact that United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania, was heading approximately in the direction of TMI at the time. Although speculation about its intended target has centered on Camp David and the White House, the threats following the 1993 attack mean that TMI could not be ruled out as a possible target.

It could be argued that a long time has passed since the terrorists' 1993 threat to attack "nuclear targets", and that those making the threats are now behind bars. The same could be said of the story of Abdul Hakim Murad, who according to CNN told Philippine police that Ramzi Yousef, convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center attack, had a plan to hijack a plane and ram it into the CIA headquarters or the Pentagon. Philippine police say that they passed this information on to the FBI in 1995. Murad and Yousef are currently serving life sentences in prison.

Ironically, Three Mile Island is one of the few nuclear power plants where the containment of each of the two reactors was designed to withstand the crash of a medium to large aircraft. This was done because the reactors lie more or less on the flight path to Harrisburg airport! Whether or not this design would protect the plant in practice is subject to question. However, Reactor 2's containment fortunately remained intact after the explosion during the 1979 accident, though it did not prevent some radioactivity escaping into the environment (see WISE News Communique 467.4637, "Study reexamines 1979 TMI accident cancer").

While the 1979 accident forced the permanent shutdown of TMI reactor 2, reactor 1 is still in operation, and was sold to AmerGen, a joint venture of PECO (now part of Exelon) and British Energy in 1999.

Sources: www.tmia.com; Email from Scott Portzline; www.cnn.com, 18 September 2001
Contact: Scott Portzline, Three Mile Island Alert, Inc. 315 Peffer St. Harrisburg, PA 17102, US
Tel: +1 717 233 7897 Email: [email protected] Web www.tmia.com

WASHINGTON --  America's 10 nuclear weapons research and production facilities are vulnerable to terrorist attack and have failed about half of recent security drills, a non-government watchdog group has found.

U.S. Army and Navy commando teams penetrated the plants and obtained nuclear material during exercises designed to test security, according to the Project on Government Oversight report, being released Friday.

In a drill in October 2000 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, "the mock terrorists gained control of sensitive nuclear material which, if detonated, would have endangered significant parts of New Mexico, Colorado and downwind areas," the report says.

In an earlier test at the same lab, an Army Special Forces team used a household garden cart to haul away enough weapons-grade uranium to build several nuclear weapons.

In another test at the Rocky Flats site near Denver, Navy SEALs cut a hole in a chain link fence as they escaped with enough plutonium for several nuclear bombs. They were discovered only as they left the facility.

Government security rules require the nuclear facilities to defend themselves against the theft of nuclear materials by terrorists or through sabotage.

A spokeswoman at the National Nuclear Security Administration, a branch of the Energy Department, declined Thursday to comment on the report.

The report is based on information provided by 12 whistle-blowers, according to Danielle Brian, the non-government watchdog group's director, as well as declassified Energy Department material that describes the security exercises.

The repeated security breaches are cause for serious concern, Brian said, because Energy Department employees were warned before each security exercise but still failed to stop would-be terrorists in more than half of the drills.

"These are tests where the security forces are necessarily dumbed-down so that they know the tests are coming," Brian said. "They are very restrictive tests [but] they're still losing half of the time.

"No one thought it really mattered, until two weeks ago," Brian added.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon have raised alarms about security concerns, from local community responses to chemical and biological weapons to the security at nuclear power plants.

Nine of the weapons facilities are within 100 miles of cities with more than 75,000 people. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is near the San Francisco metropolitan area, which has more than 7 million people. The Rocky Flats site is near Denver, home to 2.6 million people.

Eight of the 10 weapons plants contained a total of 33.5 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium. Experts say it takes only a few pounds of plutonium to craft a nuclear bomb.

The study has drawn the attention of the House Reform Committee, which has launched its own review of security measure at the nuclear weapons plants.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of a national security subcommittee in the House, declined to discuss the report. But he issued a statement indicating he was "deeply troubled" that the nuclear facilities failed security tests even though they had been alerted in advance.

"We want to know what DOE is doing to resolve this deficiency, both in the short term and in the long term," Shays' statement said.

Security tests at the nuclear weapons facilities are simulated on computers and run as drills between an invading terrorist force and the plant's security team. Participants strap on devices similar to those from a laser tag game.

When someone is "killed" by an opposing force, they must lie down and end their participation in the exercise.

No sane nation hands to a wartime enemy atomic weapons set to go off within its own homeland, and then lights the fuse. Yet as the bombs and missiles drop on Afghanistan, the certainty of terror retaliation inside America has turned our 103 nuclear power plants into weapons of apocalyptic destruction, just waiting to be used against us.

