Urgent Action Needed to Protect Reactors from Terrorist Attack. NRC Comment Period Ends Monday, January 24.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has published in the Federal Register a REQUEST FOR comments on a Petition for Rulemaking by the Committee to Bridge the Gap (CBG) to upgrade protections against terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities. Current security regulations are woefully inadequate. The comment period expires January 24. Please take a moment now and submit a comment in support of the DBG rulemaking petition. Comments can be sent via email to SECY@nrc.gov.
The CBG proposal would do two things. First, it would require protection of nuclear facilities against air attack. Astonishingly, three years after 9/11, there still is no such protection. The proposal recommends construction of "Beamhenge" shields, constructed of steel I-beams, with cabling between them, at stand-off distances from sensitive reactor structures, so that an incoming plane crashes into the shield rather than the reactor, spent fuel pool, or critical support facilities, preventing massive radioactive release.
The second component of the Rulemaking Petition is to upgrade the Design Basis Threat (DBT) regulations to require protection against at least the number and capabilities of the attackers on 9/11. Current DBT regulations -- unchanged for a quarter of a century -- require protection against only three attackers on foot, acting as a single team, with weapons no greater than hand-carried automatic weapons, plus the possible assistance of one insider. NRC in 2003 did issue secret "Orders" that marginally increased the DBT, but the legality of doing so in negotiation with the industry while the public was frozen out of the process completely has been challenged in court, and the Commission has conceded that the DBT in the Orders still does not approach 9/11 levels. The Rulemaking Petition would rectify this deficiency by requiring protection against attackers in at least the numbers and with at least the capabilities seen on 9/11. It seems a no-brainer.
The full Petition for Rulemaking and the associated NRC Federal Register notice can be found at http://ruleforum.llnl.gov/cgi-bin/library?source=*&library=ctbg_prm_lib&file=*&st=petitions-a.
Background information can be found in recent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles on the subject at http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2002/jf02/jf02hirsch.html
and http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj03hirsch.
Comments can be submitted to NRC via email at SECY@nrc.gov, or through their website at http://ruleforum.llnl.gov/cgi-bin/library?source=*&library=ctbg_prm_public&file=*&st=petitions-a, or via fax at (310) 415-1011. Put in the subject heading: PRM-73-12.
SEND IN YOUR COMMENT TODAY! Thank you!
Dan Hirsch, Committee to Bridge the Gap
Paul Gunter, NIRS (pgunter@nirs.org)
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