- He called it Project Worst Nightmare. And in the twisted
mind of Donald Beauregard, commander of the 77th Regiment Militia in St.
Petersburg, Fla., it surely was. Beauregard's plan was simple-disable the
electric power grid feeding the nearby Crystal River nuclear power plant
with explosives stolen from a National Guard armory. That would shut down
the plant, blacking out St. Petersburg. This was no idle fantasy. When
the cops finally caught up with him, Beauregard and his "strike team"
had a 20-mm cannon, a .50-caliber machine gun, and a few pipe bombs primed
to blow.
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- Beauregard might have succeeded if an informant hadn't
tipped the police. He was prosecuted and clapped off to prison last year.
But the FBI took Beauregard's plan seriously enough to incorporate it into
a test it ran last May against the Palo Verde nuclear generating station
in Arizona.
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- And here lies the rub. In the past decade, nearly half
the nation's 103 power plants have failed mock terrorist attacks against
them. The plants that failed, in other words, would not have stopped the
Donald Beauregards of the world.
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- In the parlance of counterterrorism, nuclear power plants
are among the world's most "hardened" targets. Barbed wire, surveillance
cameras, motion sensors, armed response teams-all are designed to make
the plants impenetrable to even the most determined saboteur. But interviews
with current and former Nuclear Regula- tory Commission inspectors, security
experts, and plant guards paint a very different picture. Often, security
measures at nuclear plants don't work as they should or don't work at all.
A re- view of recent incidents by U.S. News reveals numerous breakdowns
in plant security, from criminals being granted access to sensitive areas
to inadequate security that places vital equipment within easy reach of
an attacker who never even enters the plant's perimeter.
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- Security experts say a terrorist is far more likely to
attack a so-called soft target- such as a government building-than a nuclear
power plant. Indeed, argues Lynnette Hendricks of the Nuclear Energy Institute,
the nuclear power trade group: "We believe the plants are overly defended
at a level that is not at all commensurate with the risk." But in
light of attacks against fortified targets such as U.S. embassies, threats
against nuclear plants are now considered very real. And concerns about
security are likely to mount as the Bush administration calls for greater
use of nuclear power. Last year, for instance, Japanese police arrested
a man with seven pipe bombs who was planning to blow up a uranium processing
plant. Last September, Ukrainian police arrested a group planning to sabotage
the Chernobyl reactor. And in the United States, officials list at least
30 threats against nuclear plants since 1978. Most have been hoaxes, but
in the mid-1980s, for instance, three of four power lines leading to the
Palo Verde plant were sabotaged. And in 1989 four members of Earth First!,
a radical environmental group, were charged with conspiring to disable
three nuclear power plants in the Southwest.
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- Rating risks. Despite the threats and the documented
security flaws, the nuclear industry has convinced the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission-the federal agency that oversees nuclear power plants-that security
at these sites would function better with less federal oversight. So starting
this fall, the NRC will launch a pilot program allowing the power companies
to design their own security exercises-a function formerly performed by
federal terrorism experts. The industry says the new program will cost
the plants less, yet allow for more frequent tests. But opponents, including
many within the NRC, say the industry's track record has hardly earned
it the right to looser regulation. In the past year alone, NRC inspectors
have discovered alarms and video surveillance cameras that don't work,
guards who can't operate their weapons, and guns that don't shoot. "I
am very skeptical about the nuclear industry's ability to regulate itself,"
says Rep. Edward J. Markey, a vocal critic of nuclear security.
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- High on critics' lists of concerns is the failure rate
in the NRC-run mock terrorist assaults-attacks that, if real, could have
released radiation more lethal than the 1986 Chernobyl accident that resulted
in an estimated 32,000 deaths. These exercises, called Operational Safeguards
Response Evaluations, or OSREs, have been run by an outspoken former U.S.
Navy SEAL captain named David Orrick. In a typical exercise, a team of
three "terrorists" armed with small weapons and basic knowledge
of how a plant works attempts to penetrate the facility. They evade or
disable security equipment and destroy a set of targets in an effort to
damage the plant's nuclear core, causing a radioactive release. In some
cases, the mock terrorists make it all the way to the sensitive control
room-even though they give plant operators ample advance notice of when
they intend to strike.
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- Proponents of the NRC's mock attacks say they teach valuable
lessons. In 1999, the Waterford 3 Nuclear Plant in Taft, La., failed a
preliminary mock attack, but the plant's managers said that the exercise
did not reflect the plant's true capability. So Orrick's team returned
last year to conduct a more rigorous exercise against the plant. "We
[the NRC team] just ate them alive," says one NRC inspector. The Waterford
3 site then hired more guards, improved training, and fortified physical
barriers. They finally passed an NRC exercise last January. And in May,
security guards easily apprehended a man with a history of mental illness
who scaled a 10-foot, barbed-wire fence surrounding the site.