One or both planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, could have easily obliterated the two atomic reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson.

The catastrophic devastation would have been unfathomable. But those and a hundred other American reactors are still running. Security has been heightened. But all are vulnerable to another sophisticated terror attack aimed at perpetrating the unthinkable.

Indian Point Unit One was shut long ago by public outcry. But Units 2 & 3 have operated since the 1970s. Back then there was talk of requiring reactor containment domes to be strong enough to withstand a jetliner crash. But the

biggest jets were far smaller than the ones that fly today. Nor did those early calculations account for the jet fuel whose hellish fire melted the critical steel supports that ultimately brought down the Trade Center.

Had one or both those jets hit one or both the operating reactors at Indian Point, the ensuing cloud of radiation would have dwarfed the ones at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

The intense radioactive heat within today's operating reactors is the hottest anywhere on the planet. So are the hellish levels of radioactivity.

Because Indian Point has operated so long, its accumulated radioactive burden far exceeds that of Chernobyl, which ran only four years before it exploded.

Some believe the WTC jets could have collapsed or breached either of the Indian Point containment domes. But at very least the massive impact and intense jet fuel fire would destroy the human ability to control the plants' functions. Vital cooling systems, backup power generators and communications networks would crumble. Indeed, Indian Point Unit One was shut because activists warned that its lack of an emergency core cooling system made it an unacceptable risk. The government ultimately agreed.

But today terrorist attacks could destroy those same critical cooling and control systems that are vital to not only the Unit Two and Three reactor cores, but to the spent fuel pools that sit on site.

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.

Indeed, a jetcrash like the one on 9/11 or other forms of terrorist assault at Indian Point could yield three infernal fireballs of molten radioactive lava burning through the earth and into the aquifer and the river. Striking water they would blast gigantic billows of horribly radioactive steam into the atmosphere. Prevailing winds from the north and west might initially drive these clouds of mass death downriver into New York City and east into Westchester and Long Island.

But at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, winds ultimately shifted around the compass to irradiate all surrounding areas with the devastating poisons released by the on-going fiery torrent. At Indian Point, thousands of square miles would have been saturated with the most lethal clouds ever created or imagined, depositing relentless genetic poisons that would kill forever.

In nearby communities like Buchanan, Nyack, Monsey and scores more, infants and small children would quickly die en masse. Virtually all pregnant women would spontaneously abort, or ultimately give birth to horribly deformed offspring. Ghastly sores, rashes, ulcerations and burns would afflict the skin of millions. Emphysema, heart attacks, stroke, multiple organ failure, hair loss, nausea, inability to eat or drink or swallow, diarrhea and incontinance, sterility and impotence, asthma, blindness, and more would kill thousands on the spot, and doom hundreds of thousands if not millions.

A terrible metallic taste would afflict virtually everyone downwind in New York, New Jersey and New England, a ghoulish curse similar to that endured by the fliers who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaskai, by those living downwind from nuclear bomb tests in the south seas and Nevada, and by victims caught in the downdrafts from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Then comes the abominable wave of cancers, leukemias, lymphomas, tumors and hellish diseases for which new names will have to be invented, and new dimensions of agony will beg description.

Indeed, those who survived the initial wave of radiation would envy those who did not.

Evacuation would be impossible, but thousands would die trying. Bridges and highways would become killing fields for those attempting to escape to destinations that would soon enough become equally deadly as the winds shifted.

Attempts to quench the fires would be futile. At Chernobyl, pilots flying helicopters that dropped boron on the fiery core died in droves. At Indian Point, such missions would be a sure ticket to death. Their utility would be doubtful as the molten cores rage uncontrolled for days, weeks and years, spewing ever more devastation into the eco-sphere. More than 800,000 Soviet draftees were forced through Chernobyl's seething remains in a futile attempt to clean it up. They are dying in droves. Who would now volunteer for such an American task force?

The radioactive cloud from Chernobyl blanketed the vast Ukraine and Belarus landscape, then carried over Europe and into the jetstream, surging through the west coast of the United States within ten days, carrying across our northern tier, circling the globe, then coming back again.

The radioactive clouds from Indian Point would enshroud New York, New Jersey, New England, and carry deep into the Atlantic and up into Canada and across to Europe and around the globe again and again.

