BRANCACCIO: Welcome to NOW on the road in Central California. Just up the coast here is the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. The government says it has evidence that terrorists have targeted nuclear plants but government regulators say they have upgraded security at the plants since 9/11. But they've done so under a shroud of secrecy. Residents here say that's not good enough.
Producer Peter Meryash and I looked into these security concerns and what we're about to tell you is nothing the terrorists don't already know.
It's an open secret, in fact, that terrorists have nuclear power plants in their sights.
PRESIDENT BUSH (2002 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS):
We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants...
BRANCACCIO: President Bush warned as much in his 2002 State of the Union address.
Then, in the 9-11 Commission Report, we learned the original terrorist plot involved "a total of ten aircraft to be hijacked, nine of which would crash into targets on both coasts" including "nuclear power plants."
And this past summer, the FBI issued a bulletin to state and local law enforcement that Al-Qaeda was still intent on attacking targets including, there it is again, nuclear power plants.
All this has residents who live near the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California worried that terrorists might set their sights here.
ROCHELLE BECKER:
There's ways to fly in. There's ways to hike in. There's ways to drift by. I mean, if I can come up you know, ten, 12 scenarios and I don't even own a squirt gun, I would imagine somebody that really wants to do some damage can figure out how to do it.
BRANCACCIO: Rochelle Becker lives just thirteen miles downwind from the plant. She and others here are now asking tough questions:
How vulnerable are America's nuclear plants to terrorism?
What kinds of threats are plants expected to defend against?
And why were new security standards developed in secret and kept secret without input from the public?
Becker raised her family here and now enjoys visits from her two grand-daughters.
She's also part of a nuclear watchdog group, Mothers for Peace and they worry if terrorists were to pull off an attack at a nuclear plant, it could be a catastrophe.
BECKER:
San Luis Obispo is a bit of an isolated community, but less than 500 miles away to the south is Los Angeles. And, less than 500 miles away to the north is San Francisco. It could devastate California, which is the seventh largest economy in the world.
JEFF LEWIS, PACIFIC GAS & ELECTRIC:
Well, it's understandable that people might be concerned, because in general people don't know how well nuclear power plants are built.
BRANCACCIO:
Jeff Lewis says this power plant is up to meeting the terrorist threat. He's a spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric, the owners of Diablo Canyon and he says the utility has spent $23 million dollars upgrading plant security since 9-11.
JEFF LEWIS:
Nuclear power plants and the Diablo Canyon Power Plant-- it's like a fortress. These are the best guarded, best constructed, commercial facilities in the country.
BRANCACCIO: We were shown some of the plant's security measures, including new barricades, surveillance cameras and checkpoints.
Since 9-11, the company says it has increased its security staff by 30 percent, constantly training and testing officers on tactical weapons and procedures.
JEFF LEWIS:
It's been almost a continual process of upgrading security, and we don't think it's over yet.
BRANCACCIO: There's no doubt that security at nuclear power plants around the country has been improved since 9-11. Overall, the industry says it has spent about 1.2 billion dollars on better defenses and more guards.
All part of new standards issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
MICHAEL WEBER, DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF NUCLEAR SECURITY AND INCIDENT RESPONSE, NRC:
NRC has worked with national experts after 9/11 to develop our security requirements. And we're quite confident that those security requirements are appropriate to protect the public.
BRANCACCIO: But critics say the NRC is underestimating the threat.
BETH DALEY, PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT (POGO):
We know from talking to insiders that various intelligence analyses show that these plants should be protecting against a much more threatening scenario than the one that they're currently required to defend against.
BRANCACCIO: Beth Daley is with the Project On Government Oversight, a watchdog public advocacy group.
She says the NRC's secret security standards require plants to defend against only a small force of attackers, far fewer than the nineteen involved in the 9-11 attacks.
And she says, it's hard to believe, but nuclear power plants are still not required to defend against a 9-11 style attack from the air.
