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My
name is Paul Leventhal, President of the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), a
non-profit organization based in
Washington and concerned with security against nuclear proliferation and nuclear
terrorism. I appreciate the opportunity to testify before you today on
behalf of NCI and my colleague Daniel Hirsch, President of the Los Angeles-based
nuclear policy organization, the Committee to Bridge the Gap (CBG). NCI and CBG
have collaborated for seventeen years in efforts to upgrade the seriously
inadequate security requirements at the nation’s nuclear power plants.
It is about those unresolved vulnerabilities that I have been invited to
testify today.
Put
simply, the nation’s nuclear power reactors are vulnerable to attack by
terrorists, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other government entities
have failed to move decisively to impose the further security measures that are
needed to prevent a successful attack and avert catastrophic radiological
consequences.
Three
days after the attacks of September 11, NCI and CBG wrote to NRC Chairman
Richard A. Meserve. We cited “the extraordinary and unprecedented threat that
now exists inside the United States in the wake of the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon” and laid out specific proposals for denying
terrorists the opportunity to destroy nuclear power plants.
These
proposals include immediate use of National Guard troops at all of the
nation’s reactors to deter attacks from land and water, prompt deployment of
advanced anti-aircraft weapons to defeat suicidal attacks from the air, and a
thorough re-vetting of all plant employees and contractors to protect against
sabotage by insiders. In addition, we called on the NRC to significantly
upgrade its security regulations to protect against the larger numbers and the
greater sophistication of attackers posed by the new terrorist threat.
In
a brief reply to our specific proposals, Chairman Meserve stated only that the
“Commission is evaluating current requirements and statutory authority
relating to acts or threats of terrorism, including but not limited to those
that you presented in your letter.” Our letter to Chairman Meserve and
his response are attached to this testimony.
A
Familiar Refrain
The
Chairman's response is a familiar refrain, and we frankly do not have the luxury
of time to allow the NRC and other federal agencies to engage in a prolonged
bureaucratic review process that Chairman Meserve has since said is now
underway. Iran threatened attacks
against U.S. reactors as early as 1987, and recent trial testimony has revealed
that bin Laden’s training camps were offering instruction in ‘urban
warfare’ against ‘enemies’ installations’ including power plants. It is
prudent to assume, especially after the horrific, highly coordinated attacks of
September 11, that bin Laden’s soldiers have done their homework and are fully
capable of attacking nuclear plants for maximum effect.
The
immediate danger is underscored by the fact by that nearly half of the nuclear
plants tested in NRC-supervised security exercises have failed to repel mock
terrorist attacks. These exercises involve small numbers of simulated attackers
compared with the large number of terrorists who waged the four sophisticated,
coordinated attacks of September 11. The NRC’s mock terrorist exercises
severely limit the tactics, weapons and explosives used by the adversary, yet in
almost half the tests they reached and simulated destruction of safety systems
that in real attacks could have caused severe core damage, meltdown and
catastrophic radioactive releases. Now in response to operator complaints and
budgetary constraints , the NRC is actually preparing to shift responsibility
for supervising these exercises to the operators themselves. Current
events clearly show that nuclear power plant security is too important to be
left to industry self-assessment.
Dr.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist and NCI’s scientific director, has performed a
straightforward calculation indicating that a direct, high-speed hit by a large
commercial passenger jet “would in fact have a high likelihood of penetrating
a containment building that houses a power reactor. Following such an
assault, 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, such as the Indian Point facility outside New York City and
the San Onofre plant near Los Angeles and San Diego.
We
submitted Dr. Lyman's analysis to Chairman Meserve with a request for his
comments and for an NRC study to evaluate the consequences for each licensed
operating reactor that could result from an attack similar to those on September
11. On November 29, Chairman
Meserve responded in a letter that our analysis will be considered in the
agency's overall reevaluation of security and safeguards, which "will
include an assessment of the potential consequences of a large aircraft attack
on a commercial nuclear power plant."
The present plan, he said, was that "this assessment will broadly
consider the vulnerabilities of operating reactors, followed by a more focused
study of a few representative
plants." I submit an abridged
version of Dr. Lyman's study for the hearing record, along with the exchange of
letters with Chairman Meserve, and I submit a non-public copy of Dr. Lyman's
full analysis for the subcommittee's use in overseeing the work NRC does to
evaluate the vulnerability of reactor containments to attacks from the air.
