Are the Nuclear Power Plants in Your Area Vulnerable?
When the nuclear facilities were first built, the idea of terrorism using airplanes, such as occurred with the destruction of the Twin Towers, was not a concern.
Because of this, the Browns Ferry cooling pools, containing more than two thousand tons of radioactive material, were designed to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters, but according to Peter D.H. Stockton, a former special assistant on nuclear issues to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, are “vulnerable as hell,” to suicide attacks or other types of sabotage by terrorist groups.
The spent-fuel pools at Browns Ferry are especially open to attack because although most nuclear plants store spent fuel near ground level, greatly which reduces the likelihood of a dangerous loss of coolant, Browns Ferry’s spent-fuel pools are near the top of the 152-foot reactor building. They are uncovered, and all three reactor pools are three stories in the air.
If the spent-fuel pools in the nuclear plants worked as designed, they would be loosely packed so that, if water were lost from one, then air would circulate around the spent nuclear fuel in order to continue cooling the fuel. When this design was put into place, engineers had been assured that the federal government was planning to build a national spent-fuel repository for nuclear reactors, but because of environmental and scientific hurdles, the repository never happened.
This leaves the nuclear plants that were built with this design especially vulnerable. Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies explains that “if the water is lost, in almost all conditions, you will then have a fire that releases extremely large amounts of radioactive material.” A fire of this type in the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant would affect most of north Alabama and Southern Tennessee, leaving an area of up to one hundred miles uninhabitable.
Congress is investigating and has asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for a report on the safety of nuclear spent fuel pools. The NAS made the recommendation that all spent fuel pools more than five years old be emptied. This is quite expensive so less costly fixes are being considered, but some require workers to have access to the pools, and that’s impossible because of the heat and radiation. While the government debates a solution to the nuclear power plant design problem, areas of the country around nuclear plants with this design are in grave danger of attacks by airplanes, projectiles, or ground troops.
Source: Eric Fleischauer, “Browns Ferry Vulnerable to Attack,” The Decatur Daily 10 June 2007: A1.
URL: http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/070610/attack.shtml
