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C. The Threat— Dr. Edwin Lyman I'm Ed Lyman from the Nuclear Control Institute, and I'd like to thank the Orange County Commissioners for their hospitality. It is always refreshing to get out of Washington, especially these days. I would not turn down an invitation like this. I was asked to talk about the issues of terrorist threats in nuclear power plants and their vulnerabilities with regard to terrorism. What I would like to do is really document what we believe the state of nuclear power plant security was before September 11`h. The Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Richard Meserve, only a few weeks ago, told Congress that, and I quote, "Before September 11, 2001, nuclear power plants were among the best defended and most hardened facilities of the nation's critical infrastructure." This is the line that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry have been peddling since the September 11`h attacks as justification for the inaction that has taken place. I think the point of this talk is simply to make it perfectly clear exactly what the vulnerabilities were before September 11`h and what they appear to be even after September 11`h. So, what do we have? The state of nuclear power plant security in general; since the 1970's it was recognized that nuclear power plants might be a potential target of the terrorists and that the consequences as Dave pointed out could be catastrophic. So, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did decide to impose some regulation that meant the plant had to protect against the potential for an attack of a commando team whose intent was to cause enough damage to the plant to cause a meltdown and the kind of consequences that we just saw in the previous slides. To do this, the commission postulated what is called a design basis threat, which is essentially, according to the regulation, several persons with the assistance of an active or a passive insider. An active insider is someone who would actually be working inside the plant and participate actively in the attack. When the attack was taking place, let's say he or she were in the control room, he would be able to manipulate the controls, he could kill the other operators, he could do all sorts of mischief actively. Passive simply means that he was in a role where information was provided to the external attacker so that they would have information about the plant layout and the physical protection system when they attacked. In the early 1990's, the NRC added another regulation that the plant also had to provide some protection against truck bombs. This was in response to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and also an incident at the Three Mile Island plant where an intruder was able to drive a vehicle into the site and disappear for four hours. So they imposed a regulation where there had to be some sort of way of preventing truck bombs from getting close enough to the plant so that if they were detonated they could cause damage and again potentially a release of radiation. Aircraft attack was never contemplated in the design basis threat and it is not today. Now, how did the plants comply with this? They had to come up with a physical security plan, which is a description of how their guards would respond if the plant were attacked. Complementary to this were controls for access authorization meaning individuals who had unescorted access to the vital areas of nuclear power plants had to be vetted, they had to have background checks to make sure they were trustworthy and had no ulterior motives that could come across in the background. Finally, access control is simply a system making sure that the people who get onto the plant site are the ones who are appropriately authorized to do so. It also includes the placement of vehicle barriers to prevent large truck bombs from getting close enough to the plant to do harm — in a position where they cannot get close enough to the plant to do harm without having been searched first. The NRC introduced a program in 1991 to test security at these plants, which was called the Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation. And this was introduced because it was recognized that even if the utility was perfectly in compliance with every element of the regulation, it is possible that they still may fail to prevent the plant from being sabotaged. So it was actually a way of testing the particular response strategy that would be executed by the guards. And the way OSREs were run, they would have four separate force on force drills,