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

Chapter Eleven: Nuclear Power 155reprocessing plant. 105 In 1972, three men hijacked a Southern Airways commercialflight to Canada, made the pilot circle over the Oak Ridge complex,threatened to crash the plane into the Oak Ridge Research Reactor or the uraniumenrichment plant (the biggest industrial installation in the world), collecteda reported two million dollars’ ransom, and landed in Cuba. 106In view of this history, it is disturbing that most plants are designed to withstanda crash only of a fairly small aircraft. A typical analysis is based on a1968 census of the civil aviation fleet, before widebody jets. 107 It also considersthe impact only of the engines, not of the airframe. Likewise, the officialsafety report for the proposed Gorleben reprocessing plant in the FederalRepublic of Germany considered only crashes by Phantom jets. Yet a jumbojet traveling slightly slower would produce a peak impact nearly six times asbig and lasting more than twice as long. 108 (On Christmas Day 1974, a hijackerwas overpowered after threatening to crash a jumbo jet into the center ofRome.) By a lucky irony, the double containment strength that enabled theThree Mile Island containment shell to withstand the hydrogen explosionwhich occurred during its 1979 accident was designed in because a commercialflight lane for low-level approaches to the Harrisburg airport passes essentiallyover the plant. But it is unlikely that most reactors or other nuclear facilitiesare really equipped to handle a crash by well-laden widebody aircraft.The tendency of the jet fuel to cause an after-crash fire about half the timewould also complicate shutdown and repair efforts in the stricken plant.The foregoing selection of examples of potential sabotage has been illustrative,not comprehensive. Many nuclear facilities, for example, are highly vulnerableto reprogramming or disabling of their control computers, resetting oftheir instrument trip points, biasing of their calibration standards, and so forth,by insiders. It is also possible to attack a plant from a distance in time ratherthan in space. Now that digital watches with long-lived, low-drain batteries arewidely available, along with sophisticated and highly reliable electronics of allkinds, it is feasible to conceal a conventional chemical bomb (or at least to sayone has done so) in a reactor under construction. One extortionist recentlyclaimed he had put a bomb in a concrete wall being poured at a German reactor,and it proved very difficult and expensive to find out whether the claimwas true: some reports indicate that the wall was torn apart to see. A claim thatscrap metal and tools had been incorporated into the molten lead used to castradiation shields for U.S. Navy reactors required extensive investigation. 109 Onoccasion, foreign objects considerably more obtrusive than a lump inside a concretewall have escaped detection for a surprising time: in 1972, for example,Commonwealth Edison reported having retrieved a complete Heliarc weldingrig, complete with a set of cables and hose twenty-five feet long, from inside a