>And how safe would you feel if al-Qaida took control of a nuclear
>state, given their stated views about the West and unbelievers in general?
I forgot to add a couple of points to my reply to Dennis P. (see my post titled "Rational Discussion of Threats of Right-Wing Networks out of Power"). As they constitute topics worthy of extended discussion in their own rights, I'll elaborate on them here.
(1) The USA as the Preeminent Nuclear Power
The US government remains the only one in history that has ever used nuclear bombs. It has the best stockpile of the most powerful nuclear bombs & the most sophisticated delivery systems in the world. Moreover, many Americans defend the US government's use of A-bombs on civilians in Japan even today, and some of them even go so far as to publicly advocate the use of "tactical" nukes. Given this, people in the world have more reasons to fear the USA as the preeminent nuclear power than any other government or social force.
(2) Nuclear power plants in the USA
It would make more sense to worry about accidents at & terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants in the USA than a remote possibility of Al Qaeda & the like getting a hold of & actually using nukes:
***** The New York Times December 8, 2001, Saturday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section D; Page 5; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk HEADLINE: Indian Point Faces Scrutiny After Some Crews Fail Tests BYLINE: By MATTHEW L. WALD DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 7
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said today that it would immediately increase scrutiny of the Indian Point 2 nuclear reactor because four control room crews had failed to pass their annual requalification tests, signaling "substantial" safety concerns.
The crews failed to react properly in four accident drills over the last three months. Two of the drills called for procedures that were also needed in recent accidents at the plant, in Buchanan, N.Y., the N.R.C. said. The tests were administered by the plant owner, Entergy Nuclear, in a control room simulator. But today, the N.R.C. took the unusual step of sending its testers to examine one of the crews itself.
N.R.C. specialists will conduct random surveillance in the plant's control room, said a spokesman for the agency, Neil A. Sheehan, and the agency may increase its involvement in other ways.
Entergy Nuclear said that two of the crews failed because the company had made the exam tougher.
The tests suggest that nuclear plants are not as safe as utilities think they are, said a nuclear engineer familiar with the results. But he added that the lapses were not serious enough to cause a meltdown.
The engineer, David Lochbaum, works for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that often criticizes nuclear plants as unsafe.
"The risk assessments that are done assume that the operators are going to be right 90-something percent of the time, and that they don't make mistakes," Mr. Lochbaum said.
Entergy bought the plant on Sept. 6 from Consolidated Edison. Jim Steets, a spokesman for the plant, said some management changes had been made in response to the training problems.
In a letter to Entergy dated Wednesday, the commission said, "The deficiencies identified during the exams reflected the potential inability of the crew to take appropriate safety-related actions in response to actual abnormal or emergency conditions."
Indian Point 2 has five operating crews, who run the control room in rotating shifts, and two "staff crews," operators who fill in for vacationing or sick employees, Mr. Steets said. In all, 44 operators were tested. The workers who failed the tests, working in teams of five to seven, have since had remedial training, the N.R.C. said. Ten failed as individual operators in addition to their team failures, the agency said.
The tests are given in the simulator, a control room with the same screens, switches and gauges as the real one, but connected to a computer instead of a reactor.
In one simulated emergency, an equipment failure should have triggered an automatic start of the emergency core cooling system, but it did not do so. The crew failed to manually start the system promptly, the N.R.C. said.
In a second simulated emergency, the emergency core cooling system started in response to a major pipe leak. At first, the system draws water from a refueling water storage tank, but before that supply is exhausted, operators are supposed to set up the system to draw from the leaking water collecting in the basement of the reactor building. The crew did not do so, the commission found.
In another scenario, some control room instruments lost power. The crew did not restore power fast enough, the N.R.C. said, referring to the incident as a "competency failure." A similar situation occurred at Indian Point 2 in August 1999, when the power supply to some instruments was lost but a battery picked up the load. The operators failed to correct the problem before the battery ran down, hours later.