The immediate damage would render thousands of the world's most populous and expensive square miles permanently uninhabitable. All five boroughs of New York City would be an apocalyptic wasteland. The World Trade Center would be rendered as unusable and even more lethal by a jet crash at Indian Point than it was by the direct hits of 9/11. All real estate and economic value would be poisonously radioactive throughout the entire region. Irreplaceable trillions in human capital would be forever lost.

As at Three Mile Island, where thousands of farm and wild animals died in heaps, and as at Chernobyl, where soil, water and plant life have been hopelessly irradiated, natural eco-systems on which human and all other life depends would be permanently and irrevocably destroyed.

Spiritually, psychologically, financially, ecologically, our nation would never recover.

This is what we missed by a mere forty miles near New York City on September 11. Now that we are at war, this is what could be happening as you read this.

There are 103 of these potential Bombs of the Apocalypse now operating in the United States. They generate just 18% of America's electricity, just 8% of our total energy. As with reactors elsewhere, the two at Indian Point have both been off-line for long periods of time with no appreciable impact on life in New York. Already an extremely expensive source of electricity, the cost of attempting to defend these reactors will put nuclear energy even further off the competitive scale.

Since its deregulation crisis, California---already the nation's second-most efficient state---cut further into its electric consumption by some 15%.

Within a year the US could cheaply replace virtually with increased efficiency all the reactors now so much more expensive to operate and protect.

Yet, as the bombs fall and the terror escalates, Congress is fast-tracking a form of legal immunity to protect the operators of reactors like Indian Point from liability in case of a meltdown or terrorist attack.

Why is our nation handing its proclaimed enemies

the weapons of our own mass destruction, and then shielding from liability the companies that insist on continuing to operate them?

Do we take this war seriously? Are we committed to the survival of our nation? If so, the ticking reactor bombs that could obliterate the very core of our life and of all future generations must be shut down.

The September 11 attacks on the United States have increased the chances that terrorists might try to use nuclear weapons or materials, or attack nuclear power plants, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency has warned.

Muhammad el-Baradei issued the warning after Pakistan said it had detained three of the country's leading nuclear scientists for questioning in connection with US concerns that nuclear weapons technology could have found its way into the hands of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

On Wednesday, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued an order restricting air space around nuclear power plants, saying that terrorists could attack them to cause public panic.

France earlier ordered the deployment of anti-aircraft missiles around a major reprocessing plant for spent nuclear fuel at La Hague.

Mr el-Baradei's warning was issued on the eve of a conference in Vienna, called to discuss nuclear safeguards and ways to combat nuclear terrorism.

Mr el-Baradei said in a statement: "We are not just dealing with the possibility of governments diverting nuclear materials into clandestine weapons programs.

"Now we have been alerted to the potential of terrorists targeting nuclear facilities or using radioactive sources to incite panic, contaminate property, and even cause injury or death among civilian populations."

Mr El Baradei said: "The willingness of terrorists to commit suicide to achieve their evil aims makes the nuclear terrorism threat far more likely than it was before September 11."

Reports that some terrorist groups, particularly bin Laden's al Qaeda network, had tried to acquire nuclear material was a "cause of great concern", he said.

He said the agency's experts believed the "primary risks" of a terrorist nuclear attack could involve the theft of fissionable material from nuclear reactors or an attack or act of sabotage intended to release radioactivity into the environment.

But he said the danger also existed that terrorists would either obtain the materials to build a nuclear weapon or would succeed in buying or stealing nuclear weapons.

A flurry of activity to re-examine and, if necessary, upgrade the security of US nuclear plants is under way within the Bush administration and Congress, with the governors of several states joining in the effort.
Among the measures taken so far:

* NRC Chairman Richard Meserve has ordered a 60-day top-to-bottom review of safeguard and security issues, including a re-evaluation of the design basis of existing US nuclear plants. The goal is to determine if they could withstand a direct hit from a large, modern fully fuelled commercial jet airplane, such as the ones involved in the 11 September terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

* The National Whistleblowers Center said it would file a lawsuit asking a federal court to order NRC to implement immediate security changes at nuclear plants, including deploying anti-missile weapons and posting armed guards outside spent fuel storage areas. The group cited a 119-page, 1982 Argonne National Laboratory study available in the NRC public documents room which concluded that the impact of a jetliner, coupled with the ignition of fuel, could lead to an explosion that would impose loads on the primary containment, possibly leading to a breach of some of the concrete barriers. Industry spokesmen say a standing order of the Air National Guard to shoot down airliners that are not responding to commands is sufficient.