The nuclear industry counters that improved security at airports and on airplanes these days makes such an attack unlikely. And what's more
JEFF LEWIS:
These are not ordinary buildings. To get a better idea you have to understand that we're looking at walls on these containment domes that are three and a half feet thick with six layers of two and a quarter inch rebar — that's over a foot of steel.
These are the strongest buildings that man has created, and the analysis has shown that-- that they will stand up to the impact of a large aircraft.
BRANCACCIO: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission agrees.
MICHAEL WEBER:
It is unlikely that an air attack would both damage the core and cause a large-scale radiation release.
BRANCACCIO: Michael Weber is the Deputy Director of the Office Of Nuclear Security And Incident Response at the NRC.
BRANCACCIO:
You could fly a plane right into one of those. And we shouldn't worry about radiation being released?
MICHAEL WEBER:
The likelihood of such an attack is low. Beyond that, the likelihood of success is low.
BRANCACCIO:
Critics, however, are not convinced — they point to an alarming study done for the German government. This study found that jetliners crashing into a nuclear reactor could crack into the containment dome, letting deadly radiation out.
And terrorists may not even have to crack open those domes to do real damage.
ROCHELLE BECKER:
There's heavy, thick, steel-reinforced concrete walls over the reactors themselves. But, between the reactors sits the soft underbelly of the nuclear industry. And, that's the spent fuel pools.
BRANCACCIO: After nuclear fuel is used up, it is really hot and really radioactive. So when the fuel rods are taken out of the reactors, they are placed in deep pools of cooling water known as spent fuel pools.
There are spent fuel pools at every one of the one hundred three nuclear reactors across the country where more than forty-four thousand metric tons of radioactive waste have been building up for decades.
All those pools lie outside the containment domes. Most, like the ones at diablo canyon, are buried in the ground. But at thirty-two nuclear plants, mostly on the East Coast, the pools are not buried at all instead, they're elevated above ground. The fear is, if terrorists were ever able to drain the cooling water from the pools.
ROCHELLE BECKER:
You don't have a blow up. You don't have a meltdown. What you have is a fire that you can't contain that is full of radioactive smoke. It is a frightening situation. They don't know how to deal with it. So, they say, "It can't happen."
BRANCACCIO: The NRC says the release of radiation from a spent fuel pool is unlikely.
MICHAEL WEBER (NRC):
It's important to remember the spent fuel pools where the spent fuel is stored are very robust structures. They are typically well within the plant. There's safety programs in place to protect that spent fuel.
BRANCACCIO: So, could all this talk about terrorist attacks just be the latest tactic of anti-nuclear activists?
BRANCACCIO: Is that the case with you, Rochelle? That essentially you just can't stand nuclear power as an idea. And that the terrorist concerns are really just another excuse to oppose the plants?
ROCHELLE BECKER: They're not another excuse. They're another reason. And, I think those aren't the same word. I think that the biggest problem at a nuclear power plant is what we are leaving our children: high-level, radioactive waste. That is not the legacy that anyone should be leaving. The National Academy of Sciences says this has to be isolated for 300,000 years.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: The waste.
ROCHELLE BECKER: The waste. So, it's subject to terrorism, earthquakes, human error for 300,000 years.
So, yes, I would love to see this nuclear power plant shut down. I would never lie to anybody and say that's not what I would really like. But you shut it down tomorrow and you have 20 years worth of high-level radioactive waste sitting there that needs to be secured.
BRANCACCIO:
Becker and many here at this Mothers for Peace meeting say there's good reason to distrust the assurances of the NRC and the industry. They say when construction started at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in the 1960s no one knew there was an earthquake fault nearby.
ROCHELLE BECKER: You cannot find a worse place to store high level radioactive waste than the seismically active coast of California.
BRANCACCIO: It took geologists from an oil company to bring that information to everyone's attention.
ROCHELLE BECKER: And did the NRC say; Oh, my God! Thank you so much. We almost finished building a nuclear plant right there in that-- on that site. They said; Nope, couldn't be. Just can't possibly be. We had to raise thousands of dollars again and force the NRC to admit that there was a 7.5 magnitude earthquake fault 2 1/2 miles from the plant. And the plant had to be redesigned.
