The Coming Apocalypse: Part I
by Harvery Wasserman
It is the morning of September 11, 2001. Mohammed Atta is at the controls of the jetliner he and his fellow terrorists have just hijacked. As per orders from their leader, Osama bin Laden, they are headed for the World Trade Center, determined to make history.
But what if Atta has other plans? What if he wants to do lasting damage? What if he wants to bring America to its knees? Below him is the weapon of mass destruction he intends to detonate—the Indian Point nuclear plant, just 35 miles from midtown Manhattan.
When the facility, overlooking the Hudson River, went online in the 1960s, the surrounding area was sparsely populated. Today millions live within a 20-mile radius of the energy center—including the governor of New York, George Pataki. Atta could kill every soul. All he has to do is aim the 767 at Indian Point’s three reactors and spent fuel pools.
Even though Indian Point Unit One has been shut since 1974, the reactor remains highly radioactive. Units Two and Three are still licensed to operate at full blast, although they are frequently shut down due to operator incompetence and aging. Even such simple accessories as sirens designed to warn the public of disaster fail in test after test. The reactors themselves are inefficient, unreliable megamachines constantly leaking radiation into the nearby community.
Hijackers like Atta know that Indian Point has no antiaircraft gun emplacements or radar system. When the plummeting airline destroys the reactor complex, nobody working there will know what hit them.
A large passenger airplane is more than capable of penetrating old, relatively flimsy reactor containment structures. Some of the newer American facilities might have shells strong enough to resist a crashing jet, but certainly not the primitive, obsolete shells in place at Indian Point and at numerous other U.S. nuclear plants.
To spark a catastrophe, it isn’t even necessary to strike the reactors themselves. Any fiery explosion close enough to shake or singe the plant’s highly vulnerable control systems will suffice. Disaster can also come from crippling the fragile cooling systems that stand between the operating reactors and multiple meltdowns. A disastrous collapse can occur in hundreds of different ways. Even the spent fuel pools, with huge stacks of extremely radioactive rods, need constant cooling and could cause a catastrophe on their own.
Take the following hypothetical situation as an example of how a nuclear crisis might unfold: After being struck by an airliner, the wounded reactor’s superheated core can melt into a molten radioactive mass. Like those of dozens of other aging American nukes, the metals that comprise Indian Point’s critical containment and cooling systems have been rendered brittle by decades of intense bombardment from radiation and heat. They are vulnerable to shattering, especially if water is suddenly poured in to stop a meltdown. If shaken or cooled too rapidly, these metals could shatter and disintegrate into hyper-radioactive dust, letting loose the core’s lethal poisons. Deprived of coolant, the spent fuel pools could follow suit.
The result would be an intensely radioactive molten lava capable of penetrating the facility’s metallic and concrete structures and into the soil. The volatile mass would burn down to the water table, flashing it to explosive steam, blowing through to the Hudson, releasing gargantuan clouds of ultradeadly radiation, with killing power never seen before on Earth— even at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Indian Point and the rest of Westchester County turn immediately into a dead zone. Thousands perish within minutes or hours. Virtually every pregnant woman in the area spontaneously aborts. Small children, the sick and the elderly drop like flies.
The cloud carries like a horrific grim reaper across the river and into New Jersey and beyond. As the winds shift, deadly radiation blankets the entire region, carries out into Long Island Sound, reaching Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Inevitably, the killing force sweeps down into Manhattan.
The U.S. government estimates that if a major accident were to hit the Indian Point Two plant north of New York City, there would be 46,000 “early fatalities,” 141,000 “early injuries,” 13,000 “cancer deaths” and $274 billion in property damage. For the larger Indian Point Three there would be 50,000 “early fatalities,” 167,000 “early injuries,” 14,000 “cancer deaths” and $314 billion in property damage.
Utter panic magnifies as the news careens across the Internet. The radioactive cloud ravages Europe and spreads death around the globe. The international media goes berserk.
Meanwhile, the entire East Coast of the United States is engulfed in mass hysteria. The nation’s financial and media centers are abandoned. As the death toll soars astronomically, the U.S. economy plunges into chaos—the irreparable damage soaring into the trillions. America would never recover.
It would not take a jet crash to inflict such mayhem. Nor would it have to happen at Indian Point. Not one of America’s 103 licensed commercial reactors is prepared to resist an attack from the air.
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regularly stages drills meant to simulate terrorism from the ground as well. And the reactor operators regularly flunk these tests, even though they often have advanced warning, and the mock attacks are pale shadows of what could actually be staged by determined saboteurs.
Keep in mind that the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, with their huge costs in life and property, had nothing to do with terrorism. Time and again, aging reactors are pushed to the brink by pure mismanagement and overuse.
While the Bush Administration shreds the Constitution to “protect America from terror attack,” it works to hand those very terrorists still more apocalyptic triggers like Indian Point. Even in the wake of 9/11, the administration has done virtually nothing to upgrade reactor security. When independent watchdog groups such as the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Waterkeepers and others suggest safety or security upgrades, the reactor industry trots out its high-paid lawyers to resist the improvements. Or it demands that the public foot the bill.
Indeed, all currently operating reactors are shielded from the true cost of a major accident or terror attack by the sneaky Price-Anderson Act, which forces victims and taxpayers to bear the liability.
If terrorists ever strike an American reactor—old or new—the owners will be shielded from responsibility, while you and your family die from the ultimate radioactive nightmare.
Harvey Wasserman, a history professor at two Ohio colleges, is also senior editor at Free Press, senior adviser to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and the author of several books about nuclear power and renewable energy. For 30 years he has been a strong force in the grassroots antinuclear movement.
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