The nuclear industry likes to cite two studies suggesting a deliberate attack by an aircraft could not pierce the containment buildings at nuclear plants.
One of those studies is easy to dismiss. It was sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a lobbyist group for the nuclear industry. The other study — actually, a videotape routinely shown to members of the press who question the issue of nuclear plant vulnerability — shows an F-4 fighter jet slamming into a concrete block at 480 miles per hour. The plane is demolished, but the block remains standing.
After repeated questioning from the press and some senators — as well as criticism from Sandia National Laboratories, which produced the video — the nuclear industry has admitted the film is not relevant to the issue of containment-building vulnerability. The Sandia web site, in fact, clearly states: “The test was not intended to demonstrate the performance (survivability) of any particular type of concrete structure to aircraft impact.”
On the other hand, three reliable and relevant studies — a 1982 work by Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois for the US Department of Energy and the NRC; a 1987 NRC study done at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and more recent computer simulations conducted by German researchers — all show that large jetliners crashing into nuclear facilities could cause situations that would result in the release of radiation.
Counter-terrorism expert Tom Bevan, director of Homeland Defense at Georgia Tech, spent years studying the fallout from the Chernobyl accident. He says that although the technology used at the nuclear plant at Chernobyl is different from that used in the US today, the potential results of a radioactive fire on the area surrounding a nuclear plant remain the same.
“If a reactor catches fire from a load of airplane fuel, then things will go in the atmosphere and spread around,” said Bevan. “It’s not a clean nuclear reaction [such as those] the military studies when they plan how they would respond to these things.”
Based on what happened at Chernobyl, Bevan said, there would be a main zone about 18 miles around the plant where no one could live. Most of the radiation would be concentrated in a zone that stretched 40 or 50 miles out from the plant but, like Chernobyl, a certain percentage of the fallout would spread across the country. What’s worse, if it were raining at the time of the meltdown, high concentrations of radiation would contaminate an area 50-100 miles from the plant.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.
