City At Risk 

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On September 11, American Airlines Flight 11 roared over the twin domes of the Indian Point plant. Seven minutes later, the hijacked plane slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

If the NRC's research over the past two decades is any guide, the planes that brought down the Twin Towers were big enough, and traveled fast enough, to have cracked open the concrete containment domes around the Indian Point nuclear reactors, potentially breaching the reactor and, according to at least one study, possibly causing a core meltdown. Because of its proximity to New York City, almost 17 million people, six percent of the US population, live within 50 miles of Indian Point nuclear plant. After September 11, the plant suddenly seemed an ideal target for terrorists. Nuclear watchdog groups in New York started asking questions they'd never thought to ask before. When the answers to their questions were printed in newspapers across the state of New York and neighboring parts of New Jersey, formerly apathetic citizens added their voices to a demand for the shutdown of Indian Point.

A survey conducted in November for an environmental group called Riverkeeper showed just how sorry a state the areas around nuclear plants might be in if they tried to implement their standard 10-mile-zone evacuation plans in the event of a nuclear emergency. The survey showed that a nuclear emergency would likely trigger mass evacuations well beyond the 10-mile radius that governments prepare for, causing bottlenecks and actually blocking in those closest to the plant. [See our accompanying story on local evacuation plans, "Traffic Jam From Hell"

Although some officials and scientists insisted that Indian Point and nuclear plants around the country are safe from attack, New Yorkers who now knew of the NRC's studies weren't buying it.

In February, New York Governor George Pataki asked the federal government to review emergency evacuation plans for all the country's nuclear power plants, including those for the areas surrounding Catawba and McGuire. In the meantime, 27 municipalities around Indian Point, as well as seven members of New York's congressional delegation, have demanded that the plant be shut down. The battle in New York still rages.

The Effect of A CrashBefore September 11, planning for nuclear disaster was probably pretty realistic, given the nuclear industry's decades-old, solid safety record. Not one American death has been directly attributed to a nuclear accident, including the well-known near meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

But September 11 changed the way the federal government and the NRC looks at and measures nuclear security. In February, President Bush told the media that diagrams of American nuclear power plants had been found by US troops in abandoned enemy camps in Afghanistan. Since then, the relative vulnerability of these plants has been the subject of fierce debate among the nuclear energy industry, nuclear activists and nuclear scientists, all of whom use their own official sources, and none of whom agree.

At the heart of the debate are several studies.

A 1982 study conducted at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois for the US Department of Energy and the NRC -- the study which was taken from the NRC reading room -- found that if a jet crashed into the concrete containment dome of a nuclear reactor at 466 miles per hour or greater, the explosion of fuel and fuel vapor from the plane could overwhelm shields inside the dome that protect the reactor. At 153 feet long and 336,000 pounds, the Boeing 707-320 used in the Argonne study was considered a large commercial jet at the time. By comparison, today's Boeing 767-300, the same aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center towers, is 180 feet long, weighs 412,000 pounds and carries 23,980 gallons of jet fuel.

A 1987 study by the NRC at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that a 12,500-pound jet had a 32 percent chance of piercing the reactor containment building's six-foot thick base and an 84 percent chance of crashing through the buildings' dome, which was 2 feet thick. Again, the Boeing 767-300's that hit the Twin Towers weighed 412,000 pounds.

But even if a massive explosion didn't smash through the shields that protect the reactor, would the crash itself disrupt the plant's systems enough to cause a meltdown anyway, as the Argonne study suggests it might? Experts' opinions vary widely on what damage, if any, would be caused by the plane, burning fuel, or burning fuel vapor if it breached the reactor.

McGuire's 130-feet-wide, 160-feet-tall containment buildings have roofs of 1.5-inch steel that top shield building walls of three-feet-thick concrete. Inside it, a five-feet-thick reinforced concrete wall and a four-feet-thick leaded concrete bioshield with 1.5-inch-thick lining inside the reactor protect its core.