At least I wasn’t glowing. The electronic “friskers” turned up insignificant contamination, and the meter on a chain around my neck showed I’d been exposed to only 1.4 millirems of radiation, less than a sixth of a basic X-ray. “Move to the wall and cut your dosage in half!” Kevin, the health-physics technician, yelled above the din of the reactor. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure I didn’t drop that pen.
It isn’t easy to get into a nuclear power plant these days, for either terrorists or journalists. My visit this month to Indian Point, 30 miles north of New York City, was both reassuring and disturbing. The good news is how small the odds are that we’ll all be irradiated from a nuclear plant, and the scrupulous emphasis on safety I found. The bad news is that “safety” and “security” are not identical, and the embattled nuclear industry–fearful of giving ammo to the critics–won’t admit to at least one clear vulnerability to terrorists and take a relatively simple step to fix it.
Before September 11, nuclear power–clean and green–seemed to be making a comeback as an alternative energy source. Now it’s under attack, especially at places like Indian Point, which some genius in the 1960s located amid millions of people. While no nuclear bomb can be made from the fuel at a power plant, audacious terrorists might target a plant anyway. Rudimentary maps of nuclear facilities were found in abandoned caves in Afghanistan.
Unfortunately for the industry, radiation and terrorism make for a potent fear cocktail. They’re both invisible–until it’s too late. “The psychological impact is so overwhelming that we sometimes get paralyzed about what we can do,” says Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund, who argues that the potassium-iodide pills now being distributed to residents within 10 miles of American nuclear plants (they help prevent thyroid cancer in children) belong in everyone’s medicine cabinet.
But those pills are for a specific kind of radioactive iodine released from reactors, and reactors themselves may not be the big problem. They’re “hardened targets,” protected by 16 feet of concrete, a “missile shield” and backup cooling tanks with 600,000 gallons of water. An engineering debate has erupted over what damage a big airliner could do to the containment shell (a small plane would crumple on impact). The pro-nuke engineers say a 747 would have to hit at the perfect angle just to penetrate, and that even if it did, the fireball would ventilate upward and not cause the reactor below to melt down. The anti-nuke types say that is overly optimistic conjecture, with no tests to back it up. Neither side can be trusted not to shade the argument.
At least the containment facility that houses the reactor was designed to be protected. Unless you include beefed-up perimeter security after 9-11, the same cannot be said of the nearby “spent fuel pools”–the 38-foot-deep pools with no hardened dome that house the depleted “fuel-rod assemblies” removed from the reactor. Indian Point’s three pools are in bedrock. But at many other nuclear plants (I won’t tell you which ones), the pools are above ground level. As Frank von Hipple of Princeton explained to me, if the water is somehow drained, the rods could ignite in a horrendous zirconium fire, releasing cesium-137 that would render hundreds of square miles uninhabitable for generations–a horror no pill could help. The odds are very low, but not low enough.
Closing nuclear plants wouldn’t prevent this disaster, because all rods must stay in the pools for at least five years. But across the United States, older rods are stacking up, awaiting permanent storage in Nevada. The Indian Point pool I visited contained twice as many rods as the facility was designed for. The industry considers this “re-racking” safe enough, but critics are persuasive in explaining how such density increases the fire hazard.
Fortunately, there’s a way out–an interim storage solution that would increase security. It’s called “dry casking”–encasing the older rods in metal and separating them. To relieve overcrowding, the industry is already moving toward dry casking. But not fast enough. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to insist on accelerating the dry-casking process (at relatively low cost) means acknowledging there’s a security problem. In a highly charged political climate, no supporters of nuclear power want to do that. Now even the Homer Simpsons among us must insist upon it.