* The FAA adopted new restrictions regarding air space over US nuclear plants, and the US Coast Guard has established one-mile security zones around nuclear power plants located on waterways. Boats must obtain permission before passing through or anchoring. The FAA’s concerns were heightened by the fact that one of the airplanes hijacked by terrorists flew over the Indian Point nuclear plant north of New York City on its way to the World Trade Center.

* The governors of at least three states ? Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York ? have called up the National Guard to help protect nuclear plants against a postulated ground attack by a group of terrorists. The guardsmen, toting M16 rifles, represent another layer of security beyond unspecified measures the NRC ordered immediately following the terrorist attacks.

* The NRC closed its website temporarily to edit out information the agency believes could inadvertently prove useful to terrorists. The NRC acted after Sen Frank Murkowski (R-AK), the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, raised concern about the longitude and latitude location of nuclear plants being readily available on the website.

When the vastly slimmed-down website re-opened, it was also missing such information as NRC’s Plant Status Report and the Daily Event Report, which wholesale electricity traders said they often check to find out which nuclear plants are off line and how long the outages might last. Traders said the uncertainty has affected regional wholesale electric prices which often rise when low-cost, baseload nuclear plants go off line.

* The House Energy & Commerce Committee approved a bill sponsored by Rep Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the panel’s energy and air quality subcommittee, that would widen the authority of contractors at NRC-licensed facilities to carry firearms and authorise them to make arrests without a warrant under specific circumstances. Two other amendments approved by voice vote would raise penalties for attempted nuclear plant sabotage to $1 million and life in prison without parole, and require the NRC to conduct a 90-day study assessing the vulnerabilities of nuclear power plants to potential terrorist attacks. Several amendments offered by Rep Edward M Markey (D-Massachusetts), including one that would require nuclear plants to be able to ward off “20 intruders wielding explosive devices and not afraid to die using them,” were set aside pending the NRC’s ongoing security reassessment.

At the same time, however, federal officials have begun to ease up on some requirements imposed after during the initial confusion in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks. On 27 September, DoE lifted a two-week moratorium it had imposed on the shipment of low-level nuclear waste to disposal and storage sites.

For years environmentalists have warned that shipping high-level nuclear waste across the country on rails or highways was a program fraught with peril. They pointed to the near certainty that eventually a train would derail or a truck would crash, spilling radioactive material into streams, fields or cities. They warned that the US was embarking on a path that would inevitably led to "a kind of mobile Chernobyl." They even pointed to the possibility that the nuke trains made an inviting target for terrorists, who could turn the locomotives into a high-speed radioactive weapon that could be derailed in the heart of several of the nation's largest cities, putting the lives of millions at risk. These concerns were dismissed as the ravings of anti-nuke Cassandras by the Department of Energy and, to a large extent, the national press corps. Indeed, the atomic boosters had become so confident of their scheme that they were poised to greenlight the largest rail shipment of nuclear waste in US history for a 2,000 mile journey from New York to Idaho. Then came 9/11 and suddenly the anti-nuke organizers didn't seem so hysterical after all.

The Department of Energy's nuke train plan came to grinding to a halt, marking yet another salutory reappraisal of US environmental policy following the terrrorist attacks of September 11. The atomic waste train was scheduled to carry 125 highly radioactive nuclear fuel assemblies from West Valley, New York through ten states to Idaho. The move has now been postponed until at least April 1, 2002.

"Actions speak louder than words, so although DOE will not admit it publicly, it's clear the West Valley shipment was suspended due to terrorism and security concerns," said Kevin Kamps of Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS). "We're relieved DOE has recognized the extreme danger this proposed shipment would have created and chose instead to suspend the shipment. But the threat such shipments pose is not going to go away in a few months. Proposals for shipping
tens of thousands of high-level radioactive waste containers by train and truck through 43 States past the homes of 50 million Americans to national dumpsites in Utah and Nevada must be re-examined in light of the potential for terrorist attacks."

The twin 20 foot-long, dumbbell-shaped metallic atomic waste containers were scheduled to leave DOE's West Valley Demonstration Project near Buffalo as early as mid-September. But due to concerns about additional potential terrorist attacks, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham suspended DOE nuclear waste and materials shipments the day after 9/11, capitulating to concerns that environmentalists and anti-nuke groups had been raising for years.

Even so the DOE's suspensions were only temporary. By the end of September, the Department began raising the possibility that the West Valley shipment might still roll by Halloween. Because metal gaskets on the two containers have not been certified for cold weather conditions, DOE had agreed to deliver the shipment to its Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory no later than Oct. 31 in order to avoid encountering freezing temperatures.

