Nuclear Plants Are Secure, Study Says
Industry Critics Dismiss the Report as Flawed

By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 26, 2002; Page A02

U.S. nuclear power plants would survive a direct hit by a fully fueled passenger airliner piloted by suicide hijackers bent on repeating the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new scientific study by a utility industry research group.

Critics of the nuclear industry said the study released earlier this week by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) was skewed to draw a preordained conclusion proclaiming the safety of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants. The danger exists that a direct strike could cause the meltdown of a plant's nuclear core that would spread wind-borne radiation to thousands of people, skeptics of the report said.

"They knew the answers they wanted and worked backwards," said Edwin Lyman, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, an organization critical of the industry's safety claims. "We can't take anything the industry says at face value."

Nuclear industry officials insist the study was scientifically sound, and was conducted by highly reputable engineering consultants using real-life scenarios involving a terrorist strike on a nuclear plant. Only a 10-page summary of the lengthier study was released publicly, with the rest withheld for security reasons.

"The results of this study validate the industry's confidence that nuclear power plants are robust and protect the [nuclear] fuel from impacts of a large commercial aircraft," said Joe F. Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association of utilities and nuclear energy firms that asked the research institute to conduct the report. "Public health and safety would be protected" in such an attack, he said.

"Confidence is predicated on the fact that nuclear plant structures have thick concrete walls with heavy reinforcing steel, and are designed to withstand large earthquakes, extreme overpressures and hurricane force winds," the EPRI report said.

The study considered what would happen if the relatively large Boeing 767 squarely crashed into a power plant's nuclear containment building -- the structure where nuclear reactors are located, with a tank full of fuel. The assumption was the plane was traveling at 350 miles an hour, the approximate speed of the jet that hit the Pentagon and the velocity that the consultants believe a pilot would maintain to maneuver a plane into a site built low to the ground.

Yet nuclear industry critic Lyman said it would be feasible for a highly trained al Qaeda pilot to fly at as much as 600 miles an hour, the approximate speed of the first plane to strike the World Trade Center -- a scenario that would worsen the damage at a crash site. Furthermore, the study apparently did not consider the effect of two or more aircraft strikes on the same plant, he said.

The study, mostly employing computer modeling, was performed for EPRI by ABS Consulting and ANATECH engineering specialists, and was peer reviewed by other experts with decades of experience in structural analysis, the Nuclear Energy Institute said.

Nuclear plants were not designed to withstand direct hits by passenger airliners, although some that were built beneath jetliner flight paths and that were approved in the 1970s had to show they could survive glancing blows from the relatively small 727, said Lyman, who has a doctorate in physics.

Lyman said the gravest danger if an aircraft slammed into a nuclear containment site is that the extremely hard steel shafts in the jet's engines would penetrate all the way through the four feet of reinforced concrete that makes up the side walls, and well beyond the three feet of concrete that he said makes up the structure's dome.

Safety specialists fear that a massive "insult" or breaching of a containment building's walls could cause the nuclear fuel to melt, setting off a cascade of events ending in the release of dangerous radioactivity that could be carried by winds for hundreds of miles. Among the plants that nuclear industry critics say pose the greatest risk in such a scenario is Indian Point nuclear power plant in Peekskill, N.Y. Twenty million people live within 50 miles, and 300,000 within 10 miles.

A study by a Washington think tank in October suggested the nuclear industry does a better job of protecting itself than many others.

In a mock exercise simulating the response to a vague report of a terrorist threat to East Coast energy installations, nuclear industry executives showed their plants are "the best defended targets" of any in the energy business, in part because they are in such close contact with local and federal officials, said John J. Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which helped run the exercise.

The center said that while commercial airlines have massively tightened their security since Sept. 11, 2001, the general aviation sector, including operators of large corporate jets, and companies flying cargo aircraft still need to improve security measures.