Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

144Disasters Waiting to Happenlimited to isolated individual saboteurs and local semi-amateur groups, butincreasingly to include more organized and sophisticated international groupswith access to a worldwide network of resources. At least two attacks havebeen made by governments as an open act of war: military aircraft twicebombed an Iraqi “research” reactor. The second attack destroyed the reactor.Lower-level, clandestine episodes are far more numerous. The following listof published incidents (plus the other examples postponed to later sections)give the flavor of the diversity and the gradually escalating intensity and focusof nuclear terrorism to date. (Incidents not specifically documented are generallygiven in a compendium by the British analyst Michael Flood. 12 )Armed attacks and bomb explosions The Atucha-1 reactor in Argentina,when nearly built in 1973, was taken over by fifteen guerrillas for publicity.They quickly overpowered five armed guards, caused only light damage, andwounded two other guards whom they encountered while withdrawing. 13 TheFessenheim reactors in France sustained peripheral site damage by fire after aMay 1975 bombing. A month later, half the input terminals at the computercenter of Framatome, (the French reactor vendor) were destroyed by a carefullyplaced bomb. Another bomb damaged Framatome’s valve-testing shops.Two months after that, a pair of bombs set by Breton separatists caused minordamage to a cooling water inlet and an air vent at the operating gas-cooledreactor at Monts d’Arée, Brittany, which as a result was closed for investigation.It was the eighth sabotage attempt in a month by the separatists againstutility installations. It was also the most spectacular, using a boat that crossedthe artificial cooling lake through cut fencing. In early November 1976, abomb caused extensive damage at the Paris offices of a nuclear fuel manufacturer,and two more bombs put a French uranium mine out of operation forabout two months by destroying four pump compressors. 14 In 1979, unknownsaboteurs skillfully blew up the nearly completed core structure of two Iraqi“research” reactors at a French factory. 15The chief scientist of the Iraqi nuclear program was recently assassinated inParis (as was a probable witness), allegedly by Israeli agents. 16 In 1981, fourattacks were reported on uranium prospecting equipment in southern France,while at the Golfech reactor site in southwestern France, shots were fired andMolotov cocktails did well over a half-million dollars’ damage. 17 And inJanuary 1982, five Soviet-made shaped-charge rockets were fired at the constructionsite of the French Super-Phénix fast breeder reactor, causing onlyminor damage but just missing twenty workers and a sodium depot. 18In March 1978, Basque separatists bombed the steam generator of theLemoniz reactor, under construction near Bilbao in northern Spain, killing two