Defending Nuclear Power Plants - No fucking clue

Here we are, coming up on five years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and you'd think that with all of the Republican claims about how safe they are making our country, that we'd have a comprehensive security plan in place to protect out nuclear power plants. Wrong.

It's amazing how the GOP bullshit artists are able to get away with their fairy tales about just how well they're defending the homeland. Read on for more about how they're failing to protect us from further terrorist attacks.

A NYT article published today examines the confusion that still exists over just who should be responsible for protecting from a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility.

A spokesman for the nuclear industry said that terrorist threats were greater than the commercial security forces at reactors could handle, and that the industry was therefore justified in lobbying against some security requirements that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had considered.

But another witness said that there was no one else in position to respond to large threats.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission redefined its requirements for the attacks that reactor owners must be prepared to defeat, known as the design basis threat, but the commission backed off some of its early ideas after industry objections.

At the hearing on Tuesday, which examined the adequacy of reactor security, the subcommittee chairman, Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, said, "There's an assumption that the design basis threat will protect the plant, and therefore the public." But he said he believed that the security requirements were eased "because we've made a decision that it's not practical to meet what may in fact be a very realistic threat."

Here, we have another example of an industry lobbying federal regulatory officials to protect their bottom line.

Another witness, Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington that has issued reports about security lapses at government and civilian nuclear plants, said industry officials wanted the rocket-propelled grenades and sniper rifles removed from the official threat because they claimed it was too expensive to defend against them.

"The result of this process is a completely unrealistic design basis threat that reflects not what intelligence experts say is realistic, but what industry is willing to pay for," she said.

Ms. Brian said that assembling a SWAT team and getting it to a plant site would take at least 90 minutes while a terrorist assault would succeed or fail within eight minutes.