CSPO Perspectives

Perspectives

Nuclear Resurgence, Part II
by G. Pascal Zachary

The issues raised by nuclear power have never been neatly captured by cost-benefit analysis; the case for nuclear power has always been shadowed by extraordinary concerns. The special nature of nuclear power can perhaps best be appreciated by conceding the best of all possible worlds from the standpoint of strident advocates of this energy technology. The best-case scenario for nuclear power, in short, is that the economic case for it grows stronger in the coming years, as prices for oil, gas and coal rise and the exploitation of renewable resources (wind, solar, geothermal) rises only slowly. Let’s concede, also, that the environmental case for nuclear power grows stronger in the coming years, with more urgent curbs on greenhouse gases and more effective means of storing nuclear waste. Finally, let’s concede that the technological case for nuclear power grows stronger in the coming years, with the advent and commercialization of a new generation of reactors that are simpler to build and maintain, produce less waste and leave little room for operator error.

Positing a best-case scenario for nuclear power is a useful exercise because it brings into focus what is possibly the most vexing issue posed by this energy source: the problem of security. No matter the strength of the economic, environmental and technological cases, nuclear power poses difficult security problems from two perspectives. First, nuclear-power plants present unusual opportunities for terrorists. As Graham Allison, author of the recent book, Nuclear Terrorism has written, “While nuclear power plants can be hardened, they are what the U.S. military calls a ‘fixed target.’ All fixed targets are vulnerable to attack if terrorists can muster sufficient force or corrupt an insider.” Second, nuclear power plants provide the means, both direct and indirect, to generate the fuel essential to the creation of nuclear weapons.

In this brief essay I will chiefly raise questions about the security of nuclear plants in the U.S. and their potential vulnerabilities to acts of terrorism. I will then raise the question of the extent to which nuclear-power generation, and the technologies that underpin it, contribute to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As in part one of this essay, I am drawing on both published sources and wide-ranging interviews with officials with nuclear operators, regulators and critics. My goal here is to highlight important questions that deserve more attention. I offer no definitive answers to these questions, but I must admit that, based on my review of the evidence, I do not believe that nuclear power plants pose inherently unmanageable security risks. However, the risks posed by nuclear plants are challenging – and it is by no means clear whether the existing counter-measures to a terrorist attack are sufficient. But let’s back up and start at the beginning:

It is by no means certain that nuclear plants are terrorist targets. Are they?

No organized terrorist group has explicitly identified a nuclear power plant as a target, and security experts privately wonder why terrorists would take the risk of attacking a nuclear plant – and failing to create a spectacular hit – when they can achieve more certain results by assaulting a “softer” target, of which there are many in the U.S. What we might call the “low hanging fruit” view is widespread among nuclear-industry officials. They pointedly note in private conversations that as long as security protections for chemical plants and other vulnerable infrastructure targets, such as key bridges and tunnels, are virtually non-existent, terrorists are most likely to strike at these rather than nuclear plants. They are not complacent, but they say that their security efforts, while not perfect, have at least created a significant deterrent.

The potential for a doomsday scenario – terrorists taking over a reactor control room and engineering a meltdown, for instance – is real enough that post-9/11 nuclear-plant operators must act as if their plants are terrorist targets. Given this premise, how have they responded to the threat of terrorism?

In a word, seriously. Since 9/11 the nuclear industry has spent nearly $1 billion hardening security at these plants. At one typical nuclear plant, Grand Gulf, in Mississippi, one in five of the fulltime employees are now security officers, with 120 people defending the plant 24 hours a day. Security changes (some mandated by the Nuclear Regulator Commission and some not) are both obvious and complex. Employees at Grand Gulf plant once could enter the employee parking lot with a shotgun in their pickup trucks. No longer. Physical barriers now make passage into the perimeter of a nuclear plant cumbersome. A series of interior fences, topped with the latest in barbed-wire, mean that any attacking party must be skilled. Vehicles no longer can come close to secured areas and even those allowed to penetrate the plant’s perimeter are now subject to thorough human searches for bombs and weapons. High-tech countermeasures also raise the level of deterrence. For instance, hidden cameras, armed with night-vision lenses, peer into the darkness, searching for intruders. Motion detectors are linked to alarm triggers. Procedures for identifying employees – include fingerprint or eyescan matches at point of entry to secured areas – reduce the chance of impersonators entering the building that contains the reactor core. Every employee and visitor to this area is forced to pass through a single staging area where they are screened by both a metal-detector and a bomb-detector. A few armed security officers, meanwhile, are stationed behind bullet-proof glass in order to prevent terrorists from simply overwhelming the detection procedures by killing everyone in the room.

