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Terrorists
strike U.S. | Article published November 11, 2001
SECURITY TIGHTENED
Fermi II,
Davis-Besse generate new fears
Security tightened against terror strike
Alice Skinner says
the Davis-Besse nuclear plant is a good neighbor. (THE
BLADE/HERRAL LONG)
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By JENNIFER FEEHAN
and BRIAN DUGGER
BLADE
STAFF WRITERS
OAK HARBOR -- The back wall of Emmy
Minier’s home is decorated with pictures of her 3-year-old daughter,
Sydney.
The ranch home is in the shadow of the Davis-Besse
Nuclear Power Plant, a quarter-mile away from the front gates. Since
Ms. Minier was a small girl, the plant has been her neighbor, and
she has never given a second thought to possible danger or worried
about raising a daughter so close to the 500-foot cooling
tower.
But on Sept. 11, her calm was shaken.
After
hearing about the jetliners that struck the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon and then the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in a
Pennsylvania field, she called her father, Kevin Minier, a longtime
employee of Davis-Besse.
"I told him, ‘You’ve got to get out
of there. They just crashed a plane in Pennsylvania. They’re coming
this way.’ He was calm. I was the basket case," Ms. Minier
recalled.
Two months after terrorists hijacked four airliners
loaded with passengers and fuel and pulled off the unthinkable,
officials aren’t quick to discount an attack on one of the country’s
nuclear power plants. In fact, plants across the country are on the
highest level of alert. What’s unnerving for experts is that they’re
not sure what would happen if a plane was crashed into a
plant.
The answer is particularly relevant for the 2 million
people in northwest Ohio and southern Michigan who live within a
50-mile radius of Davis-Besse outside Oak Harbor and Detroit
Edison’s Fermi II nuclear power plant in Monroe County. The city of
Toledo is almost right in the middle.
Cindy and Jerry Flint
moved to their home next to Fermi II about nine months ago. Before
that, they lived about two miles from the nuclear plant.
In
the days after the terrorist attacks, traffic stretched down the
road in front of their home as security officials stopped and
searched each car that went into the plant, but plane traffic was
eerily absent after airliners were temporarily grounded.
"You
really watch now with the planes going over," Mrs. Flint said. "You
try to look at the sky a little more."
Attractive
targets
Nuclear experts and observers say the power plants
that supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity are attractive,
although not easy, targets for terrorists.
"I think they are
an attractive target to terrorists just because of the fear factor
involved. If you want to cause panic, an attack on a reactor is
something that’s going to do that," said Michael Mariotte, executive
director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a
6,000-member information and network center for those concerned
about nuclear issues.
In Washington, the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission is examining whether security at the nation’s 100-plus
nuclear plants is good enough.
"In light of the attack, in
light of the fact that a commercial jetliner was used as a weapon,
the [NRC] chairman felt it was appropriate to direct the staff to
review all of the agency’s policies, activities, and regulations in
order to determine whether changes could be made," commission
spokesman Victor Dricks said. "One of the things that will be
addressed is the definition of a ‘design basis threat,’ which is the
threat each plant is to be able to defend themselves
against."
Mr. Dricks said prior to Sept. 11, potential
threats only included ground attacks, not attacks from the air and
water.
In fact, the commission says it does not know what
would happen if a 767 jetliner fully loaded with fuel were
deliberately flown into a nuclear plant. That scenario has never
been analyzed. And, when most nuclear plants were built in the
1970s, the designers considered only the possibility of the
then-popular but smaller 727 crashing into the plant.
The
terrorist attacks have intensified the efforts of national watchdog
organizations that have long considered nuclear safety their top
concern.
The National Whistleblower Center wants nuclear
plants equipped with anti-aircraft missiles and given the authority
to shoot down unauthorized planes. The request was filed after the
group learned of a 1982 report that outlined what could occur if a
reactor building was hit by a jetliner at a high rate of
speed.
The report was pulled from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission’s web site, and Mr. Dricks refused to comment on its
contents.
Meanwhile, a coalition of more than 100
environmental organizations has recommended a dozen ways to make the
nation’s nuclear plants and the people living near them more secure
- ideas that range from stockpiling potassium iodide, a pill that
helps counteract the effects of radiation exposure, to beginning a
total phase-out of nuclear power in this country.
"Obviously
for us as well as just about everyone else in the world, the
realization that there are people out there who are willing to kill
large numbers of civilians and don’t really have any compunction
about doing it means the security issue is vastly more important
than it was two months ago," Mr. Mariotte said. "Our concern over
the readiness of the reactors or the ability of the reactors to
withstand a serious attack is much greater than it was
before."
David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the
Union of Concerned Scientists, put it another way: "What Sept. 11
reminded us was that terrorists may not try to bring weapons into
our country to try to cause problems, but may use things that are
already here to be their weapons of terror. They used our own
aircraft against our own buildings to create that tragedy. Nuclear
power plants may also be used as a weapon by folks either by ground
or air. The plants have vulnerabilities that need to be
protected."
On high alert
While they may not be
packing their bags and moving, residents - like the nuclear power
plants themselves - have been on high alert since that September day
when more than 4,500 people lost their lives. Local law enforcement
agencies have received a flood of calls about suspicious incidents.
So far, none has panned out.
"We’ve had gunshots heard in the
area. It turned out to be duck hunters," Monroe County Sheriff
Tilman Crutchfield said of calls from the area surrounding the Fermi
plant. "Someone in the state park looking at Fermi with binoculars.
... There’s a vehicle that’s been parked on the highway in front of
the main Fermi drive for several minutes. That turned out to be a
husband waiting for his wife to get off work."
