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CNN Live Sunday

Heightened Security Alert at Nuclear Power Plants

Aired October 21, 2001 - 15:42   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The nation's nuclear power plants have been under heightened alert since the September 11 terrorist attacks. National Guard troops have been deployed for surveillance of reactors in New York and other States.

CNN's Bill Delaney has a close look at this now -- nuclear plant security.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL DELANEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The pre-dawn shift change at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant along the New Hampshire coast. On high alert, like all the country's 103 nuclear plants, more perimeter security, public access severely restricted. How much security though is enough.

(on camera): Every nuclear power plant has a security force, well trained, well armed. But according to a new study by the Project on Government Oversight, government exercises conducted in recent years to challenge plant security repeatedly breached plant security at nuclear power plants around the country.

(voice-over): Some experts now also worry about an attack from the air. At a nuclear plant like Indian Point, north of New York City. And attack there potentially causing a radioactive cloud for hundreds of miles, more devastating than even jets hitting the World Trade Center.

GORDON THOMPSON, INST. FOR RESOURCE & SECURITY STUDIES: They're not designed to withstand the impact of commercial aircraft. They'd be a radioactive plume. The plume would contaminate vast areas downwind. And people could then have fatal cancers for decades thereafter.

DELANEY: Power plant security, the nuclear industry says, is intense, sophisticated. Power plant buildings as fortified as any on earth. Many were designed, like Seabrook, when commercial jets weren't as large as now. Though officials say Seabrook could withstand the jets that hit the World Trade Center.

ALLEN GRIFFITH, SEABROOK POWER: We are in daily contact with local, state, federal law enforcement agencies, so that we are making decisions that are based on real-time information and intelligence. So we're very confident that we have a safe and secure installation here at Seabrook.

DELANEY: Seabrook officials do acknowledge their reactor core is more protected than nuclear waste, spent fuel. The waste pool is 30 fortified feet underground, but nuclear power experts, like Gordon Thompson say, even that's not good enough to protect spent fuel, which is any nuclear plant's most radioactive substance.

Spent fuel could ignite, critics say, spreading radiation or water that cools is, drained off, as a result say of the crash of a big commercial jet.

THOMPSON: Best approach is to protect the spent fuel, which is the biggest hazard by transferring it rapidly as possible from the pools where it can catch fire if water is lost, to highly secure casks dispersed across the reactor sites and protected by earth burns.

DELANEY: Measures nuclear critics hope now may get more attention at proposed congressional hearings on nuclear plant safety.

For now though, formidable as nuclear power plants are, alleged vulnerabilities, too.

Bill Delaney, CNN, Seabrook, New Hampshire.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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