The Citizens Awareness Network (CAN) released a report today assessing the nation’s greatest security risk and a proposal to increase security of the high level radioactive waste storage at nuclear power plants. The northeastern regional group commissioned the report to analyze the vulnerability of reactor sites post-9/11 and create a means for hardening the sites to reduce risks. Robust Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Neglected Issue of Homeland Security, was prepared by Dr. Gordon Thompson, Director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies.

In North Carolina, NC WARN is honored to co-release this cutting edge report, and to be working with CAN and over two dozen grassroots organizations to mandate safer storage of nuclear waste fuel.

The vulnerabilities, comparative consequences, and risk reduction measures detailed in the report are applicable to all nuclear power plants in North Carolina. Dr. Thompson is one of the experts that CP&L/Progress Energy spent millions to avoid debating during Orange County’s legal challenge to the Shearon Harris waste pool expansion.

Post-9/11, operating reactors are vulnerable to a terrorist attack from the air, water or the ground. Reactor sites contain more than 1,000 times the radiation released in the Hiroshima bomb. If one nuclear reactor were successfully destroyed, it could create a regional humanitarian and environmental disaster, crippling the national economy.

Both operating reactors and decommissioning sites are potential targets, as they both store millions of curies of high level waste in their spent fuel pools. Fuel pools are the most likely targets for attack, since they contain the greatest amount of radioactive material and do not have a containment system to limit radiation releases in an accident. Also, dry-cask storage systems currently used for irradiated fuel are vulnerable. Fuel pools and cask storage are less secure than reactor containment buildings: dry casks are not designed or tested to resist attack and are stored outside in the open air; fuel pools are in buildings with little to no structural protection, sometimes suspended many stories above ground.

Thompson concludes, “[N]uclear power plants and their spent fuel can be regarded as pre-deployed radiological weapons that await activation by an enemy. The US government and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) seem unaware of this threat. US nuclear facilities are lightly defended and citizens are exposed to the risk of widespread radioactive contamination. This situation is symptomatic of an unbalanced US strategy for national security, which is a potentially destabilizing factor internationally.” Used reactor fuel is toxic and highly flammable. More than 90% is now stored in pools of water at reactor sites.

To assess the danger, Thompson chose the Indian Point and Vermont Yankee reactors as case studies. Thompson found that a fuel fire could be far more devastating than a reactor meltdown:

The State of New York is 127,000 sq. kilometers; an attack on Vermont Yankee could leave an area the size of MA, NH, and Vermont combined uninhabitable for decades. “The use of a little imagination shows that a spent fuel-pool fire at Indian Point or Vermont Yankee would be a regional and national disaster of historic proportions, with health, environmental, economic, social and political dimensions,” the report concludes.

The report proposes criteria and a design concept for protecting commercial nuclear waste. “This report develops a strategy for robust storage which includes the removal of the fuel from the pool and storage of waste in hardened containers protected from attack. (Such a strategy is necessary whether or not a repository is opened at Yucca Mountain.) This strategy should be implemented as a major element of a defense-in-depth strategy for US civilian nuclear facilities. In turn, that defense-in-depth strategy should be a component of a homeland-security strategy that provides solid protection of our critical infrastructure.”

SCHEMATIC OF HARDENED
ON-SITE STORAGE

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the nuclear industry and NRC attempt to assure communities that reactor sites are well defended and secure. “The nuclear industry responds to the prospect of a terrorist attack as a public relations problem. They attempt to conceal the grim reality of increased vulnerability that reactor communities live with,” said Deb Katz Executive Director of CAN.

“Dumping the waste does not address the vulnerability of reactor communities, which will continue as long as reactors produce radioactive waste,” said Katz. “In fact it increases risk by creating thousands of ‘dirty bombs’ rolling on highways and railroads, through towns, cities, and farms.”

Related Documents:
View the executive summary - with new hardened storage diagram (PDF)
View the full report (PDF)