As
Dr. Bennett Ramberg, until recently CBG’s research director, noted in his
seminal work on the subject, Nuclear
Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An
Unrecognized Military Peril (University of California Press, 1984),
the possession of nuclear energy facilities gives to one’s adversaries a
quasi-nuclear capability to use against you.
In effect, a conventional attack—be it a truck bomb, plane crash,
attack by terrorists on foot, or an insider—can turn a nuclear reactor into a
radiological weapon. At the very least, hundreds to thousands of square miles
could be placed off limits to human habitation due to the lingering impact of
long-lived radioactive elements. The economic consequences would be devastating.
The
Dilemma of Speaking Out
Our
organizations have long been troubled by the dilemma of speaking about the
present vulnerability of nuclear power plants. We have tried to work
quietly for a decade and a half in a largely unsuccessful attempt to get the NRC
to upgrade reactor security. To
illustrate this longstanding effort, I submit for the hearing record an article
from the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of March 1986,
"Protecting Reactors against Terrorists," by the Committee
to Bridge the Gap’s Daniel Hirsch and colleagues Stephanie Murphy and Bennett
Ramberg, as well as the recommendations the same year by the International Task
Force on Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism for "Securing Nuclear
Facilities." This Task Force,
convened by the Nuclear Control Institute, included senior nuclear officials
from industry, the military, and the national laboratories.
Our
principal success came in 1994 when the NRC agreed to require nuclear plant
operators to erect barriers and establish setback distances to protect against
truck-bomb attacks. But this reform came only after the lesson of the
bombing of the World Trade Center the year before, and the NRC has refused our
appeals to upgrade protection to defend against the much larger bombs used by
terrorists since.
The
horrendous attacks of September 11 have now made NRC foot dragging intolerable.
The new threat should now be evident to all, and the country can afford to wait
no longer. The vulnerabilities at
these plants can and must be closed, now. The American people have a right
to know the dangers and to demand the prompt corrective actions that we propose
to protect nuclear power plants from terrorist attacks and the unthinkable
consequences that could follow.
We
are concerned with the longstanding history of inaction on this issue by the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a pattern continuing to this day despite the
urgency of the situation posed by the attacks of September 11. The NRC’s security regulations are designed for a terrorist
threat a small fraction of what was made evident to all two months ago.
Yet despite the President saying we are at war and should expect further
terrorist attacks at domestic targets, the NRC has done nothing concrete but
recommend that plants increase their alertness level and coordinate security
with state authorities. The NRC's grossly inadequate security rules remain unchanged.
Each
of the nation’s 103 operating nuclear plants contains in it an extraordinary
amount of radioactivity. An attack by a truck bomb, insider, armed group,
or hijacked airliner at one of our civilian nuclear facilities could result in
sufficient radioactivity released to produce tens or hundreds of thousands of
latent cancers and contaminate hundreds of miles downwind. A Sandia
National Laboratory report concluded that a successful truck bomb attack at a
civilian nuclear plant could result in “unacceptable damage,” i.e., a
meltdown. Further, NRC and the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry
lobby, now concede that containment structures were not designed to withstand a
757 crash of the sort witnessed on September 11.
In
addition, the safety systems necessary for keeping the fuel cooled and
preventing melting are of special concern, and represent "soft
targets" if reached by terrorists, as are the spent fuel pools.
The latter are generally outside of containment and hold several
Chernobyl’s worth of long-lived radioactivity.
The zirconium cladding on the spent fuel in those pools can catch fire if
terrorists succeeded in damaging the pools and causing them to lose their water
coolant. The spent fuel pools are
even more poorly protected than the reactors themselves, particularly at
shut-down reactors. Nor has the
defense of spent-fuel pool ever been tested in the mock-terrorist exercises
supervised by the NRC.
Outdated
Security Requirements
For
17 years our two organizations have been warning the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission that its quarter-century-old security regulations for protecting
civilian nuclear facilities from terrorist attack are woefully inadequate and
outdated. These regulations require, for a nuclear power plant, a very
small number of guards---a minimum of five--- [10 CFR 73.55(h)(3)]
and the ability to repel no more than a very small group of
attackers, entering the site as a single team and with artificial constraints on
weapons and explosives, and the involvement of only one insider [10
CFR. 73.1(a)(1)]
Until
recently, when our repeated petitions were finally granted in part, no
protection whatsoever against truck bombs had been required.
