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Still, politicians from both parties question whether the NRC has done enough. Eight state attorneys general recently petitioned the NRC to require more security. The standard for protecting nuclear plants "remains essentially what it was in the 1970s," said one of their filings, sent to the NRC by New York's Eliot Spitzer. The NRC needs to bolster security at power plants "to reflect the realities of 2005, beginning with an immediate recognition of what we all learned on September...
...face of industry opposition. One bill would have required plants to defend themselves against a 9/11-size enemy force, perhaps aided by air-and-water-based attacks. Another would have created a federal Nuclear Security Force and a 20-member mock terrorist team to test the plants regularly, The NRC and industry representatives argued against such a federalized force on the ground that the close cooperation between plant operators and guards would be lost if federal employees were protecting the plants. "That would actually create almost a barrier between security and safety," Diaz tells TIME...
...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...
Some nuclear-security officials privately call the design-basis threat a "funding basis threat," suggesting the threat has been scaled back to meet the bottom line of what the industry was willing to pay for security. "The NRC is basically saying that what they're doing is as much as you can expect private industry to pay for," says Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group...
Even if the current security standards are sufficient, there is some question as to whether they will be properly enforced. Last year the NRC approved the NEI's request to hire the Wackenhut Corp. to test security at the nation's plants. Such exercises--suspended after 9/11, pending improvements--resumed last fall. Each plant is to be tested once every three years, which means the British-owned Wackenhut is running fake attacks twice a month...