Then on October 7, the DOE reinstituted its suspension of nuclear waste shipments, citing concerns of potential reprisal attacks in response to the initiation of U.S. military action in Afghanistan that day. Despite this, DOE's West Valley site director Alice Williams told the Buffalo News on Oct. 16 that the nuclear train might still roll by the end of the month despite on-going national terrorist threats. However, the very next day, orders were sent to Williams from DOE headquarters in Washington explicitly suspending the shipment until next spring, according to an Oct. 19 Buffalo News article. The two containers will now be off-loaded from the on-site railcars, where they sat outdoors since May, and will spend the winter inside the West Valley facility.

"Energy Secretary Abraham's decision to halt this high-level nuclear waste shipment, not once, not twice, but three times clearly shows that the Energy Department itself acknowledges atomic waste trains like this one are potential terrorist targets," said Tim Rinne, State Coordinator of Nebraskans for Peace.

"Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI have warned about additional terrorist attacks. Trucking firms and railroads have been put on highest alert against attacks upon hazardous and radiological shipments. Recently, airports around the Three Mile Island nuclear plant were shut down due to a terrorist threat. The DOE shipment ban should be extended indefinitely, and expanded to cover commercial high-level nuclear waste shipments as well," said Kay Drey of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.

Despite the current shipment ban, Energy Secretary Abraham appears ready to approve the national high-level atomic waste dumpsite targeted at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. DOE closed its public comment period on the Yucca proposal Oct. 19, and has announced Abraham will make his recommendation to President Bush by the end of the year or early next year.

In recent days, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission publicly announced its "concurrence" with DOE's Yucca Mountain siting guidelines, and in recent weeks finalized its own Yucca licensing regulations. At the same time, the NRC is reviewing a nuclear power industry license application to "temporarily store" all currently-existing irradiated fuel at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation in Utah, which would launch 200 high-level atomic waste trains per year throughout the country as early as 2004.

"It is hypocritical for DOE to put the brakes on the West Valley shipment while rushing ahead to give its thumbs up to Yucca Mountain," said Dave Ritter, policy analyst at Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "Approval of the Yucca Mountain repository proposal would launch tens of thousands of high-level atomic waste trucks and trains onto our roads and rails. Inadequately addressing potential terrorist threats to such shipments is rash, irresponsible, and reckless."

DOE studies show that 50 million Americans in 45 States live within a half mile of projected highway and train routes to Yucca Mountain. Critics also point to an Aug. 27, 1998 letter written by Abraham, then a U.S. Senator from Michigan, to then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson regarding plutonium shipments. In the letter, Abraham wrote "I am sure you will agree that the ramifications of an accident are too serious to consider anything less than the very best emergency response preparedness.".

"Just as police and firefighters were on the front line of the 9/11 attacks, so would emergency responders be called upon to protect our communities in the event of an atomic waste transport accident or terrorist attack upon a shipment," said Chris Williams, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana. "They need to be thoroughly trained and well equipped to deal with radiation emergencies, and not caught off-guard as our government agencies have been by the bio-terrorism attacks."

Greens want the NRC to address terrorist threats to atomic waste transport containers. Commercial high-level atomic waste shipments, such as those to Carolina Power and Light's Shearon Harris reactor storage pools in North Carolina, have continued to roll despite the DOE ban. In a Sept. 21 response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission admitted that "the capacity of shipping casks to withstand such a [large aircraft] crash has not been analyzed."

In June 1999 the State of Nevada filed a "Petition for Rulemaking" to the NRC, charging that safeguards against terrorist attacks on high-level radioactive waste shipments were woefully inadequate or non-existent. Nine state governments and the Western Governors Association endorsed the petition. Despite officially agreeing to act on the petition in Sept. 1999, the NRC has yet to do so.

"Large scale movement of radioactive waste on the roads and rails would create tens of thousands of potential targets, in virtually any scenario a terrorist might choose, whether major metropolitan areas, suburbs, or the agricultural heartland, near schools, hospitals, or water supplies," said Corey Conn of Illinois-based Nuclear Energy Information Service.
 

An article in The Sunday Times (21 October 2001) published exactly one month after WISE News Communique 554.5315, "US attacks: the Three Mile Island connection", lent force to the theory that United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, could have been heading for Three Mile Island. According to the article, within a week of the attacks (i.e. around the time of our article), the FBI sent a report to the British security service MI5 saying that a "credible source" had said that the terrorists might have been planning to hit a nuclear plant. Three Mile Island, site of the 1979 accident, had been under surveillance by some of the hijackers and their associates in the months before the terrorist attacks, according to US security sources.

