Nuclear 9-11?

A nuclear 9-11? We all hope not. The Fukushima tragedy destroyed the nuclear power safety myth. We have to face the grim fact that these plants are not only vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis and floods, but also to terrorism.

By Grace Aaron,
Vice President of the Social Uplift Foundation, co-chair of the Los Angeles Branch of the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom, Past interum ED of Pacifica Foundation Radio Network

(Footnote links in this color)

According to David Kyd, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), most nuclear power plants were built in the 1960s and 1970s and were not designed to withstand the impact of a jumbo jet full of fuel. In Japan, Takeo Hiranuma, Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry, noted that his country's nuclear plants were not built to withstand hits from missiles or aircraft.1

Two prominent nuclear scientists have written about the possibility of nuclear terrorism. One of them, Theodore B. Taylor, theoretical physicist and nuclear weapons designer, warned that the bombardment of nuclear facilities could convert them, in effect, into nuclear weapons.2 Dr. James C. Warf, who headed the analytical chemistry section of the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb and who held patents for the process of separating plutonium from high-level nuclear waste, concurred.3 Both scientists wrote that such an attack could contaminate huge areas -- hundreds, perhaps thousands, of square miles.4

Greenpeace nuclear consultant Dr. Helmut Hirsh estimates that an airliner colliding into a nuclear reactor could cause a meltdown in less than one hour.5 

Yet in spite of these obvious dangers NRC security requirements still assume that terrorists targeting a nuclear facility will not use aircraft, will not attack with more than a handful of individuals, and will not use widely available weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades.6

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a leading science-based nonprofit, concluded that nuclear plant risk assessments are being used to increase -- not reduce -- the threat to the American public.7

Projections of casualties from nuclear meltdowns vary wildly but are all beyond our most dreadful imaginings.

A 1982 study by Sandia National Laboratories, part of the U.S. Dept. of Energy, estimated that a core meltdown and radiological release at the Indian Point, New York nuclear plant that is 38 miles north of Manhattan could cause 50,000 deaths from acute radiation syndrome and 14,000 subsequent deaths from cancer.8

In the early 1980s, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimated that a meltdown at San Onofre, about 70 miles south of Los Angeles, could result in 130,000 immediate deaths, 300,000 cancers, and 600,000 genetic effects, for a total of about a million killed and injured.9 (As an aside, in 1977 Bechtel Industries installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards at San Onofre.)10

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) agree that the containment structures around nuclear power plants would probably be breached by a direct crash from a 747. But spent fuel pools that hold nuclear waste and are usually kept close to nuclear reactors are even easier terrorist targets. At least the reactors themselves have containment structures. Spent fuel pools are housed in more conventional buildings and, according to both these agencies, are more susceptible to aircraft strikes or explosives.11

In 1997, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Government Department of Energy, estimated that a calamity at one spent-fuel pool could lead to 138,000 deaths and contaminate 2,000 square miles of land.12

A spent fuel pool fire in the United States could render an area uninhabitable that would be as much as sixty times larger than that created by the Chernobyl accident.13

The U.S. also operates numerous research reactors, many in urban centers and universities. Although the inventory of radioactive materials in such facilities is far smaller than that of nuclear power stations, security at most of these reactors is very limited, which could make them potentially attractive targets for terrorist groups.14

There have been many credible terrorist threats from both inside and outside the U.S. In January 2002, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sent a confidential memo to power plants nationwide warning of a credible Al Qaeda threat to fly a commercial aircraft into a nuclear power plant.15

In his 2004 threat assessment to Congress, then Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet stated, “more than two dozen other terrorist groups are pursuing CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear] materials.”16

We are currently at a political and cultural crossroads. One direction leads to increasing vigilance and surveillance, the curtailment of civil liberties in the name of security, and endless global wars and military incursions undertaken to prevent the often-impredictable insane acts of maniacal individuals and groups. The other direction leads to the unwinding of the web of nuclear horror that began with Hiroshima and that has brought a limited gift of energy tied to a boundless nightmare of risk.

Footnotes:
(This article was originally published in August 2011. Some of the footnote links no longer work. We will do our best to remedy that soon.)