Even with these precautions in place, security experts worry that terrorists could use a nuclear plant to inflict unspeakable damage on a wide surrounding area. What would their objective most likely be?

Though gaining control over the control room presents the gravest risk, security experts believe that the main target of terrorist would be the area where spent fuel is kept. Terrorists might blow a hole in this facility, drain the spent fuel, then start a catastrophic fire that would spread radiation everywhere.

Are nuclear plants secure enough to prevent such an event?

No one knows. The new security standards for nuclear plants are only starting to come under serious evaluation. Starting last fall, the NRC began so-called “force on force” exercises during which a team of intruders attacks a plant, pursuing a nefarious objective. These mock attacks are far more rigorous than the standard prior to 9/11. However both the plans for these tests, and their results, are confidential. Indeed, secrecy cloaks virtually every aspect of nuclear-plant security. Even the details of the plant’s fencing cannot be revealed.

Despite the lack of information about specific “force on force” exercises, doubts exist about the stringency of these tests.

The doubts stem from a decision by the NRC to allow nuclear operators, through a trade association, to hire and maintain a team of attackers. The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, hired Wackenhut, the security company, to assemble an attack team and to mount training exercises on a regular basis. The NRC chose this same attack team to mount its exercises. Critics of the decision say that Wackenhut has a classic conflict of interest, since the company supplies the security officers for a large number of nuclear plants, meaning that in some cases a Wackenhut attack team “opposition force” will face a defense mounted by Wackenhut guards. One nuclear watchdog, who has investigated industry practices for many years and advises the NRC on security matters, asks, “Do you really believe that a Wackenhut attack team wants to make a Wackenhut guard team look like dogshit?” He insists that the potential for “cheating” is too high and that “even if force-on-force exercises are totally honest, no one is going to believe them.”

Industry officials respond, however, that the Wackenhut attack team is quarantined, run by a separate unit within the company and not subject to interference. Michael Wallace, an executive with the nuclear operator Constellation Energy, is the industry’s security liaison with government and chair of Nuclear Sector Coordinating Council under the Department of Homeland Security. He insists that Wackenhut can play both adversary and defender because “management of that [adversary] activity comes from the Nuclear Energy Institute.” He explains that “the way these forces operate is under the regulation of that NRC, which has very capable people here. They can continually evaluate the adversary forces.”

Nevertheless, questions remain about the size and strength of the attacking force that nuclear plants must repel. Plant security is organized around an NRC-sanctioned “design basis threat” that specify the types of attacks to be mounted. In other words, it can be argued that the force-on-force tests cannot assess the implications of attacks that deviate from the design basis threat.

What are the limits of the design basis threat?

Wallace says the design basis threat is good enough. This claim is hard to evaluate since the specifics of the threat are secret. But the NRC has acknowledged that nuclear plants are not required to defend against an air attack of the sort that occurred at the World Trade Center. The NRC is currently considering whether to alter its requirement, in response to an objection by a citizen group. Industry officials say that, as a practical matter, an air attack would be difficult to mount and unlikely to create a catastrophic accident. Floyd says that terrorists would be “wasting an aircraft” by flying it into a nuclear plant. They’d have to fly the plane directly into a reactor, to start with, to have any hope of shattering containtment. Even then they’d likely fail. In 2002, the Electric Power Research Institute ran a computer simulation to assess the odds, concluding that a direct hit from a 450,000 pound Boeing 767 flying low to the ground and at a speed of 350 miles per hour would destroy a plant’s ability to make electricity but not break the reactor’s cement shield. While conceding that in such an attack employees at a nuclear plant would be killed, Floyd says the “likelihood of any wider problems is very, very remote.”