The rule adopted in 1994 was not intended to protect against
terrorist bombs much larger than the one used in the attack on the World
Trade Center the year before. No security measures against attack by boat
or air, as just occurred in New York and Washington, are required under NRC
rules. Aside from the truck bomb rule, the NRC security regulations have
not been upgraded significantly since the 1970s, despite the dramatic increase
in the magnitude of the terrorist risk.
The
NRC has long argued that stronger security regulations were not required for
domestic nuclear facilities and transport because of the alleged lack of any
domestic threat, the likelihood of advanced warning if a threat materialized,
the relative lack of sophistication in terrorist attacks, and a supposed
reluctance of terrorists to create large numbers of casualties. The
coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon demonstrate that
all of these assumptions no longer hold, if ever they did.
Those
attacks involved far more terrorists than the NRC’s Design Basis Threat (DBT)
contemplates, acting as four independent teams (only one attacking team is
contemplated in the DBT), and employing a high level of sophistication and
planning. In addition, the attacks occurred without any advance warning
recognized as such by the responsible agencies. Furthermore, current
regulations state that reactor operators are not required to protect against
attacks by an “enemy of the United States,” be it a nation or a person. In
the absence of the federal government taking responsibility for security of
these nuclear sites against attacks by “enemies,” it is clear that
protection of the public in this regard is falling through the cracks.
The
new "design basis threat," made manifest by September 11, is at least
19 sophisticated and suicidal terrorists attacking from at least four different
directions. Mr. Chairman, we ask that this Subcommittee inquire of the
Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission whether any nuclear power plant
today is capable of repelling an attack of that magnitude. If
the answer is no, as we suspect it will be, he should be asked why he has not
promptly ordered an
immediately effective upgrade of the NRC security rules to meet such a threat,
and why, in the meantime, he has not advised the President that military
protection of these plants is needed to deter and defeat such an attack.
This
question is all the more pertinent, given a recent statement by Chairman Meserve.
On November 8, he said: “Plainly these vicious attacks (of September 11) far
exceeded anything that the NRC had contemplated as a threat to our licensees. .
. .In principle, of course, it is the responsibility of the Federal Government
to protect the nation against threats from abroad; but the reality of the
present crisis is that all of us, organizations and individuals, public and
private, have a responsibility as citizens to do our part to protect the
American people.”
A
Matter of Law and Regulation
But
it is not a matter of principle. It
is a matter of law and regulation. The
plain facts are that there is now a terrorist threat to nuclear plants that the
NRC had failed to foresee. It is
the responsibility of the NRC to require its licensees to provide adequate
security, given the nature of the threat now evident, and to advise the
President how to provide the protection if industry cannot.
On November 8, Chairman Meserve also made a commitment that "the NRC
will reexamine the DBT and modify it, as appropriate."
This commitment is vague and open-ended.
It is surely no substitute for providing immediate military protection of
nuclear power plants.
In
1991, our two organizations petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to
upgrade its Design Basis Threat regulations.
In particular, we called for increasing the assumed attacking force, which security must be designed to repel, to twenty attackers acting as
multiple teams. That number has
been shown to be remarkably prescient in light of the 9/11 attacks. The NRC
rejected our petition, stating predictably that an attack involving more than
the present Design Basis Threat of “several” attackers acting as a single
team was not credible. The actual
number of assumed attackers is a very
small group compared with the nineteen attackers in four coordinated teams on
September 11. Thus far, the NRC has
failed to upgrade the DBT rules in response to the new threat environment. It
promises a "top-to-bottom review" of uncertain duration, and
anticipates at some point a government role to fill "any gap between a
licensee capability and the assumed threat."
The
obvious question is, what do we do in the meantime?
Both the threat and the gap to be filled exist right now. The notion that both will wait until the NRC gets its act
together is unreal and dangerous.
President
Bush has called up the National Guard at airports and placed Federal marshals on
aircraft to make Americans feel safe flying again.
