Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...break through fences by using bolt cutters or Bangalore torpedoes, pipe-shaped explosives developed by the British army in India nearly a century ago. The terrorists would blast through outer walls using platter charges, directed explosives developed during World War II, giving them access to the heart of the plant. They would use gun-mounted lasers and infrared devices to blind the plant's cameras, and electronic jammers to paralyze communications among its defenders. They would probably be armed with precious information--hand-drawn maps, drawings of control panels, weak spots in the site's defenses--provided by a covert...
...spend a minute or two carefully flipping, disabling and breaking specific controls and switches, shutting down pumps and operating key valves. It 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...
...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 in fail-safe mechanisms that would prevent a saboteur from engineering a catastrophe. As a result, says Paul Blanch, a nuclear-safety...
...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...
Space and occupancy costs are “probably up,” Berman said in March, attributing the increase to a “tough winter” that drove up energy expenses. Other costs increase with square footage as Harvard’s physical plant grows...