With terrorists interested in obtaining nuclear material to build a dirty bomb, a new report shows how dangerously simple it could really be, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.
According to the Government Accountability Office, their undercover agents easily got a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to legally guy radioactive materials.
They did it in just 28 days by creating a dummy corporation that never had any offices or employees. Nobody from the NRC even checked to see if the company really existed, adds Attkisson.
What's more, they used off-the-shelf computer software anyone can purchase and easily counterfeited the license to remove limits on how much material they could buy. Then they bought enough to build a "moderately sized dirty bomb, all without leaving their desks." And they say they could have gotten substantially more.
The NRC acknowledges the license was bought and forged but tells CBS News that the dirty bomb scenario was not really feasible because it would have cost millions to actually build. And the bomb would have contained the radiation equivalent to a CAT scan to the chest and stomach.
The problem is determined and well-funded terrorists would not have stopped when the government investigators did. The NRC is concerned enough that it has already completed a serious revision of procedure.
From now on, anyone applying for a license to buy nuclear material will get a face to face meeting with regulators to make sure they are who they say they are.
source: 11jul2007
WASHINGTON, July 11 — Undercover Congressional investigators set up a bogus company and obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March that would have allowed them to buy the radioactive materials needed for a so-called dirty bomb.
The investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, demonstrated once again that the security measures put in place since the 2001 terrorist attacks to prevent radioactive materials from getting into the wrong hands are insufficient, according to a G.A.O. report, which is scheduled to be released at a Senate hearing Thursday.
“Given that terrorists have expressed an interest in obtaining nuclear material, the Congress and the American people expect licensing programs for these materials to be secure,” said Gregory D. Kutz, an investigator at the accountability office, in testimony prepared for the hearing.
The bomb the investigators could have built would not have caused widespread damage or even high- level contamination. But it still could have had serious consequences, particularly economic ones, in any city where it was set off.
The undercover operation involved an application from a fake construction company, supposedly based in West Virginia, that the investigators had incorporated even though it had no offices, Internet site or employees. Its only asset was a postal box.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials did not visit the company or try to interview its executives in person. Instead, within 28 days, they mailed the license to the West Virginia postal box, the report says.
That license, on a standard-size piece of paper, also had so few security measures incorporated into it that the investigators, using commercially available equipment, were able to modify it easily, removing a limit on the amount of radioactive material they could buy, the report says.
With that forged document, the auditors approached two industrial equipment companies to arrange to buy dozens of portable moisture density gauges, which cost about $5,000 each and are used to read the density of soil and pavement when building highways. The machines include americium-241 and cesium-137, radioactive substances commonly used in industrial equipment. Auditors, convinced they had enough evidence to prove their point, called off the ruse before the devices were delivered.
But if they had gone ahead with the plot — which would have required extracting the radioactive materials from the machines and combining them, a job that could harm anyone in close contact — they could have built a bomb that would have contaminated an area about the length of a city block, according to the regulatory commission.
As with any dirty bomb, the resulting low-level contamination would not have presented an immediate health hazard. Still, the area would have to have been evacuated and decontaminated.
Edward McGaffigan Jr., a member of the regulatory commission’s governing board, said the agency had taken steps to improve safeguards immediately after learning about the security lapses from auditors. The commission now requires members of its staff to visit any company it is not familiar with before approving a license application. It is also looking for ways to change the license to make it harder to modify or counterfeit, Mr. McGaffigan said.
But he said the danger associated with the amount of radioactive material the auditors were trying to buy should not be overstated. And the operation would have been much more expensive and complicated than pulling off a more conventional attack involving a truck bomb or a chemical tanker truck.
“Why would I not blow up a chemical tanker on a train with chlorine in it or other toxic materials, at a tiny fraction of the cost before doing this very elaborate exercise?” Mr. McGaffigan said.
A nuclear commission spokesman, David McIntyre, said the agency had not inspected the offices of the bogus company before issuing a license because the portable devices the Congressional auditors were trying to buy are considered a lower-level threat than that posed by more dangerous radioactive materials, which it regulates more strictly.
But Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, who has pushed Congressional auditors to investigate nuclear threats since 2003, said the commission was guilty of playing down the threat.
“The economic and psychological effects of a dirty bomb detonating on American soil would be devastating,” Mr. Coleman said in a statement Wednesday. “The N.R.C. has a pre 9-11 mindset in a post 9-11 world focusing just on preventing another Chernobyl.”
The findings by the Congressional auditors are the latest in a series of reports about management and procedural weaknesses at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that investigators have argued make the nation more vulnerable to a dirty bomb attack. In 2003, auditors first recommended that licenses for radioactive materials not be granted without inspections or other means of verifying that the applicant was legitimate.
In 2006, it recommended that the agency take steps to make sure its documents cannot be forged.
The use of undercover tactics is not a new one for the auditors. They used a similar approach last year when trying to smuggle radioactive materials across the border and investigating how effective the government’s protections were against fraudulent efforts to get cash assistance after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The most recent investigation did turn up some reassuring news: a second ploy by the auditors to acquire radioactive material was thwarted.
