Perry nuclear power plant was vulnerable to sabotage, says Union of Concerned Scientists

The Union of Concerned Scientists today said operators at the Perry nuclear power plant discovered a vulnerability in the plant's security in early 2012.

The weakness apparently had something to do with underground piping or trenching, the watchdog group said in a report issued Thursday.

The revelation of the potential security weakness that could have allowed outsiders into secure areas of the Perry plant -- possibly through underground tunnels -- is one of 14 "near misses" included in a report on nuclear safety issued annually by the watchdog group.

The UCS defines a near-miss as a situation or problem that could have led to a serious incident endangering public safety or worker health.

"Perry's owner informed the NRC that its security program for monitoring underground pathways and other unattended openings were insufficient to detect and prevent unauthorized access to the protected area," the report states.

Protected by heavily armed guards, surrounded by prisonlike fencing and in locked buildings, these areas include the reactor and emergency safety equipment, such as the plant's diesel generators.

The group believes the vulnerability -- had it not been discovered -- would have made Perry more vulnerable to sabotage.

Although there is no public record of the discovery of the security issue, plant owner FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron reported the problem to the the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Jan. 25, 2012, according to the UCS report.

The federal agency sent a special inspection team to Perry, which then issued a security violation, again not available in the agency's public files.

FirstEnergy spokeswoman Jennifer Young said federal security rules prevented her from fully responding to the charge.

But she insisted, "This was not an event or near-miss. At no time was plant security breached."

In a statement responding to a request for comprehensive explanation, Young also wrote:

"U.S. nuclear facilities, including the Perry Nuclear Power Plant, employ many layers of robust security measures, including physical barriers, trained site protection forces, access restrictions and other procedures to protect the health and safety of the plant, its personnel and the public from any security related event.

"Our nuclear plant security measures are continually inspected, assessed and exercised to look for opportunities to make our safe, secure facilities even safer. When Perry self identified a potential vulnerability, it took prompt and immediate action to report its discovery to the regulator and correct the issue.

The NRC had no immediate response to the UCS report.

UCS is a nuclear watchdog organization. It is not opposed to nuclear power, and the author of the annual near -miss report, David Lochbaum, is a nuclear safety engineer who worked for 17 years in a nuclear power plant.

Lochbaum seemed more critical of the NRC than FirstEnergy because, he said, such problems were identified by other nuclear power plant operators 30 years ago, well before the 9/11 attacks.

"While the security veil hides some information about this problem and its resolution, the available information strongly suggests that the NRC is requiring that the owner fix the identified problems of uncontrolled access into the plant's protected area," he wrote in the report.

"That's good, but there is no evidence that the NRC is also requiring that the owner fix its testing and inspection regime shortcomings that allowed this security problem to remain undetected for so many years. Both fixes are equally important and yet the NRC seems willing to accept half measures. That is fully wrong."

FirstEnergy has spent millions of dollars in the last decade on physical security and a police force at its three nuclear power plants to meet federal security regulations.

Source: http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2013/03/perry_nuclear_power_plant_was.html

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