Yet, neither the NRC nor the White House has called for military
protection of nuclear power plants located within tens of miles of where
millions of Americans live and work. Relatively
small numbers of National Guard troops have been placed at nuclear power plants
in 13 of the 32 states that have such plants, but at least two states have
recently withdrawn the troops. In
the absence of clear guidance from Washington, the response of the states has
been indecisive and confused. Both
NRC Chairman Meserve and Homeland Security Director Ridge have advised governors
to coordinate security with plant operators but have left it to the states to
decide for themselves whether state troopers or National Guardsmen are needed,
and in what numbers. This level of
response is clearly inadequate.
Failed
Security Exercises
To
make matters worse, many reactors in the country do not have security systems in
place sufficient to meet even the current, very weak regulations. The
NRC’s Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation (OSRE) Program tests reactor
security by running “black hat” mock attacks. Even
with six months advance warning of when the test attack will occur, nearly half
the reactors in the country have failed these tests---meaning that the attackers
simulated destruction of a "target set," which is defined as set of
redundant safety systems needed to maintain cooling of the core and prevent a
meltdown.
The
response by NRC and industry to this dismal record was to attempt to kill the
OSRE program entirely three years ago, and now, having had to back off because
of bad publicity, they are attempting to convert it into an industry-run,
Self-Assessment Program (originally called SAP, but changed to SPA, for
Safeguards Performance Assessment). Both the NRC and industry
representatives claimed that a number of the exercises were not in fact failures
because plant operators could have intervened to mitigate damage caused by the
mock attackers. But they
refused to require operators to demonstrate such supposed "operational
impact" on simulators--- that is, to demonstrate that they actually they
could respond effectively to multiple system failures caused by the attackers. Nor, at the outset, did they account for the possibility that
plant operators might not survive an attack or be able to function effectively
inside or outside the control room when a plant is under siege.
When
the NRC moved to zero out the OSRE program in 1998, the NRC official responsible
for supervising the exercises, Retired Navy Seal Capt. David Orrik, filed a
“Differing Professional View” strongly protesting the move. “NRC has only
one – small – program to ensure that the 60+ nuclear power plants are able
to protect against a terrorist attack aimed at causing radiological sabotage,
i.e, an “American Chernobyl,” he wrote.
After the Commission restored the program, Orrik was pressed at a
Commission hearing the following year as to whether his finding that 47 per cent
of the plants tested had revealed “significant security weaknesses” was too
severe, given the possibility the operators could mitigate damage.
He replied: “We did not look at operational impact. That was not my charter. We looked at the security impact
only, and if the target set was reached, destroyed, that was it.”
The
NRC, at the industry’s urging, has rewritten the procedures to give credit for
operators’ claims that they could prevent a meltdown even after a set of
redundant safety systems is destroyed in an attack.
This approach only serves to undercut and confuse what should be a clear
security goal in protecting nuclear plants against terrorist attack: denial of
access. Under the new procedures,
credit is given for operator intervention only if it is determined that the
operators would still be alive and able to take the mitigating action in the
simulated attack situation. But
this is still a highly subjective and conjectural factor compared with the
unambiguous simulated destruction of a complete target set by the mock
attackers.
Unfortunately,
the security situation at nuclear power plants has been getting worse.
Since May 2000, when NRC began public reporting of the plant-by-plant
results of OSRE exercises, only two of 11 plants tested succeeded in repelling a
mock attack force. Of the nine
plants that failed, two plants managed to avoid simulated destruction of a
complete target set, while seven plants failed to prevent destruction that, in
the event of a real attack, could have resulted in severe core damage and
meltdown. Thus, 82 percent of the plants tested failed to repel mock
attackers, and 64% of the plants tested lost redundant safety systems and faced
core meltdown. This is a
disgraceful situation that no amount of spin
control by the NRC and the
nuclear power industry can hide.
In
addition, certain industry proposals could significantly increase the targets
and risks of nuclear terrorism—particularly the push for the construction of a
new generation of “pebble bed” reactors, made of combustible graphite
like Chernobyl and with no containment structure, and the prospect of ending the
25-year-old bipartisan policy against commercial reprocessing of spent fuel of
nuclear power plants. Reprocessing
would put into commerce immense amounts of separated plutonium that could be
stolen by terrorists for use in nuclear or radiological weapons.
A study performed for NCI by five nuclear weapons designers made clear
that a terrorist group sophisticated enough to steal such material could put
together a technical team capable of making atomic bombs.
