US Nuclear Plants Are Feeling Post-Sept 11 Gaps in Security As .rtf

							U.S. Nuclear Plants Are Feeling
Post-Sept. 11 Gaps in Security

As Washington, Industry Debate Scenarios,
Owners Rely on Their Own Ad Hoc Shields
By JOHN J. FIALKA
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
7/3/2002


PEACH BOTTOM TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- At the sprawling nuclear-power facility here, 65
miles southwest of Philadelphia, new signs posted in the Susquehanna River warn
boaters to stay away. A former parking lot has been converted into a winding driveway
that forces cars and trucks to slow as they approach the plant. The National Guard and
state-police units that Pennsylvania sent to protect the plant after Sept. 11 are still
around.

Inside, at the end of his daily shift, security guard Jeff Johnson, a 35-year-old
ex-Marine, sits down to play a serious board game that he says is "like chess." It's
supposed to hone the ability of plant guards to assess and defend against an attack. It
has red markers that represent terrorists and yellow markers that represent security
guards, and a multilevel board that shows the floor plan of the Peach Bottom Atomic
Power Station.


The game, the signs in the river and the curving driveway are among the ad hoc
measures that owners of the 103 commercial nuclear-power reactors operating in the
U.S. have been forced to take to deal with the threat of terrorist attacks since Sept. 11.
They have hired more guards and moved security devices and patrols out beyond their
usual perimeters. They have bought tons of so-called Jersey barriers, or large cement
curbs, to keep vehicles from ramming through fences and gates. They have installed
portable lights and cut down trees to give guards better firing angles.

The U.S. has made broad changes in the way it monitors air travelers and polices its
borders. But there is no unified plan to improve security at nuclear-power plants, which
provide 20% of the country's electricity and could unleash far-reaching safety and health
problems if damaged. Instead, there are disagreements about nearly every aspect of
nuclear-plant security.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the industry, says it is better protected
than most of the nation's commercial infrastructure. The industry is resisting efforts to
federalize the security force at plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which
regulates the industry, wants to upgrade plant security, but it needs help from Congress,
where there are deep, partisan splits over legal changes that might help. The White
House's Office of Homeland Defense is studying the matter, but it doesn't expect to
have a plan until October.
Some basic questions about the government's role in safeguarding these sensitive sites
remain unanswered. "Where are the lines?" asks Roy P. Zimmerman, director of the
NRC's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, set up in April. "Where is it
that the utility has responsibility, and where is ... the responsibility for various levels of
government?"

Tom Ridge, the head of President Bush's Homeland Security Office, said recently that
he plans to give the president a "national strategy" on how to deal with the security
vulnerabilities of U.S. industries this month and a more-detailed plan later.

An official in Mr. Ridge's office explained that the more-detailed plan expected by
October will give plant owners a better sense of what they should do and what
government help to expect at various points in a new four-stage terrorist alert system
the office is developing. The plants remain on the high-alert status set by the NRC after
Sept. 11. Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is worried that some kind of
terrorist attack could happen to mar July 4 celebrations.

Assessing Vulnerability

Amid the debates, nuclear-plant owners are working with the NRC to wrestle with such
questions as: What is the real vulnerability of nuclear plants? How does the industry
deal with local laws that limit the use of weapons? What type of attack might terrorists
mount and what size force would be needed to deal with it? Some of the answers are
unsettling.

Peter Stockton, a former security analyst for the Energy Department who currently
works for the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington advocacy group, recalls
an NRC exercise several years ago in which a team playing enemy attackers got into a
nuclear facility, planted mock explosives and then left without being detected. David N.
Orrik, a former Navy SEAL who runs such tests for the NRC, recently told a House
Commerce subcommittee that in 81 tests the NRC has staged since 1991, attackers in
37 got to parts of the plant where a real act of sabotage could have led "in many cases
to a probable radioactive release." He said the industry's 46% failure rate hadn't
improved before Sept. 11. The tests were canceled after that date because they would
have interfered with the high-alert status of the guards.

