SUSTAINABLE WORLDVIEW
The Bull’s-Eye on Our Back
A new nuclear plant may be nothing but a big bombing target.
By Michael Totten
Adefining security position of the Bush
administration has been a claimed
right to wage preemptive war. The key
target now is Iran, whose aggressive push to
construct a nuclear reactor would give them
the capability to build atomic bombs. Presidential candidate John McCain echoes the
Bush doctrine, remarking repeatedly that he
would not rule out a preemptive military
strike against a threat like Iran. Israel has
demonstrated, with raids in Iraq and Syria,
that reactors make pretty good targets. Proliferation expert Bennett Ramberg, an official
in the George H.W. Bush administration,
noted in 1984 that any nation with nuclear
power plants in effect offers its adversaries a
quasi-nuclear capability to use against it. He
even wrote an influential book about it, titled
Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy:
An Unrecognized Military Peril.
It is all the more puzzling, then, that after
threatening Iran’s nuclear facilities, Sen.
McCain endorsed the rapid construction of 45
nuclear reactors in the United States over the
next two decades, followed by 55 more reactors over the longer term. That would double
the number of operating reactors, which now
generate 20 percent of our electricity.
McCain and other nuclear advocates
ignore the technology’s military peril. They
focus instead on nuclear power as an essential part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That might be acceptable if climate
change were the only peril we face, and if
there weren’t already
a large pool of competitive and profitable
energy options.
Nuclear power
has strong appeal
based on the fact that
one ton of fissile uranium generates as
Michael Totten much power as 20,000
tons of coal. This was
part of the reason
why, in 1973, President Nixon called for constructing 1,000 reactors by 2000. But Wall
Street concluded that nuclear plants posed
higher financial risks to construct and were
more expensive to operate than other
options. And so, for purely financial reasons,
no new nuclear power plant has been ordered
since 1978 (the last new American plant
came on line in 1996).
The Bush administration has fixated on
pushing nuclear power back into the marketplace. The Department of Energy appropriations for nuclear electricity-related research
and development, adjusted for inflation,
totaled $6.2 billion from fiscal year (FY) 2002
through FY2007. This was a 60 percent
growth over six years, and 440 percent more
than was appropriated for all renewable electricity-related research R&D ($1.4 billion).
In FY07 the government spent 20 times more
for nuclear electricity research R&D than for
wind power. Congress was complicit, too: In
2002 they renewed the 1957 Price-Anderson
Nuclear Indemnity Act, a permanent subsidy that puts the burden on taxpayers to
absorb the cost of a catastrophic nuclear accident over $11 billion. According to estimates
prepared for Congress by the Sandia National Laboratory in 1980, a large reactor accident
would cause more than $700 billion in damage (in 2007 dollars).
These funding increases occurred after
9/11 — that is, after all operating reactors
were put on alert against terrorist attacks.
President Bush underscored the danger in
his 2002 State of the Union address. “Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst
fears,” he said. “We have found diagrams of
American nuclear power plants.”
Professor George Bunn, at Stanford University’s Center for International Security
and Cooperation, posed a key question in
the aftermath of the 9/11 attack: “Suppose
that the 19 [World Trade Center airline
hijackers] had formed into teams to drive
four vans with large high-explosive bombs
into the power reactors and spent fuel ponds
for a large nuclear facility. Does any civilian
facility’s design … suggest protection against
such threats?”
FBI Director Robert Mueller, testifying
before the Senate Committee on Intelligence
in 2005, said, “Another area we consider
vulnerable and target-rich is the energy sector, particularly nuclear power plants. Al-Qa’ida planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
had nuclear power plants as part of his target set and we have no reason to believe that
al-Qa’ida has reconsidered.”
A typical 1,000-megawatt reactor contains
more than 15 billion curies (compared to
about 2,000 curies from the Hiroshima atomic bomb’s fallout). In an impact by a wide-body jet or conventional-warhead missile,
the heat and chemical energy contained within a reactor vessel could trigger a release comparable to a 1-megaton ground burst. With
the cooling system destroyed, the radioactive core would melt. That could contaminate
25 million acres (New Jersey and half of New
York, for instance) for 100 to 1,000 years.
HANS F. MEIER 2007/ ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
The nuclear industry wants permits to build 100 new plants. But they would generate elec-
tricity at two to 12 times the cost of efficiency and renewables, take four times longer to build,
and furnish tempting targets for terrorist attack.
Reactors are just one vulnerable part
of the nuclear supply chain. The spent fuel
pool located at any reactor holds about 10
times more long-lived radioactivity than the
reactor core itself. A radioactive release from
such a pool would be catastrophic. One
major concern is the fission product cesium-
137, which comprised 75 percent of the long-term radiological impact of the 1986 Cher-nobyl accident.
Nuclear waste shipments are another, and
easier, terrorist target. Traffic by barge, truck
and rail to the Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada, between 2010 and 2033, is
forecast at nearly 11,000 cask shipments.
Transport routes could traverse 45 states, 700
counties and 50 Indian reservations, with
populations totalling 120 million people.
More than 11 million people live within
