Power Line Raid Clouds Security : Sabotage Believed Aimed at Troubled Reactor Site

It was a death-defying act of sabotage.

In what a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector calls a “well-coordinated assault,” at least three people climbed more than 100 feet up on widely separated, high-voltage power transmission stanchions--towers literally tingling with electricity--and in 25 minutes knocked out three of the four transmission lines supplying power to the Palo Verde nuclear plant here.

They left not a trace of a clue to who they were or why they had struck.

But the success of their act, generally assumed to have been directed at the controversial, three-reactor complex 30 miles away from the shorted lines, did leave behind many concerns and questions about security at Palo Verde and the reliability of the reactor that will be the nation’s largest when all three units are in operation.

The sabotage, on the night of May 14, came at a time when the Palo Verde owners face a punitive fine of $100,000 over alleged security shortcomings in the facility’s most vital areas--shortcomings the NRC has refused to publish for fear of compromising security further.

Moreover, the raid on the remote power lines followed a string of acts of vandalism and unexplained incidents at the $9.3-billion plant.

“The so-what isn’t so much the incidents as the possible implications for Arizona Public Service’s plant security,” said Myron Scott of the Coalition for Responsible Energy Education, a Tempe-based consumer and environmental group that has opposed the plant and favors abandoning the building of the third reactor. “All of the incidents seem to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

“They stop short of threatening plant safety, but what they have done is to reveal serious deficiencies in APS’ plant security that could make the plant more vulnerable to tampering with more serious consequences. They don’t take seriously the possibility that something major and out of the ordinary can go wrong.”

Arizona Public Service, which owns 29.1% of the facility and manages construction and operation of Palo Verde for the six other partner utilities in the project, denies that there is any security problem now, and says that some of the past suspicious incidents may have been accidents.

Co-Owner Utility’s View

A spokesman for Southern California Edison, which owns the one transmission line that was not sabotaged and a 15.8% stake in Palo Verde, said: “As a co-owner of Palo Verde, we’re concerned about the reliability of the plant and urge APS to do everything in their power to find the cause (of the sabotage).”

The raid on the transmission lines also has focused attention on an older concern of some federal officials: the security of the nation’s power transmission system and the nation’s vulnerability--twice cited by Congress’ watchdog General Accounting Office--to acts of war, sabotage or terrorism on power lines.

In the wake of the power-line sabotage, the NRC notified all 101 nuclear plant operators in the nation to be on the alert for similar strikes.

The FBI is investigating the power-line affair, and a $25,000 reward has been posted.

Could Have Been Worse

“This incident had a potential not so much for damage, but for economic disruption had the plant been operating,” said Don Andrews of the Arizona Nuclear Power Project. Had all three 1,270-megawatt reactors been functioning, and had all four transmission lines to the plant been knocked out of service, Andrews said, the plant would have been shut down and power to a wide area curtailed.

“If (Palo Verde) had been running, there’d be no way to recover (lost power) immediately,” said Guy D. Albert, manager of system electric operations for Arizona Public Service.

At the time of the incident, Unit 1, which began commercial service in January, was shut down for routine maintenance and Unit 2, scheduled to begin commercial production of power in September, was idle between tests. It was to have been restarted at low power at about the time the power lines were hit. Four transmission lines were carrying power to Palo Verde on the night that three of them were short-circuited.

Since restarting a nuclear reactor requires two independent sources of power, the restarting of the second unit had to be delayed more than a day because of the sabotage.

Did the saboteurs know that?

Or did they bungle something?

“I would assume whoever did it knew what was going on at the plant,” said Scott. “Neither unit was operating, and the fourth line was not cut. It’s like somebody, or some group of people, is trying to send a negative message without creating a safety hazard.”

“You don’t know if someone really, really knew or grossly overestimated what he was going to do,” said Brad Parker, a spokesman for Arizona Public Service. “Did they really know (Unit 2) was going to start?”

It was the latest of several suspicious incidents related to Palo Verde that began on Feb. 8, 1984, with the discovery that 22 cables in Unit 3 had been sliced, apparently by someone employed at the plant. In the next two days, 59 other cables were found to have been severed--for about $150,000 worth of damage.

