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If Kathy Davidson's experience is any measure, there is a question whether plant security forces could even beat the DBT. Until May, Davidson was the chief guard trainer at Pilgrim Nuclear Station, south of Boston. The 16-year employee says she was fired from her $75,000-a-year job for complaining about poor security at the plant. Wackenhut Corp., the giant security company that employed her, says she was terminated for failing to improve security. "Security at the plant is pathetic," says Davidson. "It's just too confusing." Because there were too few guards, she says, each had to fulfill a different mission, depending on how an attack unfolded. "One person could have as many as seven places to go," she says. When Davidson complained, she says, she was told "to keep my mouth shut, that nothing was going to change." Since the plant's post-9/11 security plan took effect last fall, she tells TIME, there have been 29 in-house classroom exercises--with members of the guard force split into groups of "attackers" and "defenders"--designed to show how well the guards could defend the plant from terrorist attacks. "We won only one out of 29 tabletop drills using the new defensive plan," she says. "The attackers won 28." A senior Wackenhut official, who said "there is no win-lose ratio kept on these types of tabletops," contended that Davidson was fired for poor performance and that Pilgrim's defenses are improving.
The stakes could scarcely be higher. The toll of the 9/11 attacks would probably pale alongside a successful attack on a nuclear plant near a major metropolitan area. A recent study by Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, estimates that if terrorists triggered a meltdown at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, 35 miles north of New York City, as many as 44,000 people could die from radiation poisoning within a year, and as many as 518,000 could perish eventually from cancers spawned by the attack. Millions of people in the greater New York area would have to be permanently relocated, and economic losses could top $2 trillion. Lyman's study echoes the findings of one done by the Sandia National Laboratories for the NRC in 1982 that said as many as 50,000 early deaths could be caused by a reactor accident at Indian Point.