IT IS almost too frightening to contemplate. In the grey sky over the north of England a silver streak appears. A 400-tonne Boeing 747 laden with 200,000 litres of fuel plummets earthwards at 250 metres per second towards a building few people have ever heard of. A building whose name we would never forget if it were hit.

B215 is just one of the many unprepossessing structures that make up the vast nuclear reprocessing complex at Sellafield in Cumbria. Inside, however, are 21 concrete and steel tanks containing more than 1500 cubic metres of high-level radioactive liquid waste.

Reprocessing involves dissolving old fuel rods in acid and extracting the plutonium. The leftover liquid, which contains a mixture of wastes including caesium-137, is stored in the tanks in B215. It is so radioactive that the tanks have to be constantly cooled to prevent their contents from boiling and leaking out.

No one can be sure what would happen if a hijacked airliner plunged into B215. But the impact would almost certainly break open some of the tanks. The accompanying explosion would fling a plume of radioactivity into the atmosphere, according to Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Afterwards, the burning fuel would continue to pump radioactivity into the air. Putting this fire out wouldn't be easy. Fire crews struggled to dampen down the fire after the Pentagon crash on 11 September-and they didn't have deadly radiation to contend with.

One problem was that they didn't have the foam needed to quash jet fuel fires. Does Sellafield? British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), the state-owned company that operates the reprocessing plant, won't say.

The explosion and the fire would just be the beginning. A crash of such magnitude would probably destroy the cooling systems too. Tanks that survived the initial impact would heat up and start to spew out more radioactivity within hours.

After the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986, an exclusion zone of 4800 square kilometres had to be set up around the plant, more than a quarter of a million people were resettled and radiation spread so far that sheep in Wales still have to be tested to check they're safe to eat. So far 11,000 cases of thyroid cancer have been reported in the Ukraine and Belarus.

According to Thompson, who has been investigating the high-level waste tanks for local authorities in Britain for the past five years, as much as half of the 2400 kilograms of caesium-137 in the tanks at B215 could escape into the air. That would be 44 times more caesium-137 than was released by the Chernobyl disaster. Four million terabecquerels of radioactivity would contaminate large parts of Britain and, depending on which way the wind was blowing, Ireland, continental Europe and beyond. Some places could become uninhabitable.

Britain, of course, is much more densely populated than the Ukraine. Immediately after the attack there would be widespread chaos as authorities tried to organise mass evacuations. In years to come, the death toll might be terrible. Thompson calculates that the radiation released by such a disaster could cause more than 2 million cancers in the following 50 years-assuming that the pattern of public exposure was similar to that after Chernobyl.

Neither BNFL, nor the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) that regulates it, nor the Office for Civil Nuclear Security, the little-known government agency meant to protect nuclear facilities, would directly answer any of New Scientist's questions about what was being done to address this threat. Instead, BNFL released a statement intended to reassure:

"Major nuclear facilities, including for example reactors and highly active waste stores, are constructed to extremely robust engineering standards and incorporate large quantities of reinforced concrete as an integral part of the construction," says the company. "These facilities are resistant to many terrorist threats including aircraft impact. Safety cases and contingency plans take these events into account."

But the 21 high-level waste tanks in B215 have certainly not been constructed to withstand crashing planes. "There has been no specific design provision to protect against crashing aircraft," states a safety report on Sellafield published in February 2000 by the NII. Both BNFL and NII thought that the risk of a plane hitting the tanks was too remote to be worth considering.

It is also highly unlikely that other ageing buildings containing large amounts of radioactivity at Sellafield are strong enough to resist a falling airliner. John Large, an independent nuclear engineer, has identified seven
potential terrorist targets at Sellafield, including the high-level waste tanks and a store containing over 70 tonnes of plutonium. All their radioactive inventories are published, and detailed aerial photographs showing their precise locations are easy to get hold of.

"It would be very easy for a terrorist group," he claims. Aviation sources point out that every year thousands of large passenger jets fly along the English coast near Sellafield, on their way from European airports to the West Coast of the US. Lockerbie, where Pan Am Flight 103 crashed in 1988, is only about 75 kilometres away.

One of the disturbing things about Sellafield is that it's not even supposed to be storing so much high-level waste in such a dangerous form. BNFL is meant to solidify the liquid waste into blocks of glass to make it safer, but technical problems are holding up the process.

Anxious about the build-up of "highly active liquors" in B215, the NII has demanded that BNFL reduce the volume in the tanks or shut down reprocessing at the plant. Yet BNFL is only obliged to reduce the volume stored from 1500 to 200 cubic metres-and has until 2015 to do this.

