Re: Fwd: RUSSIAN SECURITY SERVICES WARN USA RE NEXT TARGETS BEING NUKE FACILITIES...
To: "Barbara Byron" <BByron@energy.state.ca.us>, graydavis@governor.ca.gov, "Barbara Boxer, Senator (CA, D)" <senator@boxer.senate.gov>
From: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
Subject: Re: Fwd: RUSSIAN SECURITY SERVICES WARN USA RE NEXT TARGETS BEING NUKE FACILITIES...
Cc: president@whitehouse.gov, "Russell Wise, NRC" <rxw@nrc.gov>, "Elmo Collins" <eec@nrc.gov>, "Pat Gwynn" <tpg@nrc.gov>, "Clanon, Paul" <pac@cpuc.ca.gov>, "Ajello, Julian E." <JEA@cpuc.ca.gov>, "Wong, Zee Z." <czw@cpuc.ca.gov>, "Clark, Richard W." <rwc@cpuc.ca.gov>, "NRC" <the.secretary@hq.doe.gov>, Bob Aldrich <boba@energy.ca.gov>
URGENT
To: "Barbara Byron" <BByron@energy.state.ca.us>
From: Russell Hoffman, concerned citizen
Date: September 19th, 2001
Re: SHUT THE NUKES DOWN TODAY
Ms Byron:
This matter is urgent. I sent you a letter yesterday and have received no response so far.
I understand from Bob Aldrich (Webmaster, California Energy Commission), that you are the person in California's state government who actually understands how nuclear power plants work, what the dangers are if they melt down, and what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says when they say things (anything) to Californians. You therefore should be the one to detect their lies whenever they lie to us, which they regularly do.
If you are not the proper contact person in the State of California to handle this matter, it is urgent that you pass this message, and all my previous correspondence of the past few days (including my letters to Mr. Aldrich), on to whoever is in that position.
Attached (below) are two articles on nuke vulnerabilities and related matters. What kind of warning are we waiting for? The answer is, we are not waiting for a warning. We are waiting for a catastrophe. We've had enough warnings. We know what's coming next.
WE MUST SHUT THE NUKES DOWN TODAY -- THEIR VULNERABILITY IS REDUCED SUBSTANTIALLY AS SOON AS THE CONTROL RODS ARE DROPPED, AND CONTINUE TO BE REDUCED EVERY DAY THE REACTORS REMAIN IN COLD SHUT DOWN.
ALSO, IF TERRORISTS GET ACCESS TO THE CONTROL ROOM THEY CAN CAUSE A MELT-DOWN WHENEVER THEY WANT. THIS WOULD BE A VERY BAD SITUATION.
THE REACTORS MUST ALL BE SHUT DOWN AND DISABLED SO THAT THEY CANNOT BE RESTARTED.
NOW IS THE TIME. AMERICA'S VULNERABILITIES MUST BE ADDRESSED TODAY.
Here are four reasons military protection of nuclear power plants is not the answer:
1) It might not work, and if it doesn't, the devastation would last for millennia and the death toll and suffering would be unspeakable -- several orders of magnitude worse than what we saw at the World Trade Center.
2) Using trained troops for this purpose takes those troops away from other defensive positions where the country could use them. There are over 1000 nuclear hotspots in this country, including nuclear power plants (103), research reactors (~40), training reactors (several), closed reactors (~50), and waste dumps (lots and lots). Hanford alone is about the size of a small state, and just has a fence around it -- very difficult to protect. All nuclear sites are vulnerable to one degree or another, most of them are extremely vulnerable.
3) Having so much weaponry so close to the reactors is unsafe prima facie. "Friendly fire" is an extremely serious risk in any firefight. Also, there is no guarantee that those manning the guns will do what is expected of them. Timothy McVie was a U.S. soldier before he became a terrorist.
4) It's extremely expensive to protect the plants and the expense will not go away as time goes by. We will need to protect the NPPs from this day forward. Thus, they are not and never will be economical to run (they never were before).
CLOSE THE NUKES NOW! LET'S SWITCH TO RENEWABLE ENERGY TODAY!
Russell Hoffman
Concerned Citizen
Carlsbad, California
Attachments (2)
1) Article about a Russian Warning
2) Article about a prior warning which was ignored
===========================================================
At 06:14 AM 9/19/01 , Jack Shannon wrote:
From: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>
To: "Rad-UK/Europe List" <rad-UK@egroups.com>,
"Abolition-Caucus" <Abolition-Caucus@yahoogroups.com>,
"Nukenet" <nukenet@envirolink.org>,
"Nucnews List" <Nucnews@egroups.com>,
"Indian Point List" <westcan@egroups.com>,
"DU List" <du-list@egroups.com>,
"Downwinders List" <downwinders@egroups.com>,
"DOE-Watch List" <doewatch@egroups.com>
Cc: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: RUSSIAN SECURITY SERVICES WARN USA RE NEXT TARGETS BEING NUKE FACILITIES[ACCORDING TO RUSSIAN TV]
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 21:47:45 -0400
Russian television reported on Wednesday: "Our
[Russian] security services are warning the United
States that what happened on Tuesday is just the
beginning, and that the next target of the
terrorists will be an American nuclear facility."
