Pools of Fire

Looking for weapons of mass destruction? Try the backwoods of North Carolina. In what is called the triangle area, the gleaming cooling tower of the Shearon Harris nuclear plant rises like a concrete beacon out of the woods.

It may not look like much, but inside the confines of steel fence that rings the plant resides one of the most lethal patches of ground in North America. This is not just a nuclear power reactor, but a repository for highly radioactive spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants owned by Progress Energy. The fuel rods are sent by rail from the Brunswick and Robinson nuclear reactors to Shearon Harris, where they are stored in four densely packed pools. The pools are interconnected and enclosed within one building. Together, they form the largest radioactive waste storage pools in the country.

This makes Shearon Harris a very inviting target for would-be terrorists. They don't have to steal plutonium or concoct a bomb to manufacture a radiological nightmare scenario. All they have to do is penetrate the security fence of a lightly guarded commercial reactor and find a way to ignite the pools of high-level radioactive waste. The easiest target is to disrupt the circulation of the water system that keeps the pools cool.

The resulting fire would be virtually unquenchable. Moreover, because the water system that feeds the waste pools is also connected to the Shearon Harris reactor, a pool fire could also trigger a nuclear meltdown. And it would put more than two million residents of this rapidly growing section of North Carolina in extreme peril. A study by the Brookhaven Labs, not known to overstate nuclear risks, estimates that a pool fire could cause 140,000 cancers, contaminate thousands of square miles of land, and cause over $500 billion in off-site property damage.

An October 2000 report from the Sandia Labs in Albuquerque painted a grim picture of the consequences from a pool fire. The report, which was kept under wraps for two years by the NRC, found that a waste pool fire could spread radioactive debris over a 500-mile radius, including Cesium-137, a known carcinogen that is also linked to birth defects and genetic damage.

It's not that difficult to break into a nuclear plant, and security at Shearon Harris is notoriously lax. In 1999, NRC records show that two Progress Energy employees gained access to the reactor and the waste pools without security clearances. Plus, the company has hired numerous employees with questionable security backgrounds, including three guards who failed psychological exams and one with a criminal record.

Of course, the whole plant could go up without the help of terrorists. Basic mismanagement could do the trick. In fact, the NRC has estimated that there's a 1 in 100 chance of a pool fire happening under the rosiest scenario. And the Shearon Harris plant is far from rosy.

The Harris reactor has a troubling history. In 1999, the nuclear plant experienced four emergency shutdowns, or SCRAMS. The problems led plant managers to tell the Charlotte News and Observer that they were "very disappointed" engaged in "soul searching" and unsure whether the string of malfunctions were "coincidental or a sign of deeper problems."

A few months later, in April 2000, the plant's safety monitoring system, designed to provide early warning of a serious emergency, failed. It wasn't the first time. Indeed, the emergency warning system at Shearon Harris has failed fifteen times since the plant opened in 1987.

Between January and July of 2002, Harris plant managers were forced to manually shut down the reactors four times. Then in August of that year, the plant automatically shut itself down when the outside power grid weakened.

Documents uncovered from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reveal other disturbing problems at Shearon Harris. For example, inspectors have found "rubber and other foreign material" clogging the cooling lines in the plant's heat removal system. There are also internal memos from the plant reporting that many of its evacuation sites within the 10-mile emergency zone surrounding the plant are inoperable during severe weather.

In 2002 the NRC put the plant on notice about nine unresolved safety issues detected during a fire prevention inspection by NRC investigators. The plant was hit with a "Security Level III Notice of Violation." When the NRC returned to the plant a few months later for a reinspection, it determined that the corrective actions were "not acceptable."

"Progress Energy is far above the industry average in three important areas: emergency reactor shutdowns, required inspections, and the fact that it has interconnected Harris reactor's cooling system to four high-level waste pools--the largest in the nation," says Jim Warren, executive director of North Carolina WARN.

And the problems continue. This spring there have been four emergency shutdowns of the plant, including three SCRAMs over a four-day period in the middle of May. One of the incidents occurred when the reactor core failed to cool down during a refueling operation while the reactor dome was off of the plant--a potentially catastrophic series of events.

So, over the past four years, there have been 12 major problems requiring the shutdown of the plant. According to the NRC, the national average for commercial reactors is one shutdown per 18 months.

The situation at Shearon Harris is made more dire by virtue of the fact that the reactor is directly tied to the cooling system for the spent fuel pools. A breakdown in either system could lead to serious consequences in the other.

Congressman David Price commissioned a study of the situation by scientists at MIT and Princeton. The report pinpointed the waste pools as the biggest risk at the plant. The study recommended that the spent fuel pools be replaced with low-density, open frame racks and that the older waste assemblages be placed in hardened, above-ground storage units. The change could be done relatively cheaply, costing the energy giant about $5 million a year--less than the annual bonus for Progress Energy's CEO, Warren Cavanaugh.

But Progress scoffed at the idea and recruited NRC Commissioner Edward McGaffian to smear the MIT/Princeton report. In an internal memo, McGaffian instructed NRC staffers to produce "a hard-hitting critique...that sort of undermines the study deeply."

McGaffian's meddling has outraged many anti-nuke activists. "There's a huge credibility gap in the federal regulatory agencies," says Lewis Pitts, an environmental attorney in North Carolina. "After 9/11, the nuclear industry faked a report to convince the public that an airplane hitting a nuke plant is nothing to worry about, and now the NRC has directed the production of a bogus study to deny decades of science on the perils of pool fires."