An attack on Sellafield is perhaps the worst-case scenario because of the sheer quantity of radioactivity that might be released. But it's not the only target. There are similar storage facilities in several countries, including the US and Russia. A recent study by the World Information Service on Energy (WISE) in Paris highlighted the vulnerability of the French reprocessing plant at La Hague on the Normandy coast.

The site includes a 55-tonne plutonium store, 7484 tonnes of nuclear fuels in five cooling ponds and more than 11,650 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. The WISE study suggests that a large airliner crashing on one of the La Hague cooling ponds could release 60 times as much caesium-137 as Chernobyl-although this isn't directly comparable to the Sellafield estimate because it's based on the assumption that all, rather than half, the caesium would be released.

Nor are storage facilities the only vulnerable sites. Since the attacks on 11 September, British officials will say only that security at nuclear installations is now under review. But other countries have admitted that few nuclear reactors could cope with large aircraft crashes.

It's true that the containment vessels of some plants built since the 1970s were designed to withstand impacts from small planes like Cessnas, which weigh up to 6 tonnes. But none was meant to resist hits from modern airliners. The WISE study points out that the kinetic energy of a crashing 560-tonne Airbus 380 is 2557 times greater than that of a Cessna 210.

The US, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Australia have all admitted that hundreds of nuclear facilities are vulnerable. And their statements have been backed up by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body in Vienna responsible for nuclear power.

Large offers one crumb of comfort by suggesting that advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) might survive an aircraft crash because of the strength of their 1-metre-thick reinforced concrete containment vessels. British Energy, a company based in East Kilbride that operates Britain's seven AGR stations, agrees. It points out that in a joint US and Japanese crash test in 1989, the engines of an F4 Phantom jet flying at 800 kilometres an hour only penetrated six centimetres into a concrete wall 3.7 metres thick.

An F4 Phantom, however, weighs only 28 tonnes. Researchers at the Nuclear Control Institute, a lobby group based in Washington DC, estimate that the engines of a 179-tonne Boeing 767 travelling at 850 kilometres an hour could penetrate at least a metre of reinforced concrete.

Perhaps the clearest statement came on 21 September from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is responsible for 103 reactors. "The NRC did not specifically contemplate attacks by aircraft such as Boeing 757s or 767s, and nuclear power plants were not designed to withstand such crashes," it said.

What should be done in the face of such a threat? Measures are already being taken to prevent planes being hijacked (New Scientist, 22 September, p 10), and to ensure that any planes that do get hijacked are shot down before they reach their targets.

Officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency have even suggested that anti-aircraft batteries should be installed around sensitive sites, ready to shoot down planes before they crash. But this has obvious drawbacks. Siting guns near nuclear plants would create new safety hazards. What if they shot down an innocent aircraft? And experts doubt that they would have much chance of hitting a jet dropping from the sky. "It would be like trying to shoot down a bomb," says Frank Barnaby of the Oxford Research Group, an independent group of scientists studying nuclear issues.

The terrible consequences of failing to prevent an attack put a new question mark over the future of the nuclear industry. Before 11 September, President Bush was talking of building more nuclear reactors. And it's thought that Britain's energy review will also recommend building more plants.

If these countries go ahead, they should perhaps follow the example of the former Soviet Union. Some of its earliest plutonium production reactors at Zheleznogorsk (formerly Krasnoyarsk 26) in Siberia were built more than 250 metres underground. "They may now be the safest reactors in the world as far as aircraft attacks are concerned," says Shaun Burnie from Greenpeace International.

Anti-nuclear groups, of course, argue that the best way to protect people against the risk of nuclear terrorism is to dismantle nuclear facilities and convert radioactive wastes into more stable, safer forms. Yet even if the political will were there, decommissioning the 438 nuclear power reactors generating electricity worldwide would take decades.

What would happen if an aircraft hit a nuclear plant

Terrorism goes nuclear

THE prospect of terrorists making an atomic bomb has become the stuff of legend. It has featured in the plots of films, fuelled media speculation and, lately, frightened world leaders. Yet it has never happened.

Since 11 September, some say it never will. Why should Al Qaida bother to build a bomb, the argument goes, when it can hijack a passenger jet and turn it into one with devastating effect? This seems to be the view of the British government, which last week gave the go-ahead for the state-owned company BNFL to start up a new nuclear plant at Sellafield in Cumbria. Every year the plant will make and export reactor fuel containing up to six tonnes of plutonium.

