Word: defendable
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...build them, has significantly improved its standards. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which oversees 103 reactors run by private operators at 64 sites across 31 states, says it has too. "What is in place right now is sufficient to give us confidence that these plants will be able to defend themselves," NRC chairman Nils Diaz tells TIME. But a tightly held NRC document reviewed by TIME raises serious questions about whether the government has set the bar too low and allowed plant operators to skimp on security. Many guards working in nuclear plants and some senior security experts working...
...case, the NRC does not require plant operators to defend against air attacks. A California antinuclear group, the Committee to Bridge the Gap, recently asked the NRC to order that shields of I-beams and steel cables be built around nuclear plants to stop airplanes from crashing into them. Antiaircraft batteries and the troops to operate them would also help but could pose hazards to innocent aircraft drifting off course. NRC officials say the likelihood of installing missiles or shields is virtually nil. The agency believes the place to thwart an aerial-attack plot is at the airport...
Another issue is the lack of imagination in the scenarios used for training guards at private plants. TIME is refraining from publishing DBT specifics on the weapons that nuclear plants must defend against, but the relatively small arsenal that the NRC gives the "attackers" in its drills doesn't impress Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican. The DBT attack force is barred from using many of the weapons detailed in the opening scenario of this story, but, says the Congressman, "if I were a terrorist, I'd feel more than free to use them." The agency doesn't require defenses...
...told "to keep my mouth shut, that nothing was going to change." Since the plant's post-9/11 security plan took effect last fall, she tells TIME, there have been 29 in-house classroom exercises--with members of the guard force split into groups of "attackers" and "defenders"--designed to show how well the guards could defend the plant from terrorist attacks. "We won only one out of 29 tabletop drills using the new defensive plan," she says. "The attackers won 28." A senior Wackenhut official, who said "there is no win-lose ratio kept on these types...
...9/11 to keep troublemakers out. Potential employees are screened through numerous databases, checked for, among other things, mental-health problems, criminal records and questionable behavior in previous jobs. The NRC's confidence in its "insider mitigation program" is so high that the DBT specifically rules out the need to defend against an "active violent insider"--a turncoat employee willing to shoot and kill fellow workers. The DBT does consider the possibility of a single, nonviolent insider working with the terrorists...