We Need the National Guard to Protect Our Nuclear Plants

On Monday, the day after U.S. and British forces began their retaliatory attacks in Afghanistan, the acting governor of New Jersey, Donald T. DiFrancesco, sent the National Guard to protect that state’s nuclear power plants from possible terrorist reprisals. Gov. Gray Davis should immediately do the same in California.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that a major release at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, the nuclear complex closest to Los Angeles, could result in hundreds of thousands of cancers and genetic defects. The primary regulations requiring security protection at that plant and others like it were created decades ago and anticipated terrorist threats much smaller than those we know exist today. Under these regulations, reactor operators are merely required to post a few guards, capable of withstanding an attack by no more than “several” attackers acting as a single team and aided by no more than one insider. No protection is required against boats or planes.

A spokesman for Southern California Edison, which operates the plant, was quoted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as saying the San Onofre facility wasn’t designed to withstand a large plane crash. “We’re not on any of the flight paths, so that was not considered a credible threat,” said Ray Golden.

The NRC’s assumption was that it wasn’t “credible” that there could ever be large numbers of attackers, acting as coordinated teams, using sophisticated techniques and willing to commit suicide to create large numbers of casualties. U.S. intelligence, the NRC claimed, would have advance warning of any such intended terrorist attack. Those assumptions fell when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit. At least 19 terrorists were involved in at least four coordinated teams, sophisticated in technique and willing to kill both themselves and thousands of others. No intelligence warning, recognized as such, was available.

A report released in November 2000 by the NRC on its test drills was not encouraging. The plants had six months’ notice of the drills and yet nearly half the reactors in the U.S. failed to prevent the mock terrorists from breaching security and reaching critical safety equipment. Had they been real terrorists, there could have been meltdowns and the massive release of radioactivity.

Appallingly, the NRC’s response to its own wake-up call was to kill off the test program that issued the alarm. When the media howled, the program was briefly reinstated, but the NRC has decided to convert the program to an industry self-policing effort.

After the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency conceded that reactor containments were not designed to withstand such an assault and that, if there were one, a Chernobyl-type disaster could result. The risk of terrorist collusion on the inside requires that all plant and contractor employees be immediately and thoroughly revetted for possible terrorist associations.

Given that some federal officials place the likelihood of further terrorist attacks in the U.S. at 100%, it is time to provide government protection of these lethally attractive nuclear targets.

Davis has sent the National Guard to protect airports. He should also assign them to protect the state’s reactors, both those that are operational and those that are shut down but still contain on-site irradiated fuel. Thirty National Guardsmen on duty at all times at these sites would be a significant deterrent against a terrorist action. They are trained military units far more capable of homeland defense in wartime than are a handful of private security guards employed by bankrupt or near-bankrupt utilities.