Word: reactor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...meltdown. They would 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...
...terrorists' tactics depicted 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...
That al-Qaeda has eyed U.S. reactors is known. U.S. officials say Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the captured architect of the 9/11 attacks, has told interrogators that his original plan was to have some of his pilots fly commandeered airplanes into nuclear power plants. According to the final report of the 9/11 commission, Atta, pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, "had considered targeting a nuclear facility he had seen during familiarization flights near New York." At the dawn of the Iraq war in 2003, Arizona National Guard troops were ordered to the nation...
...Tehran defused the crisis with nimble diplomacy, opening up its facilities to inspection and allowing unannounced and more intrusive inspections of its nuclear sites. That's not enough for the Europeans, and particularly the Americans, who insist on Iran abandoning all enrichment activity and making do with low-grade reactor fuel imported from Europe. (The concern is that enrichment is a route to bomb material - low levels of enrichment make reactor fuel, but much higher levels can create bomb-grade material.) Iran rejects this offer, refusing to make its nuclear energy program dependent on the goodwill of outsiders. Tehran insists...
...with the U.S., South Korea, China, Japan and Russia on dismantling its nuclear program, and is sticking instead to its familiar diplomatic tactics of ambiguity and provocation. Last week, North Korea jangled nerves around the region again by announcing it had unloaded 8,000 fuel rods at its Yongbyon reactor?a step that would allow it to harvest more weapons-grade plutonium for a stockpile already estimated at up to eight weapons. The North lobbed a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan (or East Sea) earlier this month. And U.S. officials have been warning that spy satellites have...