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Security

Nuclear reactors are sitting-duck targets, poorly protected and vulnerable to sabotage or attack. If their radioactive inventories were released in the event of a serious attack, hundreds of thousands of people could die immediately, or later, due to radiation sickness or latent cancers. Vast areas of the U.S. could become national sacrifice zones - an outcome too serious to risk. Beyond Nuclear advocates for the shutdown of nuclear power.

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Friday
Oct192012

Indian Point guard accuses Entergy of major security flaws, sues for $1.52 billion

As reported by LoHud.com, Clifton “Skip” Travis, a security guard at Entergy Nuclear's Indian Point Units 2 & 3 atomic reactors near New York City:

"...said as much as one-third of the plant’s security force is subpar, with some officers openly professing that they would not engage an enemy if attacked.

He blamed Entergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for lax security standards and a 'security culture mindset' that calls for doing the bare minimum rather than what it would take to repel an attack. He said his complaints over the past 18 months have fallen on deaf ears.

'There is a security culture that ‘It will never happen here,' Travis said at a news conference across the street from the plant. 'That is absolutely unacceptable.'

Travis has sued Entergy for $20 million in compensation, and $1.5 billion in punitive damages. He has called on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to deploy National Guard or State Police to secure Indian Point.

The article also quoted local opponents of the nuclear power plant:

"...Gary Shaw, a market research analyst from Croton-on-Hudson, said President George W. Bush’s announcement in 2002 that nuclear plant diagrams had been found in Afghanistan left him no doubt Indian Point was vulnerable to attack.

'We all knew they were talking about Indian Point. Security has always been an issue, and they always bluster about how good their security is,' Shaw said.

Susan Shapiro, an attorney from Pomona who attended the news conference, said the plant and its security 'is the elephant in the room.'

'Everyone’s living with it in their backyard,' said Shapiro, who sits on the board of Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, an Indian Point opponent. 'You know it’s there. It’s in the back of everyone’s mind.' "

Although U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) spokesman Neil Sheehan said the NRC’s computerized records didn’t show any high-level infractions at Indian Point as far back as 1996, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) published a major expose of security lapses at Indian Point on the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Indian Point, surrounded by 21 million people within 50 miles, may be the single worst catastrophic security vulnerability in North America. Lead 9/11 attacker Mohammad Atta had considered attacking Indian Point instead of the World Trade Center, according to Khaleid Sheikh Mohammad, as well as the 9/11 Commission Report. Al Qaeda did not approve the attack on Indian Point, according to KSM, because "it did not want things to get out of hand," but had not ruled out such attacks in the future.

Thursday
Oct182012

Beyond Nuclear debates "thorium power" proponent at Sierra Club meeting

On October 10th, Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps debated Timothy Maloney, a proponent of so-called "thorium (nuclear) power," at a meeting of the Nepessing Group of the Sierra Club's Michigan Chapter, at Mott Community College's Regional Technical Center in Flint. The Nepessing Group of Michigan represents Sierra Club members in Genesee, Lapeer, and northern Oakland counties.

Kevin's research in preparation for the debate depended on: a Beyond Nuclear backgrounder compiled by Linda Gunter; "Thorium Fuel -- No Panacea for Nuclear Power," by Dr. Arjun Makhijani of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility (2009); a Science Friday program entitled "Is Thorium a Magic Bullet for our Energy Problems?" featuring Dr. Makhijani (May 4, 2012); "Thinking about Thorium" by Dr. Gordon Edwards of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (Sept. 16, 2012); "Thorium Reactors: Back to the Dream Factory," by Dr. Edwards (July 13, 2011); and "What is the Thorium Cycle?" by Dr. Edwards (1978).

The Thorium-232/Uranium-233 nuclear fuel chain shares many similarities with the Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 nuclear fuel chains, including the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, the risk that reactors could unleash catastrophic amounts of radioactivity (particularly from intentional terrorist attacks or acts of warfare), the unsolved (unsolvable?!) radioactive waste problem, the astronomical expense of RDD (research, development, and demonstration) for "thorium reactors," and the environmental ruination downwind and downstream (as well as up the food chain and down the generations) from reprocessing facilities.

Thursday
Sep062012

NRC's Nuke Waste Confidence EIS will delay reactor licenses for at least two years!

Cover of Beyond Nuclear's pamphlet "A Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High"The five Commissioners who direct the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have just ordered NRC Staff to carry out an expedited, two-year long Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process to revise the agency's Nuclear Waste Confidence Decision (NWCD) and Rule. Critics have charged the NWCD is a confidence game, which for decades has prevented environmental opponents of new reactor construction/operation licenses, as well as old reactor license extensions, from raising high-level radioactive waste generation/storage concerns during NRC licensing proceedings, or even in the federal courts. This EIS process and NWCD revision will thus delay any final NRC approval for new reactor construction/operation licenses, or old reactor license extensions, for at least two years.

The Court's ruling mandated that NRC give a "hard look" at the safety, security, and environmental risks and impacts of extended (not years or decades, but centuries or even permanent) storage of high-level radioactive waste at reactors sites, in pools and/or dry casks.

The "Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High" conference in Chicago Dec. 1-3 will serve as a launch pad for generating public comments to NRC on this EIS, as well as to push back against the nuclear establishment's backlash proposals to begin "Mobile Chernobyl" irradiated nuclear fuel shipments by road, rail, and waterway to "consolidated interim storage." See Beyond Nuclear's pamphlet on high-level radioactive waste (cover reproduced at left). More.

Wednesday
Apr042012

"DHS: America's water and power utilities under daily cyber-attack"

As reported by NetworkWorld:

"On a daily basis, the U.S. is being targeted," said Sanaz Browarny, chief, intelligence and analysis, control systems security program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as she presented some statistics from fly-away trips taken last year by the ICS emergency response team to utilities, most in the private sector...

There are three basic types of attacks coming at these utilities today, she said, those being thrill-seeking "garden-variety" hackers that target known vulnerabilities; secondly, the dangerous volley of viruses, worms and botnet attacks; and thirdly, "nation-state actors" that have "unlimited funding available" and conduct espionage as they "establish a covert presence on a sensitive network."...

Kevin Helmsley, a leader in the emergency-response effort in the Control Systems Security Program at ICS-CERT, which operates under DHS, said the count of "incident tickets" related to reported incidents at water and power-generating utilities is going up. While only nine incidents were reported in 2009, last year this grew to 198 incident tickets. Just over 40% came from water-sector utilities, with the rest from various energy, nuclear energy and chemical providers...

"We are a nation at war. And that war is raging 24 x 7 in cyberspace," Curtis Levinson, technical director to NATO, who moderated the panel, put it bluntly. "It's not only hitting stock exchanges and websites. They're also hitting power systems." (emphasis added)

A successful cyber-attack on an atomic reactor could cause a catastrophic release of hazardous radioactivity.

Sunday
Dec042011

"Cyber war" threatens nuclear facilities

Public Radio International's The World has reported that the U.S. military now recognizes "cyber war" as the "new fifth domain of war between states, after air, land, sea and outer space." It reported "the humanitarian consequences of a cyber attack could include damage to infrastructure like power grids and toxic waste facilities," which could, of course, include atomic reactors and high-level radioactive waste storage pools. Bennett Ramberg warned more than 25 years ago that reactors and radioactive waste could be targeted during war, in his book Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril. The Stuxnet computer worm, targeted at the Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, is rumored to have been launched by the U.S. and/or Israeli militaries, although no radioactivity releases to the environment from the resulting damage were reported.