Report: Nuclear waste a terror threat

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, April 6, 2005 | 10:56 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Pools of nuclear waste stored at nuclear power plants should be considered attractive targets for terrorists, a National Academy of Sciences report released today warns.

Security threats are a top argument to eventually move waste to the proposed nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, but Nevada's congressional delegation and other critics point to security problems with moving waste from reactor sites across the country to Nevada.

Congress asked the academy to study spent fuel storage after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The academy sent the classified report to Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year, and released a public version of the report today.

Some text has been reworded or redacted to protect national security, according to the report, but the public version includes the same findings and recommendations.

The academy's Board on Radioactive Waste Management found that pools of spent fuel should not be dismissed as terrorist targets "because it is not possible to predict the behavior and motivations of terrorists, and because the attractiveness of spent fuel as a terrorist target given the well-known public dread of radiation."

The committee that wrote the report said terrorists might choose the pools because they are "less well-protected structurally than reactor cores and they typically contain inventories of medium- and long- lived radionuclides that are several times greater than those contained in individual reactor cores."

The committee doubted terrorists could steal fuel from a reactor site, mainly because the fuel is so heavy and radioactive that it would be hard to move. Members recommended the commission review and upgrade security requirements for protecting fuel pools and study what would happen if the water was drained.

Dry cask storage, where waste is removed from the pools and put into hardened containers on the grounds of the nuclear plants, is better because it would break up the waste collection into smaller amounts of fuel and less radiation, according to the report.

But the committee also acknowledged that reactor sites need pools to cool off fuel before putting it into dry storage.

NRC Chairman Nils Diaz sent a letter to Congress last month outlining his concerns about the classified version of the report.

Diaz maintains that fuel pools are safe and made clear that the commission disagreed with the report's findings in several areas and felt "they lacked a sound technical basis."

"The NRC will continue to evaluate the results of the ongoing plant-specific assessments and, based upon new information, would evaluate whether any change to its spent fuel storage policy is warranted," Diaz said.

The government and the nuclear industry say storing the waste on-site at the nuclear reactors is safe, but only as a short-term solution. On-site storage is not designed to store waste safely for thousands of years like a geologic disposal site, such as the one proposed at Yucca.

But critics insist that moving the waste will just create "mobile Chernobyls" and moving terrorists targets throughout the nation. They also insist that as long as nuclear power use continues, waste will remain in fuel pools at the sites of nuclear reactors because it can not be moved to Yucca or any other central storage site immediately.