Word: doe
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That isn't some wild-eyed fantasy but what some experts fear is a realistic scenario. Many of the terrorists' tactics depicted here are taken from a Department of Energy (DOE) training video for guards at nuclear facilities. The control-room plot is based on the concerns of veterans from the nuclear industry. Physicist Kenneth Bergeron, who spent most of 25 years at Sandia National Laboratories researching nuclear-reactor safety, says plant operators focus security efforts on keeping bad guys out. They assume that no one with malicious intent will wind up at the controls and thus do not build...
...nuclear industry absorbed the lessons of 9/11 and made sufficient adjustments to the way plants are guarded? The DOE, which controls the 11 sites that house nuclear weapons and the materials used to 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...
...industry's lobbying arm. Numbers at specific locations aren't available, but that works out to roughly 80 per reactor. Broken down into four shifts, that's an average of 20 guards available to work at any one time. U.S. security officials at the Pentagon and the DOE say that is too small a number to take on a motivated group of suicidal terrorists who probably would be outfitted with weapons deadlier than the rifles used by guards...
...between the security standards at DOE nuclear sites and those at the commercial plants overseen by the NRC adds fuel to the argument over what is prudent. In the wake of 9/11, the DOE boosted by 300% the size of the terrorist force its guards must be able to defend against. The DOE's DBT is classified, but experts inside and outside the government say it requires guards to defeat a 9/11-size force. While DOE sites are more sensitive than private ones, since they house nuclear weapons and their key components, the impact of a terrorist strike on either could...
...involved in this because we believe there is a market," says Riisgaard, though he thinks a large bioethanol industry is still years away. With more funds from the DOE, Novozymes will supply enzymes for a bioethanol plant to be built in Nebraska next year by a subsidiary of the Spanish firm Abengoa. More than a few people in Washington will be watching. --By Unmesh Kher. Reported by Ulla Plon/Copenhagen