"The facts speak for themselves," says Senate Majority Whip Harry Reid, a Nevada
Democrat. "You're talking about a 50% failure rate."

Richard A. Meserve, the NRC's chairman, says the results of the agency's tests
overstate the failure rate because the attackers have far more knowledge of a plant's
defenses than a real attacking force would. The tests, he said, also don't take into
account many actions that plant engineers can take to nullify or minimize the results of
an act of sabotage. For example, officials at Peach Bottom say they could minimize the
damage from some types of attack by performing a "scram," which shuts down the
reactors within five seconds.

The NRC acknowledges that different rules and laws around the country are hobbling
efforts to ensure uniform protection for plants. The commission has long worried that
differing laws in the 31 states that have nuclear plants weaken guards' ability to use
their weapons.

At most plants, local laws prevent the use of automatic weapons and shoot-to-kill
policies that the mostly private-sector guards have at nuclear-weapons facilities run by
the Department of Energy. In some states, there could be criminal liability if guards
shoot to protect private property. In a few states, laws limit guards' firepower to pistols
and shotguns.

Some companies also interpret the same laws in different ways. Victor Gilinsky, a
former NRC commissioner who began exploring nuclear security in the 1970s, recalls
visiting a facility at that time where the company handed out cards reminding guards of
their liability if they shoot an intruder. At another, he recalls, the thrust of the training
appeared to be "shoot anything that moves." NRC regulators began asking Congress
for a uniform federal shoot-to-kill law 15 years ago, with little response from Capitol Hill.

The possibility of aerial attacks raises other defensive problems. Nuclear plants are
designed to provide protection against violent storms, earthquakes, equipment
malfunctions, operator error and even the crashes of small aircraft. But the NRC fears
that their massive containment domes may not be strong enough to withstand the
impact of a large, fuel-laden airliner such as those used by the hijackers at the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. The NRC's Mr. Meserve says the agency has begun a
major study of the issue, the details of which are secret.

Several times since Sept. 11, U.S. forces have responded to threats of an air attack --
which proved to be unfounded -- by scrambling fighter aircraft. But the Pentagon has
rejected requests made by some outside groups that antiaircraft guns be installed near
every reactor, Mr. Meserve says, and the proposal doesn't interest the NRC either.

"It raised very serious command-and-control problems," Mr. Meserve says. A facility
would need a decision to fire within minutes, too short a time to get a consensus from
the White House on shooting down an airliner. Other problems include the danger of
accidental misfiring and the possibility that antiaircraft weapons might not deflect a large
plane as it nears the plant.

The most fundamental disagreement is over the NRC regulation called the "design
basis threat" -- the designation of the size and potency of attacks that plants should be
prepared to thwart. The design basis threat drives nearly every security measure at
nuclear-power plants, from Mr. Johnson's board game here to the size of weapons,
gates, locks and fortifications. The exact numbers are secret, but according to industry
and government officials, the pre-Sept. 11 threat was considered to be a few attackers
equipped with grenades, explosives, automatic weapons and an insider's knowledge of
the plant's defenses. The threat also included a truck bomb carried by a sport utility
vehicle.

A new threat assessment, which the NRC has described to power-plant owners in
secret orders and advisories, hasn't been fully spelled out yet, but it probably will involve
a larger numbers of attackers, the possibility of multiple attacks against one plant and a
larger truck bomb, Mr. Meserve says.

Sen. Reid and Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, want to go further
and require the NRC to specify a new threat that assumes at least 20 attackers with
weapons and training comparable to U.S. Special Forces, with "at least one nuclear
engineer" and an insider who has intimate knowledge of the defenses of the plant. The
lawmakers argue that the Sept. 11 attack shows terrorists could have those capabilities.

