Security at nuclear plants gets another look

The chance of a terrorist attack on area reactors is remote,
officials say. Still, procedures are scrutinized.

By Marc Schogol
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have caused
operators of nuclear power plants in the Philadelphia region and across the
nation to reconsider their own vulnerability, a spokesman for the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission said yesterday.

Just last week, the head of the commission urged Pennsylvania and other
states to consider deploying the National Guard or state police to supplement
the private guards who now protect nuclear plants. Wackenhut Corp. guards
patrol plants at Limerick, Three Mile Island and Peach Bottom in
Pennsylvania, and at Oyster Creek in New Jersey, commission spokesman Neil
Sheehan said.

Regulators say the odds of such a direct hit are remote. A week after
the terrorist attacks, at an annual meeting of the International Atomic
Energy Agency in Vienna, agency spokesman David Kyd noted that reactors are
far smaller targets than the Pentagon or the World Trade Center and said it
would be extremely difficult for a terrorist to crash a plane at an angle
that could set off a major radiation release.

Sheehan said that until Sept. 11, the agency had never considered or
planned for the possibility that terrorists would crash jetliners into
nuclear reactors. The plants' containment structures are formidable -
three-to-four-feet-thick reinforced concrete wrapped around a one-inch steel
liner, and a six-inch-thick steel fuel vessel. But Sheehan said they "clearly
were not designed with 757s and 767s, which crashed into the World Trade
Center, in mind. . . ."

"These are civilian power installations," he said. "They were not
designed to withstand acts of war."

If there were a direct hit on a reactor, Sheehan said, the worst-case
scenario would not be like an atomic bomb exploding but would be an extended
release of deadly radiation, like the meltdown in Chernobyl in the Soviet
Union in 1986, which eventually caused 4,000 deaths.

Pennsylvania's 1979 reactor accident at Three Mile Island would pale by
comparison, Sheehan said.

"No one has done an analysis to find out exactly what would happen," he
said. "It would depend how much fuel was on board [the plane], how fast it
was going. The concern is the fuel in the reactor at the time, as with Three
Mile Island. They would not be able to keep it covered and cooled, and we
could have a massive release of radioactivity into the environment."

Since Three Mile Island, numerous safety measures have been implemented
in the nuclear power industry, he said, and security was beefed up even more
following the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center.

A meeting on emergency procedures at the Limerick reactor in Montgomery
County and Peach Bottom in York County, scheduled before the Sept. 11
attacks, was held yesterday at the commission's regional offices in King of
Prussia. Outside the meeting, reporters raised security issues with Exelon,
the company formed by last year's merger of Peco Energy Co. and Unicom Corp.
of Chicago.

Exelon owns or runs the two plants and two others in the region: Three
Mile Island in Middletown, Pa., and Oyster Creek in Forked River, N.J. It is
also a part-owner of the Salem (N.J.) Nuclear Generating Plant with Public
Service Electric & Gas Co.

A spokesman for Exelon said access to the plants was severely
restricted and enforced by Wackenhut guards.

The spokesman, Ralph DeSantis, said many of those guards are former law
enforcement or military personnel who have undergone rigorous training and
met high standards.

Recognizing the need for increased security, commission chairman
Richard Meserve wrote last week to the governors of the 40 states with
nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities.

"While there have been no credible threats against nuclear
installations," Meserve wrote, "in the current situation it would make sense
for liaison to be established between nuclear facilities and state
authorities in the event state-supplied augmenting security elements might be
needed."

Officials of Exelon - which calls itself the largest operator of
nuclear plants in the country - and the commission said all aspects of
protecting nuclear power facilities are under review at the highest levels.

"We first of all believe that our robust emergency-protection plan
provides a solid foundation to respond to unforeseen events," said Jeffrey A.
Benjamin, Exelon's vice president for licensing and regulatory affairs.

But, Benjamin said, "we are dependent on the federal government to
protect us in the event of acts of war."

Hubert J. Miller, the commission's regional administrator, said, "We're
sensitized by recent events. Security at all plants has been raised to the
highest levels - not with the idea of any specific threat, but just to be
ready."

Sheehan said terrorism such as the Sept. 11 attacks was never
anticipated when nuclear reactors were being built, mostly in the 1960s and
'70s.

"Hurricanes, earthquakes, natural disasters - the plants were designed
to be robust enough to withstand all sorts of impact," including the impact
of airplanes, he said. "However, at the time they [the plants] were designed,
planes were smaller. . . . The [Boeing] 707 was about the biggest, and the
767 is nearly double the size."

If a plane that large were to hit a reactor, Sheehan said, "there's
going to be radioactivity. There are too many variables to really say exactly
what's going