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Activists not happy with nuclear security decision
SAN ONOFRE ---- A decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop releasing information on security inadequacies and vulnerabilities at San Onofre and other nuclear power plants has raised the hackles of local and national anti-nuclear activists.
Russell Hoffman, an anti-nuclear activist and businessman from Carlsbad who challenged the commission on security concerns at its annual safety meeting on July 29 in San Clemente, said the decision to withhold information from the public will allow plant owners to hide serious security problems, rather than fixing them.
"Now they're going to hide behind the preposterous idea that they've done enough," Hoffman said.
At its first public meeting on plant safety since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the nuclear commission announced Tuesday it will no longer provide regularly updated security briefs on each of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors. The federal agency used to provide some security information on its Web site. However, that information tended to be vague.
A spokesman for the agency, Victor Dricks, said Thursday that safety information, including the results of inspections performed regularly at the plant, will still be released.
He said, for example, that if one of San Onofre's twin reactors was shut down because operators or inspectors detected a leak in its internal piping, that information would be made public. However, if the same reactor had a gaping hole in its perimeter fence, or if security guards were found to be sleeping on the job, that information would not be released, he said.
Dricks said the idea is to avoid alerting potential saboteurs of security lapses.
"The effort here is simply to limit the information that could be of assistance to terrorists," he said.
Paul Gunter, a spokesman for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an anti-nuclear group in Washington, D.C., said Thursday that drawing a line between security and safety matters is not so easily done.
"Security and safety are virtually synonymous, and closing what are already closely guarded issues only has eroded the public's right to know," Gunter said.
He said limiting the public availability of security failures and vulnerabilities may eventually result in less public information on safety matters.
"This is a growing concern, as it probably begins an erosion of the public's right to know into safety issues as well," Gunter said.
Hoffman, who has studied nuclear energy issues for decades and has an extensive personal library of nuclear-related documents, said there is already too much security information in the open to put that particular genie back in the bottle.
"The terrorists must already know it if I already know it," he said.
Dricks said that restricting security information may only make the public more suspicious of nuclear operations in the United States, but that it's a necessary step in protecting the plants from terrorists.
"It's difficult to balance the public's right to know with safety and security," he said.
Contact staff writer Paul Sisson at (760) 901-4087 or psisson@nctimes.com.