Nuclear operators are not completely uncritical of their security standards. For instance they do wonder whether plant guards need more firepower.

For example, the guards don’t have automatic weapons, relying instead on semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifles. “We’d like to have the option for automatic weapons,” says Stephen Floyd, vice president for regulatory affairs of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which coordinates some security programs shared between nuclear plant operators. But even without more firepower, “we’re pushing the maximum of what can be expected of a private guard force,” Floyd says.

Another issue is training of security guards. Critics have complained that they don’t receive enough training and even a few guards themselves have publicly stated that they need more training. The problem, of course, is that individual plants must pay for their own security, making costs a consideration in any new security initiative. Since owners of nuclear plants are already spending a significant amount on security – perhaps as much as 20 to 25 percent of their total operating costs – any new costs are sure to be scrutinized. Should nuclear defenses then be federalized? Should the National Guard, or the Army, guard plants and defend them from attack, as is the case in France?

Individual owners of nuclear power plants today hold the ultimate responsibility for the protection of their plants, and they want to keep it that way. Owners oppose the creation of a government force specifically to defend nuclear plants, citing their belief that they can do a better job than government bureaucrats. “Who’s going to evaluate a Federal force?” asks Floyd of the Nuclear Energy Institute. “We have a better scheme in place right now.”

Other nuclear officials say that while the front-line defense of the plants resides in private hands, the U.S. military has its own plans for how to repel attacks and that the industry and the military regularly work together. All records of this cooperation, however, are secret.

Secrecy is the feature that unites the fear of a terrorist attack on a nuclear-power plant with the specter of such plants contributing to the creation of a nuclear weapon. What is the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons?

The process of creating nuclear fuel, essential to the operation of a nuclear plant, creates the potential for making nuclear weapons. The technological connection is reinforced by a political connection: since President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program in the 1950s, the U.S. has either promoted the development of uranium enrichment by other countries, or at least tolerated it. Indeed, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, member countries have a positive right to enrich uranium for the purpose of producing nuclear power. The Bush administration has quietly raised the possibility that the nonproliferation treaty should be reinterpreted to preclude most nations from enriching uranium – all but the U.S., many European countries, Japan and a few others. Last year, President Bush even went so far as to propose that the world ought not to allow any but an elite group of nations to manufacture nuclear fuel. There is indeed good reason to support a freeze on the number of countries producing nuclear fuel, or even a reduction in the number. After all, there is more nuclear fuel available for purchase than the world nuclear-power industry can absorb. But such practical considerations seem unlikely to sway nations such as Brazil, which wishes to expand enrichment for peaceful purpose, and others such as Iran, which is refusing to halt its enrichment activities.

The problematic nature of the Nonproliferation Treaty lies outside the scope of my essay. What is relevant, however, is the question of whether nuclear power is the driving force behind proliferation and whether without nuclear power the conditions leading to the proliferation of nuclear weapons would be significantly different. The evidence is mixed. In the case of Iran, the pursuit of civilian nuclear power seems to be a cover for pursuing nuclear weapons. But China assembled a large fleet of nuclear weapons with little or no assistance from nuclear power plants. And as the case of Pakistan’s rogue bomb peddlers demonstrates, there are other paths to nuclear weapons. It is hard to conclude that we need foreclose on the option of nuclear power simply because, if abused, it creates a path to nuclear weapons. Like the threat of terrorism, the threat of proliferation will always haunt nuclear power but does not, I think, doom it.

(End Part II)

G. Pascal Zachary is a senior writer with Time Inc.’s Business 2.0 magazine and an independent scholar specializing in issues of technology and society. Formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, he is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (Free Press, 1997). Among his more recent work has been a series of articles on the role of information technology in the economic development of Africa, including a white paper, Black Star, commissioned by CSPO. He can be contacted at: greggzachary@hotmail.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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