The last scenario involved controlling the pressure in a steam generator, which can be a critical task after a leak in the generator. The plant had such a leak in February 2000 and it kept it shut for a year.
In the drill, the crew members being tested took 25 minutes to realize that a valve they thought was open was actually closed.
Mr. Lochbaum described the errors as "more steps down the Three Mile Island pathway." That accident, in March 1979, began with a common mechanical failure but was aggravated by controller error, in part because of inadequate training.
GRAPHIC: Photo: Four of seven crews at the Indian Point 2 nuclear plant, in Buchanan, N.Y., failed their requalification tests. (Richard L. Harbus for The New York Times) *****
***** The New York Times November 24, 2001, Saturday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk HEADLINE: Residents Near Indian Point Plant Question Evacuation Plans BYLINE: By ROBERT F. WORTH
Before Sept. 11, people in New York City's northern suburbs used to crack jokes about the booklet they were mailed every year telling them what to do in the event of a disaster at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, about 30 miles north of the city on the Hudson River. With its colored maps and refrigerator magnet cheerfully reminding people where to go to escape radioactive fallout, the booklet seemed too absurd -- and the threat too unlikely -- to be frightening.
No one is laughing now. Over the last two months, residents and elected officials have been asking what would happen if terrorists were to strike Indian Point, in Buchanan, N.Y., where two operating reactors and three spent fuel pools sit in the most densely populated area around any nuclear plant in the country. Many say the government's evacuation plans are wildly impractical and could not even protect people who live close to the plant in the event of a major release of radiation, much less the 20 million people who live within a 50-mile radius. The concern is prompting not just widespread worries about the evacuation plan but also something more: the most serious groundswell since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 in favor of shutting down the plants.
Federal officials say a successful terrorist attack is exceedingly unlikely, and the Indian Point emergency plans, which involve the possible evacuation of people up to 10 miles downwind of the plant, have been approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, like those at the country's 81 other reactor sites. The plant has been heavily guarded since Sept. 11, with fatigue-clad National Guard troops standing watch and Coast Guard cutters patrolling the Hudson.
But those assurances mean little to the parents who want to know how they would find their children if a cloud of deadly radiation were to spread across the suburbs.
Under the emergency plan, officials in Westchester, Putnam, Rockland and Orange Counties would respond either by telling people to remain in their houses with the doors and windows closed, waiting for the radiation cloud to pass over, or evacuate. If an evacuation were to occur, the counties would begin by sending fleets of buses to pick up schoolchildren and people without cars within the evacuation zone and take them to reception centers beyond the 10-mile zone. Sirens and radio alerts would not start for the general public until after the evacuation of the children had begun, so that roads would remain clear for the buses, said Anthony Sutton, deputy commissioner of the Westchester County Department of Emergency Management.
Many parents and officials say word of a disaster would surely leak out before the evacuation plan could get going and the roads -- many of them clogged under normal circumstances -- would be packed with panicked drivers.
"The roads are jammed on ordinary days, and parents have told us that they would not wait and see if the bus drivers were willing to pick up their kids," said Michael B. Kaplowitz, a Westchester County legislator.
Residents cited other concerns. "At some point I will have children in three different schools, going to three different reception areas," said Lisa Rodrigues, the president of the Lakeland School Board, whose district is partly within the 10-mile emergency planning zone. "Which one do I go to first?"
There are no plans for summer, when children are at local summer camps, she added. Also, most of the Lakeland district's bus drivers are women, yet women of child-bearing age are not allowed to participate in the evacuation.
In neighboring Putnam County, the evacuation route takes some people straight north into Dutchess County, and then back south to reception centers in the eastern part of Putnam -- where they might be directly in the path of radiation.
Even Alfred B. Del Bello, who helped write the original emergency plan as Westchester County executive in the early 1980's after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, said, "It doesn't work."
Mr. Del Bello, who also was New York State's lieutenant governor, added, "For the first time, I'm really worried about the plant."
