Word: lochbaum
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...Concerns about Indian Point grew after 9/11, when it was noted that American Airlines Flight 11 flew almost directly over Indian Point on its way to the north tower of the World Trade Center. While the plant has been improving its environmental and security record, David Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, contends that federal standards still aren't high enough...
...idea that only a small group of bad guys will go after the plant, and that there will be no aircraft involved," he said. "If that's true, if the bad guys cooperate with our assumptions, then we're OK." If not, he says, the scenario could be grim. Lochbaum cites a report written by his organization that claims a successful assault on Indian Point could result in the immediate deaths of as many as 44,000 people, with nuclear fallout eventually causing cancer in half a million people or more...
...delays in disclosure, according to David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, "raises serious red flags. That's not the way it's supposed to work. The leaks should be stopped immediately and the public should be alerted. But the companies, and I'd say the federal government, have been so distracted with putting up new reactors and new opportunities. The Bush Administration wants an expanded role for nuclear power without first properly expanding the capacity for the nuclear regulators...
...would be a deadly sequence that they had mastered in advance from an accomplice who had probably worked in the control room of the reactor or another plant, maybe abroad. "They'd be trying to cause a loss-of-coolant accident that results in a meltdown," says David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who spent 17 years working in reactors. It may sound farfetched, but Lochbaum says causing a reactor catastrophe is really that simple. "It's irreversible once that last switch is flipped...
...everything went according to the terrorists' plan, radiation could begin spewing into the nighttime sky within 20 minutes, says Lochbaum, now a nuclear-safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear-watchdog group. The lethal plume, drifting hundreds of miles downwind, could kill tens of thousands within a year and hundreds of thousands eventually...