SanFranChron

Anti-aircraft guns urged at nuclear plants Critics say jet bomb could cause disaster like that at Chernobyl

Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer Friday, September 14, 2001

Stunned to see how a hijacked commercial airliner can be used to topple skyscrapers, critics of the nuclear industry are urging the federal government to consider whether nuclear power plants are vulnerable to a similar attack.

A commercial airliner crash on a nuclear plant could set off a Chernobyl- style disaster that would spew radioactive poisons over a large area, rendering it uninhabitable for many years, critics say.

And to defend against such an attack, they say, the government should consider equipping personnel at nuclear power plants with anti-aircraft weapons.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. acknowledged late Tuesday, after the attack on the World Trade Center, that it had instituted a "security alert" at its Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on the California coast near San Luis Obispo.

The state's other nuclear power plant, San Onofre, also went on alert immediately after the terrorist attacks. That decision was made by its majority owner, Southern California Edison. The alerts continued through yesterday, and it is uncertain when they will end.

"Given the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I think one has to assume that the consequences could be far more severe if a nuclear power plant were hit," said Paul Leventhal, head of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington.

Even if a crashing plane didn't penetrate the thick containment vessel shielding a reactor, it might disable external cooling systems that prevent the reactor from overheating, said Leventhal, a former congressional staff member who directed the U.S. Senate's investigation of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.

Hence, the federal government should investigate the potential vulnerability of nuclear reactors to such flying bombs. If they prove vulnerable, then one possibility is installing "anti-aircraft missiles or rapid-fire machine guns" to down threatening aircraft, Leventhal said.

"I was frankly surprised that the Pentagon didn't have any such protection" before one of the four terrorist-seized airliners crashed into it Tuesday, Leventhal said.

The feasibility of anti-aircraft systems is questioned by some critics, though. "If you do that for nuclear power plants, where do you draw the line? Say, do you also put them around dams?" asks Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C..

As part of the security crackdown, PG&E is canceling visitor tours and refusing inessential deliveries to the power plant, PG&E spokesperson Jeff Lewis said.

Lewis said PG&E took the step in response to a request from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The step was not motivated by any specific threats to the Diablo Canyon plant, he said. After the terrorist assaults on the East Coast on Tuesday, the NRC asked all 106 U.S. commercial nuclear power plants to consider going on security alerts.

At the San Onofre nuclear plant, officials cracked down in part by positioning armed guards at all gates, increasing security patrols inside and around the plant and ordering manual inspection of all staff IDs, said Southern California Edison spokesperson Ray Golden.

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission rule dating from 1981 requires nuclear plants within regions with considerable aircraft activity to be constructed sturdily enough to withstand an aircraft impact.

If a power plant faces less than one chance in 10 million of such an impact,

then the NRC doesn't require it to meet the safety standard, said Jim Riley, an engineer and senior project manager at the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear power industry group in Washington, D.C..

However, Riley acknowledged, "when we designed these plants, we didn't expect people to be flying around with aircraft as full-scale weapons. . . . We were not expected to design against military-type attacks. I guess you'd classify this (Tuesday's terrorist assault) as a military-type attack."

Nonetheless, Riley is confident that a plant meeting the regulatory standard would be safe from an airplane assault. He doesn't know how many U.S. nuclear power plants actually meet the standard.

Riley declined to comment on the question of whether nuclear plant operators should consider installing anti-aircraft defenses.

The impact of one airline crash into the World Trade Center generated an explosive force of about one kiloton, or one thousand tons -- about one- twentieth the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

That's the calculation by Stanford University researcher Professor Steven Block, a senior fellow at Stanford's Institute for International Studies and member of the department of applied physics. Block is also an adviser to the Jasons, leading scientists who often do classified research for government and military agencies.

"I think we're all surprised that the (World Trade Center) collapsed," Block said in an interview. "I think we've just seen the dawn of a whole new generation of terrorism."

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory maintains a building for research on plutonium, a fissionable material in nuclear weapons. After the East Coast terrorist strikes, a lab representative assured a reporter that the building is designed to withstand direct impact by a commercial airliner.

Given Tuesday's disaster, does the nation need to revive some form of coastal or interior air defenses against short-range threats such as hijacked jets?

Such action is both unnecessary and infeasible, analyst Hellman says. The Air Force and Air National Guard maintain almost 1,000 aircraft whose purpose is to guard the nation against attack, he said.

"I can assure you the skies were thick with them by 9:30 (Tuesday) morning in Washington," he said.

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001

Answers

After reading this, the threat to all of us here in the states is incrediable!

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001