PUBLIC SAFETY : U.S. Panel’s Move to Upgrade A-Plant Security Draws Fire

Two hundred feet farther and Pennsylvania might still be glowing.

At the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant last year, a discharged mental patient barreled his station wagon into a turbine building, stopping just 200 feet short of ramming a vital area of the facility and possibly triggering a deadly release of radiation.

Security was so light that he was able to race past a guard post, break through a chain-link fence and crash through the building’s steel door. He drove 60 feet into the building, got out of his car and evaded guards at the plant near Harrisburg, Pa., for four hours.

By contrast, security forces at most nuclear weapons factories are equipped with SWAT teams, helicopters and enough military hardware to stop a tank, not to mention a station wagon. After resisting 10 years of lobbying efforts by safety groups, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is starting to notice the difference.

Charged with anticipating terrorist threats to the nation’s high-energy nuclear facilities, the commission last month adopted a policy that would require most power plants to stiffen protections against truck bombs.

Since the World Trade Center bombing last year, an army of safety groups has intensified efforts to persuade the commission to issue more stringent rules demanding that plant owners build stronger fences or beef up security forces. Recent U.S.-North Korean tensions also have spotlighted the apparent weakness of reactor security, because most South Korean power plants are U.S.-designed.

But as the commission stood poised to announce the new policy, many plant owners sought to loosen the proposed requirements, hoping to cut costs.

Safety advocates say no amount of penny-pinching would offset the huge monetary and human costs of nuclear sabotage.

“We’d like to see nuclear power plants better protected,” said Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a nonprofit group that has sought tougher security for reactors since 1984.

Some terrorism experts say bombers are more likely to strike at power plants because they are “soft targets.” Commission rules say plants should be ready for attacks by small bands of well-armed soldiers. Nonetheless, they allow the facilities to keep only five-member security forces on a shift.

The new policy, which is classified, requires reactor operators to prepare for an attack by armed terrorists who might use a truck to break through outer defenses or detonate a bomb outside the plant’s perimeter. But the new rules are less stringent than safety advocates had hoped.

Fences built under the commission’s existing specifications are so weak that they can only detect breaches, not block would-be intruders, said Bruce Hoffman, a nuclear terrorism specialist at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corp.

Yet some plant operators wonder whether the new policy is needed. Phillip Clark, president of GPU Nuclear Corp., which runs the Three Mile Island facility, said that “the radioactive safety of the public does not require a new rule and increased security.”

Upgrades in plant security should be left to reactor operators, said Clark, who erected stronger fences at the Three Mile Island site after the intruder crashed through the barriers.

Analysts accuse the reactor operators of caring more for their wallets than for public safety.

“The Three Mile Island incident alone suggests that instead of bean-counting up and down over the cost of a fence, they should be thinking in terms of deterring the next adversary,” Hoffman said.

The next adversary may not even attack on U.S. soil. Intelligence experts are concerned about the vulnerability of civil research centers and nuclear reactors in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine--from which terrorists could extract plutonium and weapons-grade fuel.

FBI terrorism experts say the threat of nuclear sabotage at U.S. plants is very low. “We are talking about a minuscule threat,” Hoffman acknowledged. “But in the nuclear domain, one is one too many.”