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Security at nuclear laboratories
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| 11 April 2003 |
By Andy Oppenheimer
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission conceded in January 2002 that nuclear power plants could not be adequately protected against airborne terrorist attacks. Days later, a US congressman claimed that America's nuclear weapons laboratories and storage sites were wide open to attack. US Representative Edward J Markey (D-Massachusetts) criticised the Department of Energy (DoE) for failing to shore up security gaps he said the agency had been aware of for more than 20 years.
"Unfortunately," he said, "security is so lax at some nuclear weapons sites where these [nuclear] materials are kept that terrorists could find what they needed to launch a nuclear attack right here in the United States of America."
Providing adequate physical security for the nation's nuclear complex is a huge task. Ten major sites are spread across the country, each holding enough weapons-grade plutonium and/or highly enriched uranium to build many nuclear devices or, if sabotaged, release radioactivity over a wide area. Several of these facilities are located near major metropolitan areas with large populations.
The DoE has overall responsibility for a security programme set up to protect against theft, sabotage, espionage, terrorism, and other risks to national security at its facilities. To ensure that these policies and procedures are implemented, DoE's field operations offices and the Independent Oversight Office provide oversight of the effectiveness of safeguards and security policy and its implementation. These offices play a critical role in the early detection of security problems.
The DoE periodically tests security at nuclear weapon facilities by conducting mock exercises, with teams from the US military acting as adversaries. Those defending the facilities are expected to be able to repel a surprise attack by adversaries armed with readily available weapons and explosives. In 2001, a Project on Government Oversight report found that 10 nuclear weapons facilities failed to stop mock terrorists in more than half of security drills conducted by US military teams. The report was based on information from whistleblowers and classified DoE material. US Army and Navy teams acting as mock terrorists were able to penetrate facilities' security and obtain nuclear material in several tests.
In August 2002, the DoE decided to move two tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to the maximum-security device assembly facility at the Nevada test site for security reasons. The move would be the first time the US has transported weapon-grade materials from one site to another to reduce the risk of a potential terrorist attack.
The security problems of the country's prime nuclear weapons laboratory have been dominated in recent years by alleged espionage, misplaced data and more recent revelations of theft and corruption. But before these controversies came to light, integral security was also found wanting.
In October 2000, the Independent Oversight group ran a test at Technical Area 18 (TA-18) at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory. TA-18 houses several nuclear burst reactors and tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. Built in the 1940s for the Manhattan Project, the facility was situated on the floor of a canyon so that its walls would absorb the radiation from the reactors. Because the high ground around the canyon cannot be controlled, the site is difficult to defend.
In this exercise, the intruders gained access to the reactor fuel, affording them the potential for causing a nuclear explosion that would have contaminated a large part of New Mexico. In December 2000, a security team from headquarters made a return visit to Los Alamos to verify that the laboratory had made upgrades at TA-18. It found that the upgrades had been made but not tested.
When the team visited TA-18 in January 2000, they raised questions about other vulnerabilities at the site. One burst reactor with large plates of uranium fuel was properly stored in an upgraded vault. But an almost identical reactor sat in the centre of an open area.
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