27 In Baltimore, Houston, and Chicago, he strolled through unguarded gates in broad daylight, wearing a press pass and carrying a camera. He drove up to tanks, pipes, and control rooms considered key terrorist targets. Hardly anyone tried to stop him. He found security nonexistent in many places. “I walked into one Chicago plant,” he told me. “I climbed on top of the tank and sat there and waved, ‘Hello! I’m on your tank.’ I wondered what it would take for me to get arrested at one of these plants. Would I have to come in carrying an AK-47? What would it take for someone to say ‘Why is this guy walking around taking pictures of our tanks?’ ” Reporters from all over the country took Prine’s lead and filed stories about their infiltration of dangerous plants.
28 Secretary Ridge acknowledged these reports when he testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on July 10, 2003, noting that there were deficiencies at “dozens and dozens” of U.S. chemical facilities. “Our enemies,” he warned, “look at [chemical plants] as targets.”
29
To the right-wing radicals in the White House, laissez-faire capitalism is the legitimate response to every contingency — even national security. On March 21, 2003, PBS reporter Daniel Zwerdling questioned Tom Ridge’s top aide, Al Martinez-Fonts, about Homeland Security’s reluctance to mandate security reforms in the chemical industry beyond voluntary programs.
30 Martinez-Fonts, a former executive of JP Morgan Chase, said that, even in a time of war, the Bush administration was reluctant to interfere with business decisions by the private sector.
“I was in the private sector all my life,” explained Martinez-Fonts. “Did I like it when the government came in and stepped in and told [us] to do certain things? The answer’s no. In general, we don’t like to be told what to do…. The administration has been very proactive towards business, promoting business issues, et cetera. The point is, people are concerned that a lot of regulation, a lot of legislation might ultimately come out. I think we’re trying to avoid that. I, as the person representing the private sector in Homeland Security, would prefer to avoid that altogether.”
When Zwerdling reminded Martinez-Fonts that the federal government told the airline industry to improve its security and asked whether it doesn’t make sense for the government to also require security upgrades by the chemical industry, Martinez-Fonts replied: “Well, the answer is because September 11 happened, and they were airplanes that rammed into buildings. And it was not chemical plants that were blown up.”
So much for homeland security!
Of course, toxic chemical plants aren’t the only potential dirty bombs on American soil. The nation’s nuclear power plants pose an equally devastating threat. The most vulnerable one happens to be in my backyard. I live in Mount Kisco, New York, 11 miles downwind of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. Indian Point’s two remaining active reactors — Unit 1 was shut down in 1974 — sit on the east bank of the Hudson River, 24 miles north of New York City.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston passed within a few thousand feet of Indian Point as it followed the Hudson River down to its rendezvous with Tower Two of the World Trade Center. Had it banked left and crashed into the plant instead, it could have triggered a large release of radiation. The surrounding area, including New York City, might have been rendered uninhabitable for years.
Neither the NRDC nor the Hudson Riverkeeper have ever taken a stand against nuclear power, but following the terror attacks, the communities surrounding Indian Point inundated our offices with phone calls and letters expressing concern about plant safety. The plant, however, carried on, business as usual.
Meanwhile, a few miles from my home, busy roads were closed to prevent anyone from getting near upstate reservoirs. Sport fishermen — a major economic resource to the region — were ordered off the reservoirs, and subsequently the bait-and-tackle shops shut down. The proprietor of Bob’s Tackle Shop in Katonah was stoic about closing her family business, but wondered why Indian Point was still chugging along. “It’s crazy,” says Captain Ron Gatto, the top cop in the city’s upstate reservoir. “There is no way a fisherman could sabotage the city’s water supply — you’d need tanker trucks filled with poison. Everyone knows that the biggest threat is Indian Point. I lose sleep knowing how vulnerable this whole system is. It’s absolutely insane — they’re only open ’cause they’ve got pals in Washington.”
31
This outcry prompted us to study Indian Point in light of the risks of terrorist attack. No nuclear facility in the United States is closer to such a densely populated metropolitan area.
32 Captain Gatto is not the first person to use the word “insane” to describe Indian Point. Commenting on the siting of Indian Point in 1979, in the wake of the Three Mile Island meltdown, Robert Ryan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s director of the Office of State Programs, stated: “I think it is insane to have a three-unit reactor on the Hudson River in Westchester County, forty miles from Times Square, twenty miles from the Bronx. And if you describe that fifty-mile circle, you’ve got twenty-one million people. And that’s crazy. I’m sorry. I just don’t think that that’s the right place to put a nuclear facility.”
33
Contrary to the public perception aggressively promoted by the industry, terrorists would not have to puncture the containment dome to cause a serious accident or meltdown. Nuclear plants like Indian Point are vulnerable at half a dozen points, some of them virtually impossible to shield from determined attackers. Terrorists could provoke a meltdown by coordinating attacks against the reactor’s cooling system or the plant’s control room, by cutting electric lines going into or out of the plant, or, more alarmingly, by disabling the cooling-water pumps and intake structures, which are easily approached from the river’s channel.
