(7 of 9)
The Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in southeastern Pennsylvania is a good place to see some of the enhancements ordered by the NRC after 9/11. The facility is newly ringed with 990 11-ton concrete blocks and $200-a-foot fencing topped with razor wire. Ten new guard towers--some six stories high--give armed guards broad vistas of possible approaches to the plant. "Since 9/11 we have more security officers here, and we've enhanced their weaponry," says Jeff Benjamin, a vice president of Exelon Corp., which operates the plant on the bank of the Susquehanna River. "We have a number of sensors, cameras and lighting," he told a visiting TIME correspondent, declining to elaborate for security reasons. The reactor itself is deep inside walls of concrete and steel. Says Benjamin: "All of the design and construction we do to keep bad stuff in is also pretty darn good at keeping bad stuff out."
Still, politicians from both parties question whether the NRC has done enough. Eight state attorneys general recently petitioned the NRC to require more security. The standard for protecting nuclear plants "remains essentially what it was in the 1970s," said one of their filings, sent to the NRC by New York's Eliot Spitzer. The NRC needs to bolster security at power plants "to reflect the realities of 2005, beginning with an immediate recognition of what we all learned on September 11, 2001."
Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, has pushed proposals to enhance security, only to be defeated in the face of industry opposition. One bill would have required plants to defend themselves against a 9/11-size enemy force, perhaps aided by air-and-water-based attacks. Another would have created a federal Nuclear Security Force and a 20-member mock terrorist team to test the plants regularly, The NRC and industry representatives argued against such a federalized force on the ground that the close cooperation between plant operators and guards would be lost if federal employees were protecting the plants. "That would actually create almost a barrier between security and safety," Diaz tells TIME.
Representative Shays has ordered Congress's investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, to find out why the revised DBT is so small. Shays, who chairs the House Reform Committee's panel on national security and emerging threats, told TIME he believes the DBT is "artificially low" because of economic pressures. "Rather than asking what security do we need, plant operators are asking how much security can we afford," he said.
The big gap between the security standards at DOE nuclear sites and those at the commercial plants overseen by the NRC adds fuel to the argument over what is prudent. In the wake of 9/11, the DOE boosted by 300% the size of the terrorist force its guards must be able to defend against. The DOE's DBT is classified, but experts inside and outside the government say it requires guards to defeat a 9/11-size force. While DOE sites are more sensitive than private ones, since they house nuclear weapons and their key components, the impact of a terrorist strike on either could be devastating. "The NRC, charged with the very same responsibility [as the DOE] of protecting nuclear facilities against terrorist attack, has fallen down on the job," Markey told TIME.