Word: reactor
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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...
...limitation is the number of guards. The total protecting the nation's nuclear plants is 8,000, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry's lobbying arm. Numbers at specific locations aren't available, but that works out to roughly 80 per reactor. Broken down into four shifts, that's an average of 20 guards available to work at any one time. U.S. security officials at the Pentagon and the DOE say that is too small a number to take on a motivated group of suicidal terrorists who probably would be outfitted with weapons deadlier than the rifles...
...York area would have to be permanently relocated, and economic losses could top $2 trillion. Lyman's study echoes the findings of one done by the Sandia National Laboratories for the NRC in 1982 that said as many as 50,000 early deaths could be caused by a reactor accident at Indian Point...