A confidential report revealed by New Scientist earlier this year (2 June, p 4) suggests this fuel could easily provide material for a bomb. But the material could not be stolen, the government's Office of Civil Nuclear Security maintains, because of "effective security". It probably does require more effort and skill to construct a nuclear weapon than to fly a plane into a building. But it would be wrong to suggest that stealing plutonium and turning it into a simple warhead is beyond the wit of organised terrorist groups. And it would be dangerous to assume that it is not on their agenda.

There have been 380 cases of illicit trafficking in radioactive materials reported since 1993, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Of the 63 incidents in the past year, 13 involved small quantities of plutonium and uranium.

Once in possession of such fissile materials, weapons scientists say it would be "relatively easy" to design and build a bomb. Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist who worked at Britain's nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston in the 1950s, has pointed out that only 13 kilograms of plutonium would be needed to create an explosion with a yield of 100 tonnes of TNT-fifty times the power of the bomb that exploded in Oklahoma City six years ago.

Anti-aircraft batteries should be built at the Sellafield nuclear processing plant as a matter of extreme urgency, the author of a secret EU report on nuclear safety warned last week.

The rupturing of the atom plant's tanks of lethally radioactive waste would cause more carnage than any other single act of terrorism could inflict on this country. Last week both main plants at the Cumbrian site were shut down after volumes of nuclear waste reached unacceptably high levels.

The Sellafield tanks could spray up to two tonnes of deadly caesium-137 into the atmosphere if struck by a hijacked jumbo jet, states the report by Wise-Paris - the World Information Service on Energy. This compares with the 50lb of caesium released during the Chernobyl reactor blast in 1986.

A successful attack on Sellafield could lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and leave large areas of Britain uninhabitable for decades.

The director of Wise-Paris, Mycle Schneider, one of the report's authors, said: 'After what happened on 11 September, we know what terrorists are capable of. It is a question of calculating what the impact will be.'

Sellafield's owners, British Nuclear Fuels, stressed that their buildings were capable of surviving a plane crash, but a source said: 'The plants are designed to withstand collisions with light aircraft or military planes, but not a commercial jet loaded with aviation fuel. The consequences could be unthinkable.'

Nuclear reprocessing plants at Sellafield in Cumbria and Cap de la Hague in Normandy could be prime terrorist targets, experts warned yesterday, as the conference of the international watchdog on atomic energy opened in Vienna.

With the New York and Washington attacks dominating discussions, Spencer Abraham, the US energy secretary, warned that fanatics could wreak havoc by destroying plants or stealing materials to build their own weapons.
Governments around the world have put their facilities on maximum security, but officials admitted that little could be done to protect them from airborne threats which could cause a "Chernobyl situation".

"We cannot assume that tomorrow's terrorist acts will mirror those we've just experienced," Mr Abraham told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conference. "Clearly, terrorists will attack any target, so no one will be immune. And clearly terrorists will use any method."

He added: "The terrible events of last week demonstrate in the clearest possible fashion the importance of maintaining the highest levels of security over nuclear materials.

"We expect the members of this body to prohibit nuclear exports in cases where there is a significant risk of diversion."

But delegates from the 132 member nations acknowledged that their ability to shield facilities is limited.

"It is practically impossible to protect nuclear plants to the extent needed to withstand the sort of attack we saw last week," said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the IAEA.

"Consideration was given to the possibility of a plane crashing into them when they were designed and built. But over 20 years later, we have planes that are almost twice as big and are going on long-haul flights able to carry tonnes of fuel."

Dr Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist working for the Oxford Research Group, warned that Sellafield and Cap de la Hague were likely targets because they are home to the only reprocessing plants in Europe outside Russia.
"What are very big risks are the huge tanks of very, very radioactive liquid stored in reprocessing plants," he said.

"They contain a huge amount of radioactivity and are less well-protected than reactors, which are within very large concrete shields."

A spokesman for British Nuclear Fuels said both reactors and reprocessing plants were "extremely robust" and were designed to withstand accidents, including plane crashes.

But a US official, who declined to be named, said that a direct hit from an airliner could cause a "Chernobyl situation". Although it would not destroy a reactor, it could cause meltdown by damaging its cooling systems, allowing the fuel rods to overheat.

Dr Barnaby also warned that the proposed mixed oxide (Mox) plant at Sellafield, which is expected to get the go-ahead from the Department of Environment this week, would be another prime target, because it would provide a simple source of material for bombs.

"It's crazy to give permission to open a Mox plant under these circumstances," he said.