Word: plantes
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...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...
...pilots crashing planes into reactors provoked sensational headlines after 9/11, studies commissioned by the NRC and the nuclear industry concluded that the chances of an aerial attack producing a major release of radioactivity are low. The NRC believes the concrete-and-steel containment shielding most portions of a nuclear plant would withstand being hit by an airplane. Other experts, including a recent National Academy of Sciences (N.A.S.) panel, disagree, saying the particular design and vulnerabilities of each plant make such blanket assurances meaningless...
...case, the NRC does not require plant operators to defend against air attacks. A California antinuclear group, the Committee to Bridge the Gap, recently asked the NRC to order that shields of I-beams and steel cables be built around nuclear plants to stop airplanes from crashing into them. Antiaircraft batteries and the troops to operate them would also help but could pose hazards to innocent aircraft drifting off course. NRC officials say the likelihood of installing missiles or shields is virtually nil. The agency believes the place to thwart an aerial-attack plot is at the airport...
...terrorists may not need a dramatic skyborne attack to get the job done. They could take over a plant on foot. The key to understanding how the NRC has prepared for such an event is a standard called the design-basis threat, or DBT. The DBT is the regulatory worst-case scenario, the largest threat the NRC requires plants to train its guards to defeat...