IT IS almost too frightening to contemplate. In the grey sky over the north
of England a silver streak appears. A 400-tonne Boeing 747 laden with 200,000
litres of fuel plummets earthwards at 250 metres per second towards a building
few people have ever heard of. A building whose name we would never forget if it
were hit.
B215 is just one of the many unprepossessing structures that make up the vast
nuclear reprocessing complex at Sellafield in Cumbria. Inside,
however, are 21 concrete and steel tanks containing more than 1500 cubic metres
of high-level radioactive liquid waste.
Reprocessing involves dissolving old fuel rods in acid and extracting the
plutonium. The leftover liquid, which contains a mixture of wastes including
caesium-137, is stored in the tanks in B215. It is so radioactive that the tanks
have to be constantly cooled to prevent their contents from boiling and leaking
out.
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No one can be sure what would happen if a hijacked airliner plunged into
B215. But the impact would almost certainly break open some of the tanks. The
accompanying explosion would fling a plume of radioactivity into the atmosphere,
according to Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource
and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Afterwards, the burning fuel would continue to pump radioactivity into the
air. Putting this fire out wouldn鈥檛 be easy. Fire crews struggled to dampen down
the fire after the Pentagon crash on 11 September鈥攁nd they didn鈥檛 have
deadly radiation to contend with.
One problem was that they didn鈥檛 have the foam needed to quash jet fuel
fires. Does Sellafield? British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), the state-owned company
that operates the reprocessing plant, won鈥檛 say.
The explosion and the fire would just be the beginning. A crash of such
magnitude would probably destroy the cooling systems too. Tanks that survived
the initial impact would heat up and start to spew out more radioactivity within
hours.
After the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986, an exclusion zone of 4800
square kilometres had to be set up around the plant, more than a quarter of a
million people were resettled and radiation spread so far that sheep in Wales
still have to be tested to check they鈥檙e safe to eat. So far 11,000 cases of
thyroid cancer have been reported in the Ukraine and Belarus.
According to Thompson, who has been investigating the high-level waste tanks
for local authorities in Britain for the past five years, as much as half of the
2400 kilograms of caesium-137 in the tanks at B215 could escape into the air.
That would be 44 times more caesium-137 than was released by the Chernobyl
disaster. Four million terabecquerels of radioactivity would contaminate large
parts of Britain and, depending on which way the wind was blowing, Ireland,
continental Europe and beyond. Some places could become uninhabitable.
Britain, of course, is much more densely populated than the Ukraine.
Immediately after the attack there would be widespread chaos as authorities
tried to organise mass evacuations. In years to come, the death toll might be
terrible. Thompson calculates that the radiation released by such a disaster
could cause more than 2 million cancers in the following 50 years鈥攁ssuming
that the pattern of public exposure was similar to that after Chernobyl.
Neither BNFL, nor the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) that regulates
it, nor the Office for Civil Nuclear Security, the little-known government
agency meant to protect nuclear facilities, would directly answer any of New
快猫短视频鈥檚 questions about what was being done to address this threat.
Instead, BNFL released a statement intended to reassure:
鈥淢ajor nuclear facilities, including for example reactors and highly active
waste stores, are constructed to extremely robust engineering standards and
incorporate large quantities of reinforced concrete as an integral part of the
construction,鈥� says the company. 鈥淭hese facilities are resistant to many
terrorist threats including aircraft impact. Safety cases and contingency plans
take these events into account.鈥�
But the 21 high-level waste tanks in B215 have certainly not been constructed
to withstand crashing planes. 鈥淭here has been no specific design provision to
protect against crashing aircraft,鈥� states a safety report on Sellafield
published in February 2000 by the NII. Both BNFL and NII thought that the risk
of a plane hitting the tanks was too remote to be worth considering.
It is also highly unlikely that other ageing buildings containing large
amounts of radioactivity at Sellafield are strong enough to resist a falling
airliner. John Large, an independent nuclear engineer, has identified seven
potential terrorist targets at Sellafield, including the high-level waste tanks
and a store containing over 70 tonnes of plutonium. All their radioactive
inventories are published, and detailed aerial photographs showing their precise
locations are easy to get hold of.
鈥淚t would be very easy for a terrorist group,鈥� he claims. Aviation sources
point out that every year thousands of large passenger jets fly along the
English coast near Sellafield, on their way from European airports to the West
Coast of the US. Lockerbie, where Pan Am Flight 103 crashed in 1988, is only
about 75 kilometres away.
One of the disturbing things about Sellafield is that it鈥檚 not even supposed
to be storing so much high-level waste in such a dangerous form. BNFL is meant
to solidify the liquid waste into blocks of glass to make it safer, but
technical problems are holding up the process.
Anxious about the build-up of 鈥渉ighly active liquors鈥� in B215, the NII has
demanded that BNFL reduce the volume in the tanks or shut down reprocessing at
the plant. Yet BNFL is only obliged to reduce the volume stored from 1500 to 200
cubic metres鈥攁nd has until 2015 to do this.
An attack on Sellafield is perhaps the worst-case scenario because of the
sheer quantity of radioactivity that might be released. But it鈥檚 not the only
target. There are similar storage facilities in several countries, including the
US and Russia. A recent study by the World Information Service on Energy (WISE)
in Paris highlighted the vulnerability of the French reprocessing plant at La
Hague on the Normandy coast.
