Nuclear plant security eyed

NRC to study defenses against attack from air

Jeff Long / Chicago Tribune 23sep01

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will review security at the nation's nuclear plants and study whether they should be designed to withstand the sort of terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center, Chairman Richard A. Meserve announced Friday.

Officials say power plants and other nuclear facilities were not designed to withstand an attack such as the one that killed thousands on Sept. 11, and they cannot fully answer whether such an attack would lead to an escape of radiation.

"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," the NRC said in a statement released Friday. "Detailed engineering analyses of a large airliner crash have not yet been performed."

Illinois is home to more commercial nuclear reactors and the highly radioactive waste they've generated than any other state. U.S. and Canadian nuclear power plants and spent-fuel storage sites dot the drainage basin of the Great Lakes, the source of drinking water for millions of people and a natural resource of incalculable importance.

The terrorist attacks have prompted an increase in security in plants in Illinois and around the country, as well as a broad review of security procedures and the fortifications at plants.

Since 1991, the NRC has conducted drills in which mock terrorists attempt to get by a plant's security and simulate the destruction of crucial equipment. The plants often fail the test.

The ex-Navy SEAL who runs the program, David Orrik, said in an interview that crucial equipment was "destroyed" during the drill at 42 percent of the nation's nuclear plants--including at least one in Illinois.

Last year, the mock terrorists slipped into Quad Cities Station, near Moline on the Mississippi River, and managed to simulate damage to two critical systems that would have damaged the reactor core. Exelon Nuclear, which runs that plant and five others in Illinois, has since made changes to its procedures to address the problem found in the drill, Orrik said.

Nuclear reactors aren't the only concern. An October 2000 NRC report, for example, noted that because spent fuel contains radioactive particles that remain deadly for so long, severe accidents at storage sites could result in a number of deaths "as large as for a severe reactor accident."

The report estimates that more than 26,000 people could die from cancer in such an accident over many years.

The report says that "aircraft damage can affect the structural integrity of the spent fuel pool," but it does not go into a detailed analysis of the sort the NRC now wants to conduct.

Nuclear power plants are designed to keep things in--to "contain" pressure and radiation in case of an accident.

According to NRC spokesman Jan Strasma, the walls of the containment building, which houses the nuclear reactor, are typically made of concrete 2 to 5 feet thick, reinforced with tendons of steel. The walls are also lined with a quarter-inch of steel. The sides and ends of the reactor vessel itself range from 5.5 inches to 8.5 inches thick.

Besides such physical barriers, nuclear plants have redundant safety systems, so if something goes wrong with one system, another is to back it up. For example, if a pump that circulates water to cool the nuclear fuel is damaged, a pump elsewhere takes over.

It's because of those multiple systems that NRC and nuclear industry officials feel confident that even if a hijacked jetliner struck a plant, any radiation that would be released could be kept from escaping the plant.

Less well-protected are some of the pools where spent fuel is stored.

At the Zion nuclear power plant, for example, which is no longer operating, more than 1,100 tons of spent fuel are stored--waiting for a permanent disposal site that may not open for decades. At sites across the state, more than 6,700 tons of spent nuclear fuel will be in storage by the end of the year, according to Exelon and the NRC.

At Zion and some other plants, the pool is not in the containment building. It's in the adjacent fuel-handling building, with walls 18 inches thick.

The water in the pool helps keep cool the spent fuel, which remains hot for years after it is removed from the reactor. The water also shields radiation.

Officials at the NRC and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency say they are unaware of any detailed studies that look at possible environmental consequences on the Great Lakes resulting from a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility in which large amounts of radiation are released.

In interviews, experts said the danger would be if an attack on spent-fuel pools caused the water to drain from the pool, causing the spent fuel to overheat and melt. And a jetliner crash could also spur the kind of inferno that engulfed the World Trade Center, the experts said.

In such a fire, radioactive particles of all sorts could be carried aloft and carried long distances, depending on weather conditions and such things as how long the fire burned.

The immediate danger would come from breathing in such particles or coming into direct contact with them, causing radiation sickness--death within days.

There are also long-term threats from extended exposure to these particles.

"The material deposits itself on the ground and is essentially like an X-ray that you can't turn off," said Marvin Resnikoff, a physicist with Radioactive Waste Management Associates of New York.

Harmful rays from the particles, in the long term, could cause cancer and birth defects.

The particles could settle on the land and in Lake Michigan and other bodies of water--making them extremely difficult, if not impossible, to clean up.

To some extent, the lake water would act as a shield against radiation for the particles that settle there--just as pools of water now help shield spent fuel.

But just as other contaminants at the bottom of Lake Michigan accumulate in bottom-feeding fish, working their way up the food chain, a similar accumulation could happen with radioactive particles, according to Resnikoff.