The federal government also runs periodic tests of emergency readiness within what is called a 50-mile "ingestion plume pathway," where radiation levels are expected to be lower. Evacuation might be necessary in that broader area, which in Indian Point's case includes New York City, the reservoirs that supply its drinking water and parts of three other states. But because officials have always assumed that there would be more time for such a wider evacuation, it is not part of the emergency plan.
Doubts about the evacuation plan have contributed to a growing tide of fear over the last two months. Hundreds of parents have crowded into PTA meetings convened to discuss a possible evacuation, and many want potassium iodide, which was helpful in reducing thyroid cancer among children exposed to radiation during the Chernobyl accident in 1986, said Dr. Marjorie E. Castro, the superintendent of the Croton-Harmon school district, located a few miles from Indian Point. A number of local groups have flowered overnight to urge the plant's closing, including one that boasts a Web site with a lurid map showing the plant at the center of a 50-mile-wide blood-red circle.
Local and state officials say the fears are exaggerated. "The plan keeps getting revised and upgraded," said Donald L. Maurer, a spokesman for the New York State Emergency Management Office. "Every time the roads change, we look at our ability to evacuate people safely."
Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Corporation, which owns the Indian Point plant, said the emergency plan did consider a worst-case scenario, and that even a severe accident or attack might not result in a serious release of radiation.
But Mr. Maurer and the county officials who maintain the plan conceded that it was designed to handle a nuclear accident rather than a sudden and devastating terrorist attack. And they said there were a number of risks in the plan, like the possibility that children with cellphones would alert their parents as soon as the evacuation began, quashing the county's hopes to keep the roads clear.
Lurking behind all these concerns is a broader worry. "The public gets hysterical about nuclear contamination," said William Waugh, a professor of public administration at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who has studied evacuation procedures. "Any sort of reasoned evacuation would probably not be possible at all, because everyone would run like hell."
That possibility has led many to question having a nuclear plant so close to New York City in the first place. And it is not the first time that the issue has been raised: in 1979, after the Three Mile Island meltdown, Robert Ryan, the director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Office of State Programs, said, "I think it is insane to have a three-unit reactor on the Hudson River in Westchester County, 40 miles from Times Square, 20 miles from the Bronx."
He added that it was "a nightmare from the point of view of emergency preparedness."
Emergency planning measures were strengthened throughout the country after the Three Mile island accident, and worries about the plant's proximity to New York faded gradually over the next two decades. But the need for viable evacuation plans remained a concern. In the 1980's, surveys on Long Island suggested that an accident at the Shoreham nuclear power plant would cause people well beyond the 10-mile zone to flee, and the plant was closed after officials concluded that no safe evacuation would be possible.
Now the fear of terrorism is spurring elected officials throughout the region to raise similar questions about Indian Point. Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesmen have said that they are revising the threats on which their emergency plans are based, and do not know if a nuclear plant could withstand a suicide attack by commercial jets. Some nuclear analysts have said that in a worst-case scenario, a meltdown at Indian Point could spread clouds of radiation to New York City and beyond, if the winds were right.
Some residents' fears have been further inflamed by Entergy's proposal last week to build eight gas-fired power plants only a quarter mile from the Indian Point reactors. The combination of combustible gas and radioactive waste, they say, will only heighten the danger.
Worries about evacuation were among the concerns cited by four members of Congress and a number of state and local politicians who signed a petition two weeks ago urging the N.R.C. to close the Indian Point plant until its safety can be guaranteed. Some others, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, have called for the emergency planning zone to be extended from 10 to 50 miles. But no one has proposed any clear ideas on how to carry out an evacuation in such a densely populated area.
As for evacuating New York City, Mr. Maurer said, with a sigh, "It would be a challenge."
GRAPHIC: Photo: Indian Point, on high alert since Sept. 11, can be seen from the train station in Peekskill, N.Y. (Chris Ramirez for The New York Times)(pg. D1)
Map of New York highlighting Indian Point: Indian Point, on the Hudson River, sits in a densely populated area. (pg. D4) *****
Decommission and clean them all up ASAP. -- Yoshie
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