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- Still, critics charge that even the NRC's mock terrorist
attacks do not reflect today's real-world scenarios. "There is nothing
about protecting against a helicopter assault or a missile taking out one
of our positions," says one plant security guard. Last September,
for instance, an anti-nuclear demonstrator landed a motorized parafoil
on the roof of a nuclear reactor in Bern, Switzerland, before being apprehended
by security guards.
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- While nuclear plant operators design much of their security
to prevent attacks from the outside, the record suggests that the greater
danger lies within. "If somebody got a job as a janitor and got access
to the plant, that's the real threat," says Erik Pakieser, former
nuclear security officer at the Prairie Island nuclear generating plant
in Minnesota. For instance, at the same time Donald Beauregard was cooking
up his Project Worst Nightmare, a maintenance technician at the Crystal
River site discovered that someone had intentional- ly disabled one of
the plant's |emergency diesel generators. Some nuclear security experts
also believe that sabotage should not have been ruled out so quickly as
a possible cause of the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant. Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory found striking
similarities between the incident and a computer-generated sabotage scenario
they had run several months earlier.
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- Two decades later, critics remain troubled by the sorts
of individuals who can gain access to a nuclear plant. In the early 1990s,
a carpenter named Carl Drega got jobs at three nuclear power plants in
the Northeast despite an arrest record and a job reference that described
him as "volatile." Two months after Drega left the third plant,
in 1997, he shot four people to death, including two state troopers, a
judge, and a newspaper editor. An NRC investigation of the incident found
that none of the three plants had violated their regulations by hiring
him.
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- Easy access. Another insider, a computer programmer who
once worked in the control room at the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant,
goes to trial next year for murdering seven of his coworkers at a small
Massachusetts technology company. Plant coworkers said the programmer,
Michael McDermott, slept in a coffin and told a colleague he was sometimes
so angry he felt like killing someone. In 1998, a worker at the Turkey
Point nuclear plant in Florida had free access to critical areas of the
plant for more than a month before officials learned of his 14 arrests.
And at the Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland, officials took eight months
to learn that a worker was an illegal Mexican immigrant with fake identification
papers and an arrest record. "Charles Manson could get access to a
nuclear power plant," says former nuclear security officer Richard
Kester.
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- But some experts worry that attackers can succeed even
without getting inside. Classified reports from Sandia National Laboratories
show that a well-placed truck bomb would not even have to enter a site's
property to destroy vital equipment, leading to a possible release of radiation.
In addition, experts say, the water-intake systems at some plants are particularly
vulnerable to sabotage by either cutting off the water supply by clogging
the intake valve or introducing volatile chemicals into the reactor's cooling
system.
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- An even more accessible target may be spent nuclear material
piling up at these plants. Large cooling pools inside reactor containment
buildings were designed to store this fuel, but several years ago the pools
began to fill up. Now, at many plants, the highly radioactive fuel is stored
in cooling pools outside the containment building. "A lot of the spent
nuclear fuel casks can be hit with a shoulder-fired missile by someone
standing outside the fence," says Dave Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer
at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Yet at plants that are being decommissioned,
the nuclear fuel is even less closely guarded. The Maine Yankee plant,
which has stored 700 tons of spent fuel in outside cooling pools, has removed
all of its vehi- cle barriers and received the NRC's permission to eliminate
its armed guard force once the fuel is placed into dry casks.
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- The chairman of the NRC, Richard Meserve, says that no
matter who runs the security drills, the plants remain among the world's
most heavily guarded sites. And he says that the NRC mock attacks are expensive
for both the commission to run and the plants to prepare for. "The
reason we are making a big deal about this," says the Nuclear Energy
Institute's Hendricks, is that the corrective actions resulting from these
exercises " can have a tremendous impact" on a plant owner. "It
can cost a million dollars to make these upgrades [of plant security],"
she says. In any case, says Meserve, the new self-assessment pro- gram
is only a trial: If it doesn't work, he says, it will be scrapped.
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- But the chorus of nuclear industry critics continues
to grow. "The overall focus [at these sites] is not to protect the
public but to get the NRC's blessing and ensure profits," says one
nuclear security officer. Starting next week, the Waterford 3 plant, which
had boosted security to pass the NRC's terrorist exercise, will begin to
reduce its training programs and its guard force. "As soon as the
NRC leaves," says one guard, "they downgrade security."
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