[See www.nci.org.]
http://www.tmia.com/sabter.html
http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=special&
s=bivens_wtc_20010916
Printed from http://www.thenation.com
© 2001 The Nation Company, L.P.
Back to Web View
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FEATURE STORY | Special Report
Nuclear Safety
by MATT BIVENS
What happens if a suicide bomber drives a jumbo
jet into one of America's 103 nuclear power
reactors? What happens if a fire fed by thousands
of tons of jet fuel roars through a reactor
complex--or, worse, through the enormous and
barely-protected containment pools of spent
nuclear fuel found at every such plant?
These questions are even more obvious and urgent
than they may seem at first glance. Russian
television reported on Wednesday: "Our [Russian]
security services are warning the United States
that what happened on Tuesday is just the
beginning, and that the next target of the
terrorists will be an American nuclear facility."
[See www.nci.org.] Meanwhile, eight years ago, in
the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings,
the terrorists themselves wrote to the New York
Times to warn that nuclear attack would follow.
That letter, judged authentic by federal
authorities, talked of "150 suicide soldiers" who
would hit "nuclear targets." As if to drive home
the point, those same terrorists had trained
beforehand at a camp in Pennsylvania thirty miles
from Three Mile Island. US law enforcement had
them under surveillance at least a month before
they struck--and at one point observed them
conducting a mock assault on an electric power
substation. That very same weekend, a man later
judged to be mentally unwell drove his station
wagon through the security barriers at Three Mile
Island and parked next to a supposedly secured
building. [See www.tmia.com.]
There are nuclear power plants outside many urban
areas. There's Indian Point on the Hudson River,
some twenty-five miles northwest of New York City;
Limerick Plant some twenty miles outside of
Philadelphia; Calvert Cliffs, forty-five miles
from the nation's capital; and a handful of
nuclear plants ringing Chicago, from Dresden to
Braidwood. A terrorist strike at any such plant
could not bring about a nuclear explosion--but
there are a number of scenarios that would spread
deadly radiation clouds across, in the NRC's
famous phrase, an area the size of Pennsylvania.
On top of the tens of thousands of eventual
radiation-driven deaths, there is the mass panic
such an attack might cause. And if we can clean up
and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing,
a radiological attack would force us to write off
huge swathes of land as national sacrifice areas.
So given the extraordinary events of this week,
we're taking extraordinary measures to protect our
nuclear plants, right?
Well, in France, the defense minister has
stationed troops around nuclear power plants...
But in America, not much is being done.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday in a
statement said it had "recommended" that plants
tighten security. Bob Jasinski, an NRC spokesman,
said Friday that nothing had changed since then.
(What about Wednesday's Russian TV report? Or the
repeated insistence by authorities that there are
more terrorist cells out there?) The NRC also says
there have been "no credible general or specific
threats to any of these [nuclear] facilities"--and
does not seem interested in reconsidering the
specific and, it now seems, very credible 1993
threats of 150 suicide soldiers headed the NRC's
way.
Security Already "Privatized"
David Orrik, a former US Navy Seal, until recently
ran a program that tested the security at civilian
nuclear plants by organizing mock attacks against
them. His exercises don't sound terribly
ambitious--they pit a small team, moving on foot,
against a nuclear plant security force that would
be warned six months in advance of the test. Even
so, half of all plants tested failed--and in at
least one case, Orrik's men were able to simulate
enough sabotage to cause a core melt. And
remember, these tests did not simulate, say, the
Osama bin Laden truck bombs so successful in
demolishing US embassies in Africa in 1998.
The nuclear industry did not enjoy failing, and
did not enjoy shelling out hundreds of thousands
of dollars to prepare for Orrik's tests--or to
install security upgrades as the penalty for not
passing. So it began to lean on the NRC to gut the
program. This fall, the NRC is doing just
that--phasing out Orrik's program in favor of one
in which nuclear power plants will carry out
"self-assessments." An NRC spokesman could not say
if that plan would now be scrapped, and neither
could Orrik. Asked on Friday if NRC was
considering any dramatic new security measures,
Orrik said he had "no sense at all" what would
happen next. "I'm curious myself--will it be a sea
change? Or business as usual?"