Worst of all, in a catastrophe that would rival or exceed the impact of a meltdown, terrorists could attack the plant’s spent fuel pools, which house 30 years of accumulated high-level radioactive waste and are shielded only by a series of flimsy annex buildings, so-called butler shacks that have the structural integrity of a Kmart. Indian Point’s irradiated spent-fuel pools contain more than 1,500 tons of high-level radioactive waste.
34 According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a significant loss of water within the spent-fuel pools could provoke a fuel-assembly fire that could potentially release a pool’s store of cesium 137 — up to 20 times the amount released at Chernobyl, which made an area approximately 1,000 miles around the plant uninhabitable, 100 miles of it permanently.
35
Imagine a world without New York City. The terrorists have. The Al Qaeda network and other groups have cited nuclear power plants as potential U.S. targets. President Bush warned us during his 2002 State of the Union Address that Al Qaeda terrorists possess diagrams of U.S. nuclear facilities. On the CBS news program 60 Minutes II, Yosri Fouda, a reporter for the Arabic news network Al Jazeera, said that when he interviewed the recently captured Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, architect of the September 11 attacks, in the spring of 2002, Mohammed said that nuclear facilities in the United States were Al Qaeda’s first choice of a target.
36 In November 2002, the FBI warned that Al Qaeda sleeper cells could be planning attacks on U.S. nuclear power plants near our largest cities to try to inflict “severe economic damage and maximum psychological trauma.”
37 Indian Point’s proximity to the world’s financial center, and the severe consequences for public health, national security, the environment, and the economy in the event of a successful terrorist attack make that plant especially attractive.
With this in mind, you would think, and most people do, that in a country as civilized and technologically advanced as ours, nuclear plants would be among our most secure facilities. Amazingly, the opposite is true. Indian Point and other plants near Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C., are virtually un
protected against terrorist attack on the scale of September 11.
38 If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, consider this astounding fact: Federal law absolves nuclear power plant operators from any legal duty to protect their plants from attacks “by enemies of the United States.”
39 So who does shoulder this heavy burden? Governor George Pataki of New York tells us that it is the federal government. But try to find a federal agency that will take responsibility. Not the NRC, not the Department of Homeland Security, and not the Pentagon.
Nuclear plants are required to show that they can resist attacks by small groups of vandals who are not “enemies of the United States.” And the NRC periodically conducts mock attacks by such saboteurs, typically sending small forces of two or three attackers. Astoundingly, nearly 50 percent of the nation’s nuclear facilities routinely fail to repel even these feeble assaults, despite being notified of the time and date of the attack months in advance.
40 Indian Point is apparently among the most poorly defended of the entire nuclear fleet. In a 2002 internal report by Entergy Nuclear, the plant’s Mississippi-based owner, obtained by Riverkeeper, Indian Point’s security guards acknowledged that the robust security force portrayed by Entergy in its advertising campaign and public pronouncements is a deception. Mock attackers were able to enter the plant practically at will. The head of one of the teams, Foster Zeh, attested that he could breach the perimeter fence and place dummy explosives around the spent-fuel pools in under 40 seconds. According to the internal report, the guards are undertrained, underequipped, overworked, demoralized, and out of shape. Only 19 percent believe they could defend the plant from attack. Most of them said they would flee if the plant were attacked.
41
A recent Riverkeeper lawsuit against the NRC before the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals exposed “gaps” in plant security for the first time.
42 There is, for example, no protection from air attacks at Indian Point. The FAA has refused to declare a no-fly zone over the plant, which lies in the approach path of Westchester County Airport. The FAA has given this protection to Disneyland, Disney World, and Crawford, Texas. They even provided it for my cousin Caroline Kennedy’s wedding on Cape Cod! In 2002, my brother Douglas, a reporter for Fox News, chartered a small airplane at Westchester Airport and flew directly over the plant with a film crew and circled it for 20 minutes, waiting in vain for someone to signal him off. Dr. Gordon Thompson, a research scientist at the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an expert on nuclear plant security, told me that a small private jet, chartered at Westchester County Airport and packed with explosives by a sophisticated but suicidal terrorist, could crash into the right building and precipitate a spent-fuel fire — releasing all the plant’s stored radiation.
There is also no defense against line-of-sight missile attacks from the west side of the Hudson, and only weak defenses against a marine attack on the plant’s cooling-water structures, and even those are intermittent; a patrol boat is docked alongside the plant, usually a small Boston whaler or buoy tender. Last summer we were cavorting back and forth in front of Indian Point in the Riverkeeper boat to test its defenses, when two guards finally approached us in a whaler. When we asked whether they were armed, they sheepishly told us no, and explained that they would need to radio back for directions if there were an attack. Their boat broke down on its way back to the plant and the crew had to radio for help. Buoys mark an exclusion zone that recreational boaters generally respect. Terrorists could penetrate the zone and reach the plant in a matter of seconds.
