Congressman wants better employee checks at nuclear plants
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not conduct extensive background checks on nuclear power plant employees and does not know how many foreign nationals work at nuclear plants, according to a report released Monday.
The report, "Security Gap: A Hard Look at the Soft Spots in Our Civilian Nuclear Reactor Security," was prepared by Representative Edward Markey, D-Mass., from an analysis of more than 100 pages of correspondence requested from the NRC. The report indicated that although the agency does require criminal background checks of nuclear plant employees, the checks are limited to crimes conducted in the United States.
"It is unacceptable that the NRC [does not have] a policy on screening of foreign nationals," the report said. "Terrorists may now be employed at nuclear reactors in the U.S. just as terrorists enrolled at flight schools in the U.S."
Security exercises conducted at nuclear plants are inadequate and the sites that conduct them fail more than half of the time, according to the report. The NRC waited until six months after the Sep. 11 attacks to increase security at nuclear power plants, the report said, adding that the NRC has "historically failed" to change security regulations and has "yet to begin a permanent revision of security regulations."
"Black hole after black hole is described and left unaddressed," Markey said. "Post 9-11, a nuclear safety agency that does not know--and seems little interested in finding out--the nationality of nuclear reactor workers or the level of resources being spent on security at these sensitive facilities, is not doing its job."
The NRC has worked hard to ensure that the 103 U.S. operating nuclear reactors are safe, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.
"We think we've been very proactive in trying to identify any threats against nuclear power plants," Sheehan said. "There are a number of things that have been done and will continue to be done. We're not taking any threats against nuclear power plants lightly." (Cheryl Thompson, Washington Post, March 25).
The names of all nuclear plant employees are vetted by the FBI and any criminal records would likely be discovered through the process, said Ralph Beedle, chief nuclear officer for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the main lobbying group for the nuclear power industry.
"The people we hire, for the most part, are folks who have come over here and gone through school," Beedle said. "I hired a lot of people out of Columbia University, [City College of New York], folks from India, China, that were over here for years as students," he said, referring to when he was chief of nuclear operations at the New York Power Authority (Matthew Wald, New York Times, March 25).
The NRC also does not know how many security guards are employed at each nuclear plant, Markey said. NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci said nuclear plant security forces are fingerprinted and minimum staffing levels would be included in each plant's security plan, which is filed with the NRC.
"The security plan would tell you the minimum number, but not necessarily the whole number," Screnci said.
Screnci also said security tests conducted at nuclear plants are not done on a pass-fail basis. Instead, they are used to find "chinks in the armor," she said.
Even though the NRC does require background checks, "the scope is somewhat limited" and not enough to assure security at a site where a terrorist attack could be potentially devastating, said Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"I've worked in over 20 plants in the 17 years I was in the industry," Lochbaum said. "Had I wanted to sabotage the plant, it wouldn't have been that difficult to do so."
Although other agencies do not conduct extensive background checks of their employees, "the consequences of someone causing mayhem [at nuclear power plants] are a little more severe than someone working at a 7-11," Lochbaum said (Susan Milligan, Boston Globe, March 25).