Sleeping in a Coffin
Ironically, one of the first real critical looks
at the NRC's decision to let nuclear plants who
failed security tests make up their own tests
instead appeared in U.S. News & World Report's
Monday edition--the day before, well, Tuesday.
That article quotes a representative of the
Nuclear Enterprise Institute--the nuclear power
industry's Washington-based trade group--as
arguing that nuclear power plants "are overly
defended at a level that is not at all
commensurate with the risk." On Friday, the NEI's
offices were closed. But a statement on the NEI
website [www.nei.org] trumpeted the "extensive
security measures" insisted on by the NRC,
including employee background checks. These are
the same background checks that let a man named
Carl Drega work at three nuclear power plants
throughout the 1990s. Shortly after leaving the
third plant, Drega went on a 1997 killing spree
that left dead two state troopers, a judge and a
newspaper editor. Nor did such background checks
blackball a computer programmer who worked at the
Maine Yankee nuclear plant and slept in a coffin.
That man goes on trial next year for the murder of
seven co-workers at a Massachusetts technology
company.
The NEI statement on nuclear plant security states
that the reinforced concrete containment buildings
that surround US reactors--they are there to
prevent the spread of radiation in case of an
accident--are "designed to withstand the impact of
hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and airborne
objects up to a certain force." In reality, as
even the NRC conceded on Friday, reactor
containment buildings were not built with the idea
of resisting an intentional assault by a
modern-day jet--certainly not the monster 767s
that crashed into the World Trade Center. The
literature is actually strangely silent on this
point--so much so that experts interviewed all
named the same study, published in 1974 in Nuclear
Safety, about probabilities of a plane
accidentally hitting a nuclear reactor. That study
concluded that some reactor containment structures
had zero chance of sustaining a hit by a "large"
plane, defined as more than 6.25 tons. The 767s
that hit the trade center weighed 150 tons, and
were probably moving at top speed.
In fact, the security vulnerabilities at nuclear
plants are so ghastly that almost everyone
contacted for this article balked at discussing
them in any detail. Paul Gunter, an expert with
the anti-nuclear power Nuclear Information and
Resource Service (NIRS), recoiled when asked about
one possible scenario. "Oh, I don't want to
prescribe that. It's too terrifying to imagine."
NRC spokesman Jasinski also refused to discuss
that scenario. Bennett Ramberg, author of a
sixteen-year-old book called Nuclear Power Plants
as Weapons for the Enemy: an Unrecognized Military
Peril, turned away some questions, saying, "I feel
a little discomfort talking about that now." Later
Friday, after Ramberg saw Wednesday's report of
Pakistani terrorists threatening to target nuclear
installations in India, and Tuesday's report of
Israel thinking of bombing Iran's nuclear
facilities, he felt freer to talk. "The cat's out
of the bag," he observed.
Terrorists Don't Bomb Windmills
This week's events have changed the national
landscape for nuclear power. For starters, they
make the industry's gushy talk about the
next-generation Pebble Bed Reactor--the reactor so
safe it won't even need a containment
building--seem ghastly and ridiculous.
Terrorism also has implications for the Great
Waste Debate. Our reactors have for fifty years
been piling up vast quantities of highly
radioactive spent nuclear fuel. The question of
what to do with it all takes on a new urgency. Do
we ship it all to a central site like the one
proposed for Yucca Mountain--and create a
spectacular series of terrorist targets for years,
turning trains and trucks of waste into what
critics deride as "Mobile Chernobyl"? Or do we
keep waste in vast pools on site at reactor
complexes--in buildings so frail that David
Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of
Concerned Scientists, says they could be pierced
"by a Cessna"--and also keep producing more such
waste every day?
There is no easy answer--which may explain such a
sluggish and bleary-eyed response to potential
terrorism against nuclear targets: the NRC and
others are in denial. Not so long ago, they were
arguing that terrorism was not a very scientific
probability, and that terrorists had a moral
impediment against taking life on a mass scale. So
much for that. But if terrorism is real, then a
clear-eyed view would suggest nuclear power is
done for.
Nuclear power had been previously discredited on
environmental grounds, on public safety grounds
and even on financial grounds--don't be fooled,
it's immensely costly, even with the public paying
for both waste disposal and liability insurance.
This week, nuclear power was also discredited on
grounds of national security. A country that has
nuclear power plants, it turns out, has handed
over to "the enemy" a quasi-nuclear military
capability.
We get 20 percent of our electricity from our
fleet of enormously expensive and dangerous
reactors. Regardless of what our vice president
may think, through better energy efficiency and
conservation alone we could reduce energy demand
to the point of not needing any of those
plants--of not even noticing that they had been
shut down. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a
prominent think-tank on energy matters, argues
that "up to 75 percent of the electricity used in
the United States today could be saved with energy
efficiency measures that cost less than the
electricity itself."