But it’s not just Indian Point that this White House is ignoring. On September 24, 2003, the GAO issued a report faulting the Bush administration for failing to bolster nuclear plant security nationwide.
43 The GAO found that the dereliction at Indian Point is in fact the rule at nuclear plants across the United States. According to the report, the NRC deliberately stages softball mock attacks to give the impression of plant security, and has often shielded the industry by burying significant security breaches.
44 NRC inspection reports routinely omit security violations such as a guard sleeping on duty or falsified security logs.
As it turns out, the sleeping-guard incident took place at Indian Point. The NRC report indicated that when two of its officials found a security guard napping at his post at the Indian Point 2 reactor last year, the agency decided not to issue a notice of violation because there was no terrorist attack on the plant during the half hour or so that the guard was sleeping.
45 The GAO auditors said that, nationwide, the NRC habitually refused to issue formal citations and routinely minimized the significance of problems it found if the problems did not cause actual damage (a circumstance that would occur only if terrorists happened to strike the plant when the NRC investigators were present). The NRC further explained that it elected to treat the Indian Point incident as a “non-cited violation” because no single guard had been found sleeping “more than twice during the past year.”
46 Who says the NRC doesn’t have a sense of humor?
Indian Point’s license requires its operator to demonstrate that there is a workable evacuation plan in the event of an emergency. However, Entergy Nuclear is not required to develop a plan for the 50-mile peak injury zone — which would involve the impossible task of evacuating New York City. The company has, however, developed an emergency plan to evacuate the plant’s 10-mile radius. It involves moving residents within the 10-mile radius to reception centers 11 to 15 miles from the plant. My local high school is a reception center. I doubt the evacuees will feel particularly safe there. Most of my neighbors intend to head for the hills as soon as the Indian Point emergency sirens sound. Entergy’s evacuation plan is so comically absurd that my neighbor Chevy Chase seriously considered a stand-up routine consisting of reading excerpts from the document.
In August 2002, Governor George Pataki commissioned a consulting firm headed by former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director James Lee Witt, the world’s leading expert on emergency planning, to assess Indian Point’s Emergency Response Plan. Witt’s exhaustive 550-page report criticized virtually every aspect of the plan and concluded that Entergy’s emergency plan is “not adequate to…protect the people from an unacceptable dose of radiation in the event of a release from Indian Point.” Witt added that the current evacuation plans “do not consider the reality and impacts of spontaneous evacuation.” His report pointed out that all emergency planning assumed a slow accidental release that could be kept secret for many hours in order to keep the roads clear while schoolchildren were evacuated.
47 Entergy apparently has not heard of cell phones or CNN.
Fallout from the Witt report was dramatic. Westchester’s Republican congresswoman, Sue Kelly, who had been one of the few Congress members still defending the facility and its emergency plan, immediately joined approximately 260 elected officials, 35 municipalities, 56 environmental and civic groups, hundreds of business leaders, and several labor unions and school boards in calling for the shutdown of Indian Point. Four county governments (Orange, Rockland, Westchester, and Putnam) and the State of New York have refused to certify their evacuation plans to FEMA and the NRC. Adequate evacuation plans are a condition of a plant license but, not surprisingly, the NRC indicated it was willing to overlook an unworkable and unfixable emergency plan.
Despite numerous requests by Riverkeeper and local politicians, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has refused to meet with local leaders or take any position on the issue or investigate the matter. But Ridge went the extra mile to protect Entergy’s profit margins. On July 25, 2003, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security issued a determination that the emergency evacuation plan for Indian Point “would be adequate in protecting public health and safety in the event of a release.”
The administration has independent power to shut down the plant under the EPA’s Clean Water A
ct authority, and to require security and emergency preparedness improvements through the DHS, the NRC, the DoE, and FEMA. Entergy rakes in approximately $1 million a day from the electricity produced by Indian Point and has shared its profits generously with the president and his party. Entergy is a major player within the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). Entergy president Donald Hintz is chairman of the NEI’s board of directors.
Contributions from companies and organizations on NEI’s 2001 members roster total $29.2 million in soft money from 1991 to June 30, 2001, with 63 percent going to Republicans.
48 NEI itself contributed $643,202 during the same period.
49 It also spent nearly $10.8 million lobbying Congress and the executive branch from January 1996 through June 30, 2001. These have been great investments; NEI met with Energy Department officials 19 times while the Cheney task force was at work.
In her April 8, 2004, testimony before the September 11 Commission, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice swore under oath to the nation that the administration was doing everything in its power to “harden terrorist targets” in the United States. But, as we have seen, this administration is doing next to nothing.
The idea that industry will step up to the plate on its own is pure folly. In July 2003, the Conference Board, a business research group, found that American corporations have hiked security expenditures less than 4 percent on average since the September 11 attacks.
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