Suspicious Problems Found

The summer of 1985 brought a rash of incidents at the plant: a sudden drop in water pressure in the cooling system of Unit 2, caused by the throwing of a switch in a remote-control panel; two other mishaps with switches at Unit 2; rags and paper stuffed into circuit breakers in Unit 3.

All of these, officials said, would have been detected before the reactors were put in operation, thus any serious problem would have been headed off.

The transmission-lines sabotage occurred just nine days after the NRC proposed the $100,000 fine for security violations, which resulted from a surprise inspection at Palo Verde between Feb. 11 and March 13. The Arizona Republic newspaper has quoted one unnamed NRC official as saying that inspectors found one area of Palo Verde security to be “the worst in the (Western) region.”

The proposed fine is double the standard amount because of what the commission said was past failure of Palo Verde management to “take sufficient actions to correct (security) problems and prevent recurrence.”

Palo Verde officials have asked the NRC to reduce the fine. Last week, Ed Van Brunt, executive vice president of the Arizona Nuclear Power Project, said: “We not only feel that doubling the standard fine is unfair, we also feel the amount of the standard fine should be reduced, based upon past and current corrective actions we’ve taken.”

NRC Inspector Comments

Roy Zimmerman, the NRC’s senior resident inspector at Palo Verde, says that whatever security problems the agency has identified, “the bottom line is that (the plant’s operators) are able to protect the public health and safety. Do the security inspection findings indicate an ability to cause a problem? Again, the NRC is confident that the public health and safety has not been compromised by the security deficiencies we’ve identified.”

All told, the NRC cited six security problems--including three in so-called vital areas, which Zimmerman says house essential equipment, particularly equipment needed for the safe shutdown of a reactor. Those three were:

--”Failure to limit vital area access to authorized individuals.”

--”Failure to respond to vital area alarms.”

--”Failure to maintain adequate vital area barriers.”

The NRC also cited Palo Verde for shortcomings in accounting for identification badges, poor lighting in important areas and failure to report security events to the NRC.

Last year, the NRC found the facility “critically short” of security personnel and cited “overall lack of familiarity with security equipment and security systems (with) an excessive number of deficiencies in their security program.”

Later Findings Awaited

Palo Verde officials are waiting to learn of the findings of another surprise security inspection conducted by the NRC early in May.

The transmission-lines sabotage, however, occurred far outside the area covered by NRC security requirements.

The first transmission line failure occurred at 8:58 p.m. May 14 on the North Gila line to Yuma, which is owned by APS, San Diego Gas & Electric and the Imperial Irrigation District of California.

The Kyrene line to Tempe, owned by the Salt River Project, Public Service of New Mexico, APS and El Paso Electric, went out at 9:02.

The third line, to the West Valley section of Phoenix, owned by the same four utilities, was short-circuited at 9:23.

The next day, utility crews discovered the cause of the outage: cables and chains had been hung from high in the transmission towers down to the high-voltage lines. The cables had been pulled into contact with the power lines by ropes that reached to the ground.

All 30 Miles Away

The three trouble spots were 30 miles northeast of the Palo Verde plant, 30 miles east of it and 30 miles southwest--too far apart for one person to have rigged all three within 25 minutes.

The saboteurs, while climbing the towers, would have felt “a sensation of electricity jumping off the ends of their fingers,” says Albert of Arizona Public Service. “Unless you knew you were not going to get hurt, it’d scare you off.”

He said that the sabotage “was pretty well coordinated.”

“The people who did this were either very lucky or very good,” said Larry Crittenden of the Salt River Project. “We didn’t get any calls saying, ‘Hi, we’re the group and we’re responsible.’ ”

“Why three were tampered with, and not four, is one of the mysteries of life,” said Andrews, the Palo Verde spokesman. “The motivation is unclear . . . (but) you can’t discount the possibility it was aimed at the start-up of Unit 2. We’ve had no threats or any claim of responsibility, but these guys were really risking their lives to do this.

“They could have been fried.”