The
NRC response to the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks has failed to rise to
the extraordinary threat that the nation now faces. This became apparent
on the very first day when, instead of issuing an immediately effective order to
reactor operators to go to the highest state of alert, it merely
“recommended” that they do so, noting further that there was no
identified threat against any plant (as if there had been such a threat against
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon). Absent any recommendation from
the NRC, the President has not called up the National Guard to protect nuclear
power plants. As noted, the result
is that most reactors have no protection by National Guard troops and those that
do, have it in insufficient numbers. Furthermore, the airspace over civil
reactors is not restricted. (A
week-long ban on small planes flying near nuclear plants has been lifted.)
For
a decade and a half, the Nuclear Control Institute and the Committee to Bridge
the Gap have worked to try to get
the NRC to act responsibly and to protect these facilities adequately. We
submitted petitions for rulemaking, met with Commissioners and their staffs,
submitted scholarly studies. With one partial exception, a truck bomb rule
of insufficient effectiveness, our efforts have been repeatedly frustrated.
The
horrendous events of September 11 make clear that our country is facing
adversaries well able to identify this nation’s vulnerabilities and extremely
willing to exploit them to produce massive loss of life. The vulnerability
of our nuclear plants is no secret. Officials have warned that there may
be more attacks planned; one need not be a rocket scientist to figure out that
nuclear plants may be the next target, topping in destructive effect the most
recent tragedy. Officials have warned that other cells may have been
pre-emplaced in the U.S. months or years ago, as were the ones that carried out
the September 11 attacks. Could some be working in nuclear plants here, or
planning external attacks against them?
What
Needs to be Done
To
summarize what we believe should be done to protect the public from the
catastrophic consequences that could arise from a successful terrorist attack,
here are our recommendations in brief:
1.
Arrange for the National Guard to be called out to protect each domestic
nuclear facility, and advise the Guard as to the specific kinds of threats that
need to be protected against: truck bombs, attacks by boat or air, ground
assault/penetration, and insiders. We
have been advised by security experts that
a force of 30 to 40 guardsmen for each plant site is needed to provide a visible
show of force and a credible deterrent to attack.
2.
Provide anti-aircraft protection at each reactor site to deal with
possible attacks by aircraft. We
note the French government has deployed anti-aircraft measures at sensitive
nuclear facilities in France. Why
has this not been done here, when we are the country that was attacked on
September 11?
3.
Commence a thorough re-evaluation of all nuclear power plant personnel,
including the hundreds of outside contractors who are onsite during refueling
outages and for routine maintenance, for potential security risks and establish
an immediate strict two-person rule to reduce risks of insider attack.
4.
On an immediately-effective basis, promulgate new security regulations for
protection of nuclear facilities that upgrade those regulations and the
associated Design Basis Threat to deal with a threat of the magnitude that is
now clear. That security upgrade should include:
(a)
increasing the design basis threat to a significantly larger number of
attackers, in excess of the 19 involved in the September 11 attacks;
(b)
increasing the required guard force accordingly, from the current regulatory
minimum of five;
(c)
requiring protection against attackers working in coordinated teams, using
sophisticated techniques and equipment;
(d)
requiring a strong two-person rule and other enhanced measures to protect
against insiders;
(e)
requiring protection against a truck bomb as large as a large semi-trailer can
carry;
(f)
requiring protection against boat and airplane attacks;
(g)
requiring full security protection of spent fuel storage pools and dry cask
storage, including after reactor closure;
(h)
and requiring armed escorts for all spent fuel shipments, capable of repelling
attacks by a large number of attackers working as several coordinated teams and
using sophisticated techniques and equipment.
5.
Reverse the plans for an industry-run, self-assessment program of security
exercises aimed at replacing the NRC-supervised OSRE exercises; and instead, at
least tripling the number and frequency of OSRE tests; making any problems
identified subject to enforcement action; having OSRE test against the full
magnitude of the security threat made clear by recent events (e.g., large
numbers and high sophistication of attackers, multiple coordinated attacking
teams, active insider, etc.) and the full range of potential targets at the
reactor site (including spent fuel storage); and strictly enforcing the security
requirements so that failure of an OSRE test results in a reactor shutdown
unless there is a clear demonstration in a follow-up OSRE exercise that all
deficiencies have been promptly and fully rectified.
6.
Require a demonstration that the design of any new reactor
is able to withstand damage from a terrorist attack after the security system
has been successfully penetrated.