Edward McGaffigan Jr., one of the NRC's five commissioners, says some of this is
political hyperbole coming from people who want to see nuclear-power plants shut
down. "The nuclear industry, for better or worse, is held to a higher standard, and I think
we accept that, but it shouldn't be held to an impossible standard," he says. He argues
that defending against the Reid-Markey "threat" would necessitate a force of 11,000 to
ensure round-the-clock protection at each of 64 sites where there are power reactors
(some sites, like Peach Bottom, have more than one reactor).

Legislative Impasse

There's also a legislative impasse over how to beef up the guard force. The industry and
Republicans favor bills that simply correct the differences in how guards can use their
guns. But those proposals have been overtaken by Democratic efforts led by Messrs.
Reid and Markey to federalize and enlarge the guard force to cope with the larger threat
these legislators fear.

Mr. Gilinsky, the former NRC commissioner, responds that guarding plants "is a
complicated thing to which there is no easy answer." He worries that a sudden
enlargement of the guard force could be needlessly expensive and even dangerous if it
shifted the focus of the plant managers and the NRC from running nuclear-power plants
safely to managing a large new security bureaucracy.

Aggravating the tension, industry officials complain that their two main congressional
antagonists begin with an antinuclear bias. During the past two decades, Rep. Markey
has been the nuclear industry's most frequent critic in Congress. Sen. Reid is leading a
campaign to prevent the industry from moving nuclear waste to a federal repository in
his home state of Nevada.

Another Democrat, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, is pushing to expand the circle of
territory the federal government might have evacuated in a nuclear crisis to a radius of
50 miles from the current 10 miles. It's hard to estimate the likely death toll from a
nuclear-plant accident because of the large number of variables and the small number
of precedents. The most serious U.S. accident, that at Three Mile Island, Pa., in 1979,
involved no fatalities. The radioactive release from the facility in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in
1986, caused the deaths of more than 30 workers and radiation injuries to more than
100 others. It required the evacuation and relocation of 116,000 people. About 1,800
cases of thyroid cancer have been found in children who were exposed at the time of
the accident.

The U.S. nuclear industry has been lobbying Congress against federalizing the guard
force, using a series of newspaper advertisements showing beefy guards carrying
semi-automatic rifles. "Tough enough? You bet," says one of the ads.

Here at the Peach Bottom plant, the guards like that image. Posters of the ads hang on
a wall of the guard room, where Mr. Johnson and the others play their board game. The
guards are employees of Wackenhut Corp., hired by the operator of the plant, Exelon
Corp. They are paid close to the industry's average, about $35,000 a year, plus
overtime when they are on high alert.

Their line of defense begins with outside patrols, then double fences topped with razor
wire. Those are backed with a variety of intrusion detectors, including television
cameras monitored from two separate locations. In their training, Mr. Johnson and the
other guards here learn that a skilled terrorist group using explosives could blast
through the fence in seconds. Their response, reinforced by the daily "chess" games, is
to quickly gauge the nature of the attack, then to rush to defensive positions.

In mock firefights four times a year, opposing teams of guards test their skills using
plastic rifles that make squeaking noises and softball-sized plastic grenades
accompanied by simulated explosions. During such exercises, the plant brings in an
extra shift, called a "shadow force," that engages in the mock battle while the regular
shift guards the plant. Guards sometimes "shoot" from behind mobile barriers designed
to stop bullets, and use wire-mesh screens that can be pulled out from walls to stop
grenades lobbed at them by the attackers.

"Delay is the name of the game," says Wayne A. Trump, manager of security at Peach
Bottom. "We fall back, protect and call in outside help." Describing how the firefight
would play out in the cavernous turbine room that connects the two nuclear reactors, he
says his guards are trained to aim at what he called "fatal funnels," places where
attackers are most vulnerable as they race into the plant.

While the guards here figure out how to cope, others ponder the bigger question of
where their job ends and the government's should begin. "At some point, a commercial
entity reaches a limit as to the size and nature of the threat it can, or should, solely
contend with," Stephen D. Floyd, an official of the Nuclear Energy Institute, recently told
a House Commerce subcommittee. His hope is that Congress will somehow agree on a
"reasonable" definition of that point.