In 34 states, local regulatory authorities handle license applications. In Maryland, the Congressional investigators sent a similar application for a license to buy construction equipment that relied on a radioactive source. But Maryland officials said they wanted to inspect the bogus company’s offices and storage yard, so the auditors withdrew their application.
source: 11jul2007
Undercover congressional investigators posing as West Virginia businessmen obtained a license with almost no scrutiny from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that enabled them to buy enough radioactive material from U.S. suppliers to build a "dirty bomb," a new government report says.
The investigators obtained the license within 28 days from officials at the NRC, the federal agency that in addition to regulating nuclear power plants oversees radioactive materials used in health care and industry, the report by the Government Accountability Office says. NRC officials approved the request with a minimal background check that included no face-to-face interview or visit to the purported company to ensure it existed and complied with safety rules, the report says.
Using a post-office box at Mail Boxes Etc., a telephone and a fax machine, the undercover investigators from the GAO obtained the license "without ever leaving their desks," the report says.
After counterfeiting copies of the license, the GAO undercover agents ordered portable moisture density gauges, which contain radioactive americium-241 and cesium-137 and are commonly used at construction sites to analyze the properties of soil, water and pavement. The investigators ordered 45 gauges -- enough to build a bomb with enough radioactive material to qualify as a level-3 threat on the International Atomic Energy Agency's scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the most hazardous.
The GAO investigators never took possession of the radioactive material, in part because they lacked the means to handle it safely. But the report notes that, armed with an arsenal of phony licenses, they could have secured contracts to buy much more than they did -- enabling them to make an even more lethal bomb.
"We altered the license so that it appeared our bogus company could purchase an unrestricted quantity" of radioactive material, the report says. A dirty bomb is designed to use conventional explosives to cause immediate injury to people nearby but also to cause a long-lasting threat by contaminating a wider area with radioactive material.
The GAO undertook the sting operation at the request of Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), the top minority member of the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, which since 2003 has been examining security gaps at the NRC and other federal agencies that could leave the country vulnerable to biological or nuclear attack. The report is to be the subject of hearings today before the subcommittee .
The GAO study is the latest of several government reports following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to warn of serious security gaps in NRC licensing procedures. A year ago, undercover GAO officials successfully bought enough radioactive material abroad to make two dirty bombs and smuggled them into the United States at two points, one on the Canadian border and one on the border with Mexico.
"It was as easy to get his material as a DVD at Netflix," Coleman said of the most recent investigation. "If al-Qaeda had set up a phony corporation in the U.S., they could have gathered enough material to make a dirty bomb. The problem is that the NRC is still operating on a pre-9/11 mentality. It boggles my mind that the NRC doesn't readily understand the threat we face."
NRC commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. said in an interview yesterday that the agency, while concerned about any security weakness, has had to allocate finite resources to what it thinks are the biggest potential threats to public safety. He said terrorists have looked for relatively simple ways to cause massive death and damage. Devices such as the moisture gauges, he said, pose a relatively low-level risk because they require a vast amount of work to fashion into a dangerous weapon.
"My sole concern, our sole concern, has been the safety of the American people," he said.
After the GAO presented the NRC with the results of its undercover operation, NRC officials on June 1 ordered an immediate, temporary halt in new licenses to handle radiation risks of 3 or lower. The agency lifted the ban two weeks later after modifying its procedures to require either a face-to-face meeting or site visit, McGaffigan said. The NRC already requires site visits before issuing licenses to handle material with risk levels of 1 and 2.
McGaffigan, who is to testify on behalf of the NRC at the hearing, acknowledged that one serious hurdle remains. "We have to fix the problem of people taking our licenses and counterfeiting them," he said.
In a report in 2006 and again this year, the NRC's inspector general criticized NRC officials for failing to detect and understand security flaws in its licensing process.
Coleman and other critics say the NRC essentially has ignored warnings for years and has done too little to remedy problems that would make it easier for someone to make a dirty bomb. Coleman called the NRC's efforts since June 1 "baby steps" that are insufficient and particularly outrageous because the agency has taken so long to act despite having been warned of serious flaws for more than four years.
When GAO investigators briefed Coleman on the results of the most recent operation, they said they focused the sting on West Virginia in part to show how close to the nation's capital a terrorist could build a bomb. Such proximity would reduce the chance of detection during transport to a target, the GAO briefers said, according to Senate staff members who heard the briefing.
In addition, by operating from West Virginia, the GAO undercover investigators were required to deal directly with the NRC. That's because West Virginia is one of more than a dozen states, including Virginia and the District of Columbia, that don't have their own system for issuing licenses for the handling of radioactive material and monitoring those who apply for them.
During the sting operation, an NRC official speaking to one of the phony businessmen on the phone said the agency needed to speak to the man's boss. The GAO agent put him on hold for a minute or two, then picked up the call without disguising his voice but pretending to be his boss, according to people familiar with the GAO investigation. The NRC reviewer accepted the calls at face value.
By contrast, the GAO investigators failed to obtain a license in Maryland, which is one of 34 states that under agreement with the NRC conduct their own licensing. Maryland officials told the disguised GAO employees that state inspectors would have to visit their company and perform other checks, which would take at least seven months. At that point, the phony businessmen withdrew their application, the report says.
source: 11jul2007
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