Nuclear safety up in the air

By: North County Times Opinion Staff - | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 10:21 PM PST ∞

Our view: New rules for nuke plants don't adequately address 9/11's threat from above

On Monday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission attempted to soothe our nuclear nightmare fears. But living in the shadow of San Onofre's reactors and radioactive pools for spent fuel, we're still not resting easy. With secrecy still a vital part of any defense strategy, we're left with assurances that fail to reassure. Perhaps more hope lies with Congress, which still has a chance to demand standards that better reflect the post-9/11 world.

On Monday, the federal nuclear regulators issued new defense standards for the nation's 101 nuclear plants. This update was meant to incorporate the lessons of the 9/11 terror attacks, and it's clear the new "Design Basis Threat" does offer some modest improvements over past planning.

For instance, the commission will now require nuclear plant operators to plan for would-be attackers who would risk or even welcome their own deaths. The new guidelines also ask plant operators to prepare for coordinated attacks that could come from multiple directions, including the sea and even cyberspace. So far, so good.

And we don't pretend to know everything; our security clearances aren't that good. The details of the standards adopted Monday were kept from public scrutiny, as they must be.

But what we do know isn't all that comforting. While the new standards require protection from land, sea and Internet, they don't require nuclear-plant operators to address one very real, very 9/11 threat: that posed by a commercial airliner converted into a jet-powered weapon. For North County, especially, this is a major concern: The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is directly below one of the busiest air corridors in the nation.

The commission deferred to "other federal agencies, including the military," the responsibility for defending against such airborne attacks. Those who remember the belatedly scrambled fighter jets on 9/11 can't help but hope that our response time has vastly improved since then. Perhaps San Onofre, on the northern edge of Camp Pendleton, is better prepared to fend off aerial assaults than is readily apparent. Again, we sincerely hope so.

Among the proposals for air defense that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission dismissed Monday was something called "Beamhenge," which isn't as loopy as it sounds. Essentially a steel-and-cable cage surrounding the nuclear plant, this proposal gained the support of eight state attorneys general and promised an impact-absorbing buffer around the reactors and spent-fuel pools. We don't know if it would have worked, frankly, but an ounce of prevention -- even a very expensive ounce, in this case -- can be worth a ton of nuclear catastrophe "cure."

Still, the commission sounds too confident for our comfort in after-the-fact responses in a worst-case scenario. "Even in the unlikely event of a radiological release due to a terrorist use of a large aircraft against a nuclear power plant, the studies indicate that there would be time to implement the required onsite mitigating actions," reads the commission's unclassified summary.

It's hard to overstate this point: Any successful attack on San Onofre is not something we can afford to "mitigate."

San Onofre's primary owner, Southern California Edison, touts the significant funds it has sunk into security since 9/11 -- more than $80 million, a spokesman told reporter Gig Conaughton. You can see some results when you're driving into Orange County on Interstate 5: new fences, steel-encased guard posts and concrete barriers.

Less visible are the aboveground concrete buildings wherein lie the radioactive fuel rods generated as waste by the plant's operation. More than 1,000 metric tons of this "spent" fuel sits in pools -- which are far more vulnerable than the concrete-encased nuclear reactors themselves -- cooling before it can be stored in safer, dry casks. That waste isn't going anywhere anytime soon, as political opposition seems to have all but killed the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada.

The federal regulators say the new Design Basis Threat plans are but one part of a comprehensive overhaul of nuclear power plant security; more revisions are on the way. Furthermore, the commission can expect some hard questioning from Sen. Barbara Boxer, the new chairwoman of the Senate committee that oversees the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. On Friday, Boxer specifically asked the commission to require protections against threats from above. Now, she and other leaders have a chance to demand better answers.

We pray San Onofre's defenses are up to any challenge. Congress has a chance to improve upon the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's good start in helping us rest easier.

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