It's always the public. The public watchdog. There is nothing more important to a democracy than the public looking out to protect themselves.
BRANCACCIO: But now secrecy has made that very hard, say critics who point out the NRC developed new security standards without public input.
BETH DALEY (POGO):
Problems and weaknesses are really allowed to fester behind a door of secrecy. We found over and over again that it takes vigorous public debate to move agencies in the direction that they should be going to effectively protect the public.
ROCHELLE BECKER: And we have to speak up and we have to speak up every single day.
BRANCACCIO: So Becker, along with other public advocates, took the NRC to court, demanding a more open process.
ROCHELLE BECKER: If you just cut off the public process altogether and say: Those people don't know enough to tell us anything. Then you're missing those little pieces that could be very valuable and could make the difference between a secure plant and an insecure plant.
BRANCACCIO: The NRC says it did consult national security experts and law enforcement agencies in developing their new rules but that it has to be careful not to disclose too much to the public.
BRANCACCIO:
It's hard for some members of the community, though. Because. ultimately in the end, they hear the NRC saying, "Just trust us." Are you really just asking us just to trust you?
MICHAEL WEBER, NRC:
We welcome the comments from the public. We want to get that feedback that's important to us. It's part of what democracy is all about. But we can't take that to the extent that through those processes we would somehow disclose information that could be used against the United States. The NRC is committed to protecting that information.
BRANCACCIO: Even so, the NRC now promises, since that lawsuit, to consider public input about its security standards.
DAVID BRANCACCIO:
But clearly, secrecy is important at some level. You don't want to create a process that gives a roadmap to bad guys about how to attack these plants.
ROCHELLE BECKER:
Oh, we couldn't agree with you more. We don't want the keys to the security lock. What we want to know is that lock works.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: One way to find out whether "the lock works"
is by testing it. And that's just what happens at nuclear power plants.
To test security, the government requires mock drills like this one conducted in 1999 where attackers try to break in to see how well the facilities are defended.
The tests have since been updated, and the government requires they be conducted more frequently.
But what's setting off alarms is the company hired by the nuclear industry to carry out these drills is the same company which provides security at about half of the nuclear power plants around the country, the Wackenhut Corporation which, in effect, will now be testing itself.
With millions of dollars in security contracts at stake, critics say it's a clear conflict of interest.
BETH DALEY (POGO): The conflicts of interest in and of itself would be an outrage, but to add insult to injury, Wackenhut was caught cheating on these tests down at a government nuclear facility in Tennessee.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: At the Oak Ridge Weapons Plant in Tennessee, the Department of Energy's Inspector General found that two Wackenhut employees "
were inappropriately permitted to view
" test information in advance of security drills
and concluded "
the test results were
tainted and unreliable."
Wackenhut denies cheating, and claims that exercise was not a real test. What's more, the company says, that incident at Oak Ridge involved a different corporate division.
And the NRC, which oversees the tests, says safeguards are now in place and promises to closely monitor Wackenhut's performance.
MICHAEL WEBER, (NRC):
We plan the exercises. We run the exercises. And at the end, we evaluate the exercises. So, we're confident that collectively, the set of actions that we take, provides that adequate oversight.
BRANCACCIO: But even if those security tests come off without a hitch, there's one more thing to consider. The NRC now says how well each plant does on the test will be kept secret.
BRANCACCIO:
If for some reason, that plant should not do well, the local community doesn't really get to find out. That's not a problem?
MICHAEL WEBER:
The Commission decided that those sorts of results, because they could disclose security information, would no longer be available to the public. We do share security results with local and state law enforcement officials that have a role to play in ensuring the protection of those sites.
ROCHELLE BECKER:
We don't know-- wanna know how they failed. But we wanna know that they're at least able to pass their report card. And so far, we don't know that. And it's looking like they're not gonna ever tell us.
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