The enemies within
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15249&CFID=8110341&CFTOKEN=85423533
The enemies within
Nuclear facilities around the country pose grave risks --
terrorists or no terrorists
Alexander Cockburn - Creators Syndicate
07.02.03 - Snoozing guards at Los Alamos, missing vials of plutonium
oxides ... yes, the headlines in late June were announcing
"security lapses" again at national labs and nuclear weapons
plants. It seems that an Al Qaeda terrorist could roll up to the gates
of the Sandia labs, haul out an RPG and catch America napping yet
again. Sounding all brisk and efficient, Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham acknowledged a recent critical report from the General
Accounting Office and has taken standard evasive action, in the form
of that whiskered veteran of bureaucratic ass-covering, the
"security review." At Sandia National Labs, Dave Nokes, vice
president for national security, was picked as the sacrificial goat
and forced to resign.
The mess at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico has had its humorous
side. Los Alamos equipment buyer Lillian Anaya thought she was
ordering $30,000 worth of transducers. But she dialed a number that
had been changed from an industrial equipment dealer to an auto parts
shop and wound up buying a Mustang with government money instead. Or
so say Los Alamos and University of California investigators, who
recently cleared Anaya of any wrongdoing (though I still don't quite
understand why she got the Mustang).
Let's get back to the larger picture. Who do they think they're
kidding? To talk about terrorist opportunity offered by slack security
just at Los Alamos and Livermore is like saying that hijackers would
try to board planes only at Logan and Atlanta. There's scarcely a
state in the union that hasn't got tanks or barrels of nuclear waste,
or decommissioned reactors saturated with radioactive materials. Most
interstates carry trucks hauling mobile Chernobyls around the country.
We're talking 60 years of U.S. nuclear weapons research, development,
testing and production, which has left us with staggering amounts of
some of the most dangerous substances on the planet. And that's not
even to mention the nuclear utilities.
The "security" scene doesn't change rapidly when it comes to
nuclear materials and waste. All you can do is try to store
radioactivity safely and wait for the millennia to roll by until it
naturally decays. But, of, course, it's mostly stored in extremely
unsafe and vulnerable conditions.
You live in Texas? There's the Pantex plant, producing nuclear
weapons. In Colorado? You've got Rocky Flats. Flee to the clean
breezes of the Pacific Northwest? Whoa! Here's the Hanford nuclear
reservation, with its 177 waste tanks, upward of 67 of them known to
have leaked, each containing a million gallons of radioactive waste.
How about Idaho? Camp in the hills, cheek by jowl with the militia
holdouts. Sorry, you've got the National Engineering Lab up the road,
where intensely radioactive waste was converted to dry form for
"permanent" storage nearly 40 years ago but now has to be
extracted and repackaged.
Head for the heartland, and you'll find the Fernald plant in Ohio,
whose career history includes cumulative "release" of at
least 500 tons of toxic uranium dust, kept secret through most of the
1980s. Turn south into Kentucky, and there, across the horizon, is the
Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Watch where you drink. A 1,300-acre
underground plume of technetium-99 (a uranium decay product) is
migrating toward the Ohio River at the rate of several inches a day.
The Department of Energy (DOE) has identified more than 5,700 such
plumes of various kinds of contamination under or near its sites
across the country. Head for the densely populated research triangle
of North Carolina. Walk along the railroad tracks, and in the end you
come to the Shearon Harris plant, a nuclear-power-generating station
where they take spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants owned by
Progress Energy and store them in four densely packed pools filled
with circulating cold water to keep the waste from heating up.
They're the largest radioactive waste storage pools in the country.
Even the Department of Homeland Security acknowledges Shearon Harris
as a ripe terror target. If your Al Qaeda operative found a way to
interrupt the flow of cooling water, you'd have unstoppable pool fires
and possibly a plant meltdown, with consequent peril for 2 million
people residing in that part of the state. The Nuclear Regulatory
Commission reckons that on a best-case basis there's a 1 in 100 chance
of a pool fire. And needless to say, there have been scores of
screw-ups at Shearon Harris, in the form of emergency shutdowns,
failures of safety monitoring systems (15 since the plant opened in
1987), rubber and other foreign material clogging the cooling
lines.
Get the picture? Shearon Harris is a really dangerous place, and if
you read all the security assessments and reports of past lapses, plus
Tom Ridge's bleak warning, no doubt monitored by America's foes, you
can see that -- as with Hanford and all the other nuclear waste dumps
-- it wouldn't take much for a dedicated little crew of terrorists to
inflict monstrous disaster, disaster that might well come anyway
through sheer native laxity, without Al Qaeda having to lift a
finger.
And don't forget, we're heading for a new phase in the itinerary to
Armageddon. The DOE now proposes building a new plant to manufacture
450 plutonium "pits" (nuclear triggers) a year. Function? To
arm the mini-nuke bunker busters scheduled under the Bush
Administration's new nuclear strategy. Los Alamos is bidding for it,
as is Carlsbad, New Mexico, Savannah River in South Carolina, the
Nevada test site and Pantex.
Since the government has been doing its best down the years to damp
troublesome public discussion of these dangers, concerned citizens
should take advantage of the current sensitivity to weapons of mass
destruction, which places like Shearon Harris most certainly are.
There are dedicated groups across the United States that have been
active for decades on issues of nuclear safety and have generated the
information offered here.
Now that he's stepped down from his U.N. job, why not have a
nonprofit foundation invite Hans Blix and a few other veteran
inspectors to start touring the United States, assessing the risks
posed by WMDs here? They could make well-publicized "surprise
inspections," hold hearings, take evidence from local groups,
issue public reports and build up pressure on the Department of
Homeland Security to force the government to get serious about
containing America's gravest and most deadly internal threat.