nuclear-news

November 12, 2009: “……………….critics say the plants are vulnerable to attack, and that the government is not taking the measures necessary to protect the public. ……… there is an urgent need to address safety.“The protection level at nuclear power reactors is not anywhere near that required,” said Frank von Hippel, a nuclear physicist, Princeton professor, and former assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology. “The utilities are unwilling to spend the money and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is basically under the thumb of the utilities, is not willing to make them.”

In a post 9-11 world, perhaps the biggest fear is that a hijacked airliner would hit a nuclear plant. Under this nightmare scenario, the plane would breach the outer containment wall and cause a meltdown of the reactor core, with the radioactive gas getting out the same way the plane got in…………………

Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst at Greenpeace points to an early 1980s-era report from the government’s own Argonne National Labs, removed from government Web sites after Sept. 11, saying a direct hit by an airliner on a nuclear power plant could breach the containment wall and lead to a meltdown………………

Besides the reactor core itself, which is housed inside the protective barrier, some are concerned the spent fuel could be a problem in the event of an aircraft attack. That’s especially true in some reactors where the pool that houses and cools spent fuel is several stories above ground.

“It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool…spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly…[and] the fire could well spread to older spent fuel,” von Hippel and a team of others wrote in a 2003 report. “The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.”

The report described a scenario where contamination could drift downwind from the site, rendering the land uninhabitable and resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage.

If the plant was near a populated area — like the Indian Point plant in suburban New York, some 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan — and couldn’t be evacuated in time, the damage could be much worse.

“If you get a fire at Indian Point in the spent fuel pool, it’s going to take out New York City,” said Pete Stockton, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight and a former security expert at the Department of Energy.