Every call is
investigated, and no matter how seemingly inconsequential, copies of
the reports are forwarded to the FBI, Sheriff Crutchfield
said.
Government officials consider a 10-mile radius around
the plants the most critical in the event of an accident or
deliberate act that results in a radioactive leak. Yet it is within
that "emergency planning zone" that there seems to be the most
comfort.
Residents have been through the drills. They’ve read
the literature. Many have toured the plant.
"We involve those
people [in emergency exercises] every two years since 1986," said
Andy Beaudry, operations manager for the Lucas County Emergency
Management Agency. "They’ve been going through this for quite a
while. They’re familiar with it and understand what takes place.
People who live farther out - they think of radiation. What they
can’t see is what really worries them."
Since Sept. 11,
nuclear plants across the country have been under orders to go to
the highest level of security. The Coast Guard continues to enforce
a one-mile no-boating zone along shorelines where nuclear plants,
including Davis-Besse and Fermi II, are located. Plant tours for the
public have been suspended indefinitely.
A temporary no-fly
zone for private planes flying less than 18,000 feet was set up
within an 11-mile radius of nuclear plants two weeks ago after
federal officials warned of an expected terrorist threat. While the
threat never materialized and the airspace ban has been lifted,
fighter jets commanded by the North American Aerospace Defense
Command are positioned to intervene if aircraft deviate from their
flight plans and approach airspace where they shouldn’t
be.
In some states, the National Guard has been called in to
bolster security forces at nuclear plants, while some plants like
Davis-Besse have contracted with local law enforcement agencies to
beef up their security staff.
The Ottawa County sheriff’s
office has billed FirstEnergy Corp., which owns Davis-Besse, $44,018
for providing specially trained deputies at the plant around the
clock from Sept. 11 to Oct. 31.
Sheriff Craig Emahiser said
his officers are still at the plant, much of the time responding to
calls of suspicious activity.
"You can’t believe the number
of people who have driven along Route 2, gotten out, and started
taking pictures of the nuclear power plant since all this happened,"
he said.
Officers talk to the motorists, run a check on their
driver’s licenses to make sure they are who they say, and ask them
to move along.
"We had one report of four Middle Eastern
males that stopped along the road and were taking pictures of the
power plant, so we dispatched a crew out there," Sheriff Emahiser
said. "It ended up two of the guys who looked Middle Eastern were
from Brazil and worked for Ford. They were on their way from the
Sandusky plant to Detroit. The other two were
Caucasians."
Partially underground
Officials at
Detroit Edison and FirstEnergy insist their facilities are safe. The
reactors are encased in steel-reinforced concrete and located at
least partially underground.
"A nuclear power plant is
probably one of the most secure facilities in the country to begin
with even before Sept. 11," said John Austerberry, spokesman for
Detroit Edison.
FirstEnergy Spokesman Richard Wilkins said
since the terrorist attacks, more security officers have been
deployed at Davis-Besse and stationed in areas of the plant that
were not guarded before. More patrols are being done. The security
parameter has been increased around the plant. All vehicles that
come on site that do not belong to employees are being
searched.
In addition to the heightened security, the plants
themselves are built to withstand tornadoes, hurricanes, and
earthquakes.
"There are probably no other structures on the
planet that are built as sturdy or are as fortified as one of these
nuclear power plants," Mr. Wilkins said. "There are numerous
barriers to protect the reactor itself. If you were to add all of
those barriers together, you would be talking about seven feet of
steel and steel-reinforced concrete protecting the reactor itself.
In addition to that, the reactor itself is below grade. It’s
underground, making it extremely unlikely you’re going to get any
kind of direct impact to the reactor itself."
In 1998,
Davis-Besse took the worst hit by a tornado ever sustained by a
nuclear plant in the United States. The tornado ripped apart the
plant’s electrical switchyard, knocking down 11 distribution towers
and causing the plant to lose its off-site power.
All three
of the plant’s main distribution lines were temporarily inoperable.
The reactor shut down automatically, and no radiation leaked, but it
was a rigorous test of the staff’s training and the plant’s back-up
equipment.
A good neighbor
In a little brick house
along Russell Road, Alice Skinner scoots around her home in a
wheelchair. She sees the 500-foot cooling tower of Davis-Besse from
her window every day. The plant is a good neighbor, she
said.
"No, nothing, no problems," she said when asked about
it.
"You can’t worry because everywhere you go there is
worry," she said.
There are slightly more than 20,000
permanent residents in the 10-mile zone surrounding Davis-Besse,
including a portion of Jerusalem Township in Lucas County. During
the summer, that figure swells with 11,000 seasonal residents and
30,000 transients, said Jim Greer, director of the Ottawa County
Emergency Management Agency.
"Fortunately the majority of
people who come into our county to take advantage of the lake are in
the eastern portion," he said. "I’ve seen estimates that the
county’s population which is usually 40,000 swells to 300,000 people
on a summer weekend."
About 40 miles to the northwest, Fermi
II sits in a rural area outside Monroe. The Hudick family moved to
their home on North Dixie Highway about two years ago to get away
from city living.
On a sunny fall day, 14-year-old twins Earl
and Ed Hudick are on their inline skates whipping slap shots at a
street hockey net set up in the driveway. Their friend, Larry
Holmes, 19, skates with them.
Behind the net looms the Fermi
plant.
"This is a beautiful site," Earl says. "especially at
night."
Mr. Holmes has the distinction of living in the house
closest to the plant. None of the young men seems
concerned.
"I guess if people were worried, they’d pack up
and move," Earl said. "I was thinking about it, and if it blows up,
we’re all gone, so why worry about it?"
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