Word: plantes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kathy Davidson's experience is any measure, there is a question whether plant security forces could even beat the DBT. Until May, Davidson was the chief guard trainer at Pilgrim Nuclear Station, south of Boston. The 16-year employee says she was fired from her $75,000-a-year job for complaining about poor security at the plant. Wackenhut Corp., the giant security company that employed her, says she was terminated for failing to improve security. "Security at the plant is pathetic," says Davidson. "It's just too confusing." Because there were too few guards, she says, each...
...stakes could scarcely be higher. The toll of the 9/11 attacks would probably pale alongside a successful attack on a nuclear plant near a major metropolitan area. A recent study by Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, estimates that if terrorists triggered a meltdown at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, 35 miles north of New York City, as many as 44,000 people could die from radiation poisoning within a year, and as many as 518,000 could perish eventually from cancers spawned by the attack. Millions of people in the greater New York area...
...able to intentionally provoke a nuclear accident from within a reactor," he says. Stephen Floyd, a vice president of regulatory affairs at the NEI, argues that terrorists wouldn't even try: "It doesn't seem very credible to us that terrorists would launch an attack against a nuclear power plant that's very heavily armed, especially when you look at other facilities that aren't so heavily defended that could cause great harm to the public as well." He points to chemical plants as an example...
...chief says that when it comes to hiring, plant operators are using "a much finer-toothed comb" than before 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...
...some of the enhancements ordered by the NRC after 9/11. The facility is newly ringed with 990 11-ton concrete blocks and $200-a-foot fencing topped with razor wire. Ten new guard towers--some six stories high--give armed guards broad vistas of possible approaches to the plant. "Since 9/11 we have more security officers here, and we've enhanced their weaponry," says Jeff Benjamin, a vice president of Exelon Corp., which operates the plant on the bank of the Susquehanna River. "We have a number of sensors, cameras and lighting," he told a visiting TIME correspondent, declining...