The site includes a 55-tonne plutonium store, 7484 tonnes of nuclear fuels in
five cooling ponds and more than 11,650 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. The
WISE study suggests that a large airliner crashing on one of the La Hague
cooling ponds could release 60 times as much caesium-137 as
Chernobyl鈥攁lthough this isn鈥檛 directly comparable to the Sellafield
estimate because it鈥檚 based on the assumption that all, rather than half, the
caesium would be released.
Nor are storage facilities the only vulnerable sites. Since the attacks on 11
September, British officials will say only that security at nuclear
installations is now under review. But other countries have admitted that few
nuclear reactors could cope with large aircraft crashes.
It鈥檚 true that the containment vessels of some plants built since the 1970s
were designed to withstand impacts from small planes like Cessnas, which weigh
up to 6 tonnes. But none was meant to resist hits from modern airliners. The
WISE study points out that the kinetic energy of a crashing 560-tonne Airbus 380
is 2557 times greater than that of a Cessna 210.
The US, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and
Australia have all admitted that hundreds of nuclear facilities are vulnerable.
And their statements have been backed up by officials from the International
Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body in Vienna responsible for nuclear
power.
Large offers one crumb of comfort by suggesting that advanced gas-cooled
reactors (AGRs) might survive an aircraft crash because of the strength of their
1-metre-thick reinforced concrete containment vessels. British Energy, a company
based in East Kilbride that operates Britain鈥檚 seven AGR stations, agrees. It
points out that in a joint US and Japanese crash test in 1989, the engines of an
F4 Phantom jet flying at 800 kilometres an hour only penetrated six centimetres
into a concrete wall 3.7 metres thick.
An F4 Phantom, however, weighs only 28 tonnes. Researchers at the Nuclear
Control Institute, a lobby group based in Washington DC, estimate that the
engines of a 179-tonne Boeing 767 travelling at 850 kilometres an hour could
penetrate at least a metre of reinforced concrete.
Perhaps the clearest statement came on 21 September from the US Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, which is responsible for 103 reactors. 鈥淭he NRC did not
specifically contemplate attacks by aircraft such as Boeing 757s or 767s, and
nuclear power plants were not designed to withstand such crashes,鈥� it said.
What should be done in the face of such a threat? Measures are already being
taken to prevent planes being hijacked
(快猫短视频, 22 September, p 10),
and to ensure that any planes that do get hijacked are shot down before
they reach their targets.
Officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency have even suggested that
anti-aircraft batteries should be installed around sensitive sites, ready to
shoot down planes before they crash. But this has obvious drawbacks. Siting guns
near nuclear plants would create new safety hazards. What if they shot down an
innocent aircraft? And experts doubt that they would have much chance of hitting
a jet dropping from the sky. 鈥淚t would be like trying to shoot down a bomb,鈥�
says Frank Barnaby of the Oxford Research Group, an independent group of
scientists studying nuclear issues.
The terrible consequences of failing to prevent an attack put a new question
mark over the future of the nuclear industry. Before 11 September, President
Bush was talking of building more nuclear reactors. And it鈥檚 thought that
Britain鈥檚 energy review will also recommend building more plants.
If these countries go ahead, they should perhaps follow the example of the
former Soviet Union. Some of its earliest plutonium production reactors at
Zheleznogorsk (formerly Krasnoyarsk 26) in Siberia were built more than 250
metres underground. 鈥淭hey may now be the safest reactors in the world as far as
aircraft attacks are concerned,鈥� says Shaun Burnie from Greenpeace
International.
Anti-nuclear groups, of course, argue that the best way to protect people
against the risk of nuclear terrorism is to dismantle nuclear facilities and
convert radioactive wastes into more stable, safer forms. Yet even if the
political will were there, decommissioning the 438 nuclear power reactors
generating electricity worldwide would take decades.
THE prospect of terrorists making an atomic bomb has become the stuff of
legend. It has featured in the plots of films, fuelled media speculation and,
lately, frightened world leaders. Yet it has never happened.
Since 11 September, some say it never will. Why should Al Qaida bother to
build a bomb, the argument goes, when it can hijack a passenger jet and turn it
into one with devastating effect? This seems to be the view of the British
government, which last week gave the go-ahead for the state-owned company BNFL
to start up a new nuclear plant at Sellafield in Cumbria. Every year the plant
will make and export reactor fuel containing up to six tonnes of plutonium.
A confidential report revealed by 快猫短视频 earlier this year
(2 June, p 4)
suggests this fuel could easily provide material for a bomb. But the material
could not be stolen, the government鈥檚 Office of Civil Nuclear Security
maintains, because of 鈥渆ffective security鈥�. It probably does require more effort
and skill to construct a nuclear weapon than to fly a plane into a building. But
it would be wrong to suggest that stealing plutonium and turning it into a
simple warhead is beyond the wit of organised terrorist groups. And it would be
dangerous to assume that it is not on their agenda.
There have been 380 cases of illicit trafficking in radioactive materials
reported since 1993, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Of the
63 incidents in the past year, 13 involved small quantities of plutonium and
uranium.
Once in possession of such fissile materials, weapons scientists say it would
be 鈥渞elatively easy鈥� to design and build a bomb. Frank Barnaby, a nuclear
physicist who worked at Britain鈥檚 nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston in
the 1950s, has pointed out that only 13 kilograms of plutonium would be needed
to create an explosion with a yield of 100 tonnes of TNT鈥攆ifty times the
power of the bomb that exploded in Oklahoma City six years ago.