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in this country where I think we are testing children every year, standardized tests, and they are not being told that failure is ok, it is just a means of improvement. That is what the NRC is telling the nuclear power plant operators. And so I kind of see the NRC as a very indulgent parent that has been warned never to tell their children that they have actually failed at something and always finding a way to characterize a failure as just a means of improvement. That is sort of the message that the reactor operators like to hear. The fact is that these are failures. I mean, if terrorists can actually infiltrate a plant, kill all the guards, and cause a meltdown, I do not see any other way to call it but a failure. And if you read the text of some of the reports documenting, well here NRC used the word, "The licensee failed to protect the mock adversaries from gaining access to two target sets. Numerous responders were unable to deploy that being vulnerable to the adversary." So, they used the word "failure" themselves there, and these were very recent events. So this is not some ancient history, it was something that was right before September 11`h. So, the response of this industry to this bad news was to kill the messenger. So the NRC staff decided to terminate the program very quietly in 1998 before all the plants had been tested. But news of the termination was leaked to the L. A. Times and the White House, which President Clinton two days before had given a prominent policy speech talking about the importance of response to terrorism. This news is not consistent with that message. So the White House called NRC and said, "You better put this program back on track." And they did. But since then the industry has tried every other means to try to weaken it. What had happened with regard to reactor security right before September 11`h? By September 5`h, which was the time of a major public meeting on security, NRC had suspended all penalties associated with OSRE failures. They had allowed many plants to go down to the minimum number of security guards that are allowed in the regulations, which is five per shift. They had approved starting a self-assessment program where the utilities would run OSRE type exercises by themselves and also grade them themselves, which, if any teacher has asked their students to grade their own exams, I think there are clearly methodological problems with that. And they were planning to zero out the OSRE budget in future years. So, they had laid the groundwork really for gutting the whole security assessment program, and that is where we were. And the industry was completely consistent, and this quote really says it all. This was an article appearing September 10`h. The Nuclear Energy Institute representative said that, "We believe nuclear plants are overly defended at a level that is not at all commensurate with the risks." And the scary thing is that if you ask Lynette Hendricks what she thought today, she would probably agree with that statement. I think that is probably the scariest thing. So, that's where we were before September 11`h, and have things really improved? Well, what happened on September 11`h, NRC suggested that nuclear power plants go to their highest level of security, which they promptly did. But a number of people asked them, "Why didn't you order anyone to do anything?" "Well, we didn't have to order them, because they did it anyway." "Well, what if they didn't do it?" Well, they just danced around that question. The consequences of not actually issuing a mandatory order were that the plants, instead of hiring new guards were forcing existing guards to work overtime. We heard about guards working 72- hour shifts. We were getting calls from security guards who were exhausted who said that they were scared to go to work because they did not know what they were doing anymore and they could not defend their plants. This was of great concern to us. The level of the demoralization and loss of morale among these guards was something to see. Finally, five months later, NRC did actually impose a mandatory order, but they gave all of the plants six months to actually comply with the order, which would put them almost a year after September 11`h without actually doing anything that was a mandatory requirement that they could be fined if they did not comply with. We heard about the National Guard situation in North Carolina. One consequence is that there was no recommendation from NRC about whether or not individual states should order National Guard to supplement the security at nuclear facilities. So you had situations where one