AMERICA PREPARES TIGHTENING SECURITY  / AIR THREAT; US NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS RECONSIDER THEIR DEFENSES

By Ross Kerber, Globe Staff

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 left the country's 103 nuclear power plants with a jolting realization: None was designed to survive a direct hit by a hijacked airliner.

Operators of all the plants, including five in New England, have scrambled since the attacks to beef up defenses and are considering the use of military assets, such as antiaircraft guns.

But security had already been a hot topic at many plants, following a series of mock raids in which private guard forces failed to stop intruders.

Those failures, coupled with new fears of airborne threats, have a top security official at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission concerned that protections fall short overall. "I'm not satisfied," said the official, David Orrik. The Sept. 11 attacks, he said, "should be seen like a cattle prod to get us to do more."

US Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Malden, called for broad security reviews at the plants. "We need a much higher security standard in place than industry wants to provide," said Markey, a longtime critic of nuclear plants.

The NRC urged all the plants to go on high alert after Sept. 11 and is discussing additional defenses with military leaders.

No one could have foreseen a need to defend against hijacked jets, said commission spokesman Victor Dricks.

But now some say it wouldn't be far-fetched to find reactors on terrorist hit lists, particularly if attackers have been able to infiltrate plants to learn their operating procedures. An explosion or reactor breach could put thousands of people at risk.

"All our previous calculations and assumptions about what terrorists are capable of, technically and morally, have to be revised," said Ed Lyman, scientific director of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington, D.C.

Nuclear stations aren't the only industrial facilities that seem vulnerable. But few industries operate under as many safety regulations as nuclear power, which accounts for about 20 percent of the domestic electric supply.

Most nuclear facilities seem to be well defended. They are built with reinforced concrete to survive tornadoes and hurricanes and are surrounded by barbed wire and monitored with video cameras to detect intruders. Visitors must undergo background checks and pass through a series of X-ray machines and biometric-scanning devices. Reactors are designed to shut down automatically in case of trouble, and all plants went to their highest state of readiness following the attacks.

The plants have vulnerabilities, however. They require a constant electric supply to cool their radioactive fuel. Some facilities store radioactive waste in less-secure areas.

A few plants, such as New Hampshire's Seabrook Station, were reinforced against the crash of airplanes from nearby airports. But no engineering study suggests that they could survive the impact of a loaded Boeing 767.

It's hard to say exactly what havoc might result from such an attack, beyond the NRC's description of "a release of radiation that could impact public health and safety."

An analogy might be the accidental fire at the Chernobyl facility in the Ukraine in 1986.

Estimates of the exact death toll vary. Some groups, including Ukrainian government officials, put the figure around 30,000 fatalities, mainly from increased cancer rates. Other scientists say there is only direct evidence of around 50 deaths directly attributable to the fire and the resulting spread of radiation.

In any case, the resulting fallout of radioactive material uprooted tens of thousands and left wide swaths of territory unusable.

Improving security at nuclear plants isn't a new topic. Shortly before last year's Olympics, for instance, New Zealand police discovered a criminal cell that had kept detailed information on a reactor in Sydney, including a map marked to show entry points to the site. (Charges filed in the case related only to smuggling.) The mock raids conducted by Orrik, a former Navy SEAL, have also drawn much attention.

For his security tests, Orrik usually rounds up several officers from nearby police departments and sends them to try to sneak through a plant's perimeter defenses. Their goal is to shut down or simulate damage to electrical circuits or cooling pipes that, if real, would cause the reactor's core of radioactive fuel rods to begin to melt. Left unchecked, such damage could lead to the release of toxic amounts of radiation.

All too often, Orrik's teams succeed, simulating core damage in about half the 68 exercises he has staged since 1991, Orrik said. Since 2000, his teams got through in six of 11 exercises.

Orrik is barred from discussing exactly what weaknesses the teams found, but details are available in a public report of his review of the Waterford 3 reactor in Louisiana in March 2000.

According to the report, Orrik's team found shortcomings including "defensive positions, armed responder staffing levels, response time calculations, operations/ security interface, . . . command and control, guidance on the use of protective masks by the armed responders, response weapon proficiency, and administrative controls to ensure that plant conditions are evaluated to ensure protective strategy assumptions remain valid."

Further details were kept classified. The NRC says that flaws were immediately addressed.

Why did the plant fare so poorly? "It's a hard question to answer," said Diane Park, spokeswoman for Entergy, the plant's operator. "There were different areas of our capabilities that weren't up to expectations."

Entergy also owns Pilgrim Station in Plymouth. A spokesman there said that the plant received excellent reviews from Orrik's team in 1998 and earlier this year.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group in Washington, said that no plant was fined after the mock raids and that plants have ample margins of safety.

Institute spokesman Steve Kerekes wouldn't discuss Orrik's findings specifically, but said, "If the implication is that these are failures that mean a plant isn't meeting the regulatory requirements, then that's not correct."

Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the NRC recommended that all plants be put on high alert. "While there has been no credible general or specific threats to any of these facilities, the recommendation was considered prudent," the commission said in a statement.

Lyman of the Nuclear Control Institute said the NRC should have simply ordered the alerts, as rules allow. But the NRC's Dricks said such an order wasn't necessary, because the commission's requests "are authoritative."

Lyman and Markey say that new NRC rules could water down Orrik's tests and make them easier to pass. "The prevailing attitude remains one of complacency and overconfidence," Lyman said.

Connecticut's Millstone nuclear power plant went to high alert even before the government warning, said Jim Norvelle, spokesman for the plant's operator, Dominion Resources of Richmond, Va.

"Anyone who watched television thought, 'My God, lock down the plants,' " Norvelle said.

Ross Kerber can be reached by e-mail at kerber@globe.com.