Given that our national will and purpose are now
being mobilized, does anyone doubt that, properly
channeled, we could succeed in this? Or that along
the way we could also establish wind power, solar
power and hydrogen fuel cells--and in so doing,
completely wean ourselves from the oil of the
Middle East? Surely this--and not open-ended war
against every nation that has every stamped bin
Laden's passport--is the path to real victory and
national security. After all, as Lochbaum of the
Union of Concerned Scientists noted, no one this
week is calling his colleagues in the alternative
energy sectors to ask about terrorist threats to
windmills.
In the meantime, we can follow France's lead and
post National Guardsmen around all nuclear
facilities. We can restore the NRC's compulsory
security drills, and make them even more
demanding. Hey, we can even consider anti-aircraft
emplacements at each power plant. And we can see
how safe that makes us feel when the White House
starts trying to punish Afghanistan.
<<<<< END OF ARTICLE FORWARDED BY JACK SHANNON, USMC (Ret.) <<<<<
==================================================================
>>>>> THIS ARTICLE WAS POSTED BY Magnu96196@aol.com: >>>>>
To: DOEWatch@onelist.com, downwinders@yahoogroups.com, NucNews@onelist.com
Subject: [downwinders] Hijacked Plane Targeted Nuke Complex
SEPTEMBER 19, 02
Hijacked Plane Targeted Nuke Complex
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD
Associated Press Writer
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) ‹ Twenty-nine years ago, hijackers took over an
airliner with 27 passengers and four crew aboard and threatened to crash
into the government's nuclear weapons production complex in Oak Ridge.
``They let us know that if we didn't have the money by X hour then we
were going to dive into Oak Ridge,'' co-pilot Harold Johnson recalled in
an interview last week from his Memphis home. ``And there was no doubt in
my mind that we would have done just that.''
Johnson would be threatened with his life and shot in the arm before the
32-hour ordeal finally ended Nov. 12, 1972, in Havana.
Airline hijackings to Cuba were common in those days. The commandeering
of the Southern Airways DC9 with its '70ish smiley face on the nose was
one of about 30 hijackings that year.
But this was one of the few times in American aviation history ‹ before
last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
‹ in which hijackers threatened to use an airplane as a weapon.
Johnson, who retired in 1983, said domestic security measures were
increased after his flight. But he said the government didn't go far
enough.
``For a long, long time, it was something that I thought could happen
someday, but had just hoped and prayed that it never would,'' he said.
Unlike the recent hijackers, the three Americans who took control of
Johnson's Memphis-to-Miami-flight had little training and virtually no
plan. They did have guns, a hand grenade and a grudge against Detroit,
where two of them had been charged with rape.
Hijacker Melvin Cale grew up in nearby Knoxville and worked in Oak Ridge
before moving to Detroit with his half brother Louis Moore, another
hijacker. Henry Jackson of Detroit completed the trio.
They commandeered the plane about 10 minutes after a stopover in
Birmingham, Ala., crashing through the cockpit door with an arm around a
flight attendant's throat and a gun to her head.
They wanted a $10 million ransom, 10 parachutes and 10 bulletproof vests.
The plane eventually reached Knoxville and began circling Oak Ridge, site
of the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant and their specific target ‹ a nuclear
research reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
``It was surreal in a sense,'' said Jim Alexander, a former government
spokesman at Oak Ridge. ``We would look up in the sky and see this jet
airliner circling. It was high, but it never left.''
In his book, ``Odyssey of Terror,'' the plane's captain, William Haas,
wrote that the hijackers became enraged when their demands received a
lukewarm response. They forced Haas to begin a steep descent on Oak
Ridge, pulling out only when the airline said it would comply.
Johnson, however, said the plane never got below 8,000 to 10,000 feet and
that was only so the hijackers could identify Oak Ridge.
The airline finally came up with $2 million for the hijackers, who then
forced the pilots to fly to Havana. They shot Johnson in the arm during a
shootout with FBI agents when the plane stopped to refuel in Orlando,
Fla.
The hijackers were arrested in Cuba and imprisoned for eight years. The
trio returned in 1980 to Birmingham, where they were sentenced to 20- to
25-year terms.
Haas retired in 1988 and died earlier this year. His widow said he never
would have crashed the DC9 into Oak Ridge.
``There is not a pilot in the United States that flies commercially that
would do anything like that,'' Ann Haas said. ``He might make the
hijackers think that was what he was going to do, but never, never would
they use it as a target.''
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments [by Magnu96916@aol.com]:
What they did not know at the time was the gas diffusion plant was a much
more dangerous target
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
<<<<< END OF ARTICLE POSTED BY Magnu96196@aol.com (with commentary by him) <<<<<
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First posted September 22nd, 2001.
Webwiz: Russell D. Hoffman