7.Bar
any transport of high-level waste until and unless new security requirements are
put in place that require accompanying security forces capable of meeting
attacks by terrorists of the magnitude and sophistication so dramatically
revealed by recent events, and which provide high protection against insider
actions.
A number of our proposals have
been incorporated into the House and Senate versions of the Nuclear Security
Act, which were introduced last week. We
will submit our detailed views on this legislation when hearings are held to
consider it. Generally, we are supportive of the provisions requiring the
NRC to revise the Design Basis Threat to deal with threats equivalent to the
events of September 11 and establishing a federal nuclear security force.
On the latter we have reservations about establishing such a force in the
NRC and would prefer that military protection of nuclear power plants be
mandated for the duration of the post-9/11 emergency.
We are dismayed but not surprised by the strong opposition to the
legislation expressed by the NRC and the industry.
The statement by Chairman Meserve (in a letter to Senator Harry Reid)
that “[T]here have been no failures in nuclear plant security
of the type that has plagued the commercial airline industry and thus no
need for such radical change,” is especially egregious, given the results of
the OSRE exercises.
Chairman
Meserve has made some statements recently that suggest the NRC may now finally
be prepared to upgrade the DBT in light of the current extraordinary
circumstances. But it remains to be seen whether the NRC and industry will
once again stick their heads in the sand, hoping the problem will go away of its
own accord.
This
has been their customary posture, which they assume out of concern that if they
were to concede that reactors are
vulnerable to terrorist attack and that large-scale health consequences and
contamination would result, public
fear of nuclear power would increase. Prospects
for a revival of nuclear power would then diminish, they believe, and even
continued operation of existing reactors might be jeopardized. But their concerns are extraordinarily short-sighted, placing
the industry's economic interests and political agenda above public health and
the safety and the common defense and security of the United States.
Emancipating
A Captured Regulatory Agency
The
NRC is obligated by the Atomic Energy Act of
1954, as amended, to uphold safety and security interests, and by the Energy
Reorganization Act of 1974 to serve as an independent regulator without regard
to the industry's economic interests when it comes to establishing or enforcing
adequate protection. Statutory
considerations aside, if the
industry and the NRC continue to refuse to adequately protect these facilities,
Americans will demand – as they should – that the reactors be shut down.
Indeed,
there is now a petition drive, in which Nuclear Control Institute is
participating, to shut down the two reactors still operating at the Indian Point
plant, located 25 miles from New York City,
where 20 million people live within a 50-mile radius of the plant.
The petition calls on the NRC to shut down the plant for the purpose of
overhauling and testing the defenses and to permit restart of the plant only if
physical protection can be demonstrated to be effective against the new threat
environment.
The
NRC now acts as a captured regulatory agency---captured by the industry it is
obligated to regulate. A quarter
century ago, Congress fissioned the
Atomic Energy Commission into two separate agencies in order to end the inherent
conflict in the old AEC between promotion and regulation of nuclear energy.
As a member of the staff of the Senate Government Operations Committee, I
was intimately involved in preparing the law that created the NRC and the
present-day Department of Energy, so I am familiar with what Congress intended.
Today,
sadly, the NRC has come full circle and closely resembles the atrophied
Regulatory Division of the old AEC. In
the current threat environment, this presents a dangerous situation. Congress needs to revisit the overall role and performance of
the NRC, but at this moment it must tell NRC in absolutely clear terms:
upgrade the security of nuclear power plants,
now, to levels sufficient to
protect against an attack of the scale and sophistication of September 11, or be
prepared to face legislation mandating the shutdown of these plants.
The danger to the public is too high to permit a captured and intimidated
agency to take a “business as usual” approach in these extraordinary times.
We have concluded, as noted, that we needed to go public with the
vulnerabilities to terrorist attack and the failure of the NRC to responsibly
address them. It is prudent to assume that the terrorist adversary knows
that the plants are vulnerable. The training camps in Afghanistan included
instruction and drills on attacking power plants.
We are dangerously past the time for the public and elected officials to
wake up to this vulnerability and to demand prompt action to remedy it.
We must move quickly to prevent attacks on nuclear power plants that
could release immense amounts of cancer-causing, radioactive contamination over
large, densely populated areas. We all would have trouble living with ourselves
if the worst happened and we had we not taken every possible step to prevent it.
We must act now.
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