U.S. Officials Are Reviewing Security at Nuclear Plants

Security at the nation’s nuclear power plants is under review to see if new safeguards are needed against the possibility of terrorist truck-bomb attacks, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Friday.

Chairman Ivan Selin said the installation of reinforced steel gates and concrete barricades, which the commission has rejected in the past, is being reconsidered in light of two recent events.

They are the explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City and a recent incident in which a man drove a station wagon through security checkpoints at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, ending up 60 feet inside the turbine building.

The man, a former mental patient, eluded searchers for four hours. He was unarmed and his vehicle contained no explosives.

Responding to questions from members of the Senate Public Works subcommittee on nuclear regulation, Selin said that if the vehicle had been packed with high explosives, damage could have caused operators to shut down the nuclear reactor.

He said basic protective systems would have worked and there likely would have been no release of nuclear materials, but “the risks would have been much greater than we would have liked.”

Such a blast “probably would have damaged emergency systems,” he said. “And then you would have been on very thin ice,” he said. “You would have had to take the plant down.”

“I found your answers to be hair-raising,” said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), the subcommittee chairman. “Hearing you say it makes me wonder why you didn’t have (barriers) before.”

Selin said the commission would give the issue an “open-minded, fresh review.”