Expert: nuclear facilities are vulnerable to intelligent intentional attacks

21 June, 2009, 11:18

Technical expert John Large, who has often been commissioned by Greenpeace to provide technical analysis about nuclear issues, says a nuclear holocaust can come from any country that possesses nuclear technology.

The expert, who led the nuclear risk assessment team for the raising of the damaged Russian nuclear submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea, gave an exclusive interview to RT on issues of modern nuclear facilities safety.

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RT: So you've made a career out of nuclear energy, but you are actually often very critical of the nuclear industry. You've done a lot of work for Greenpeace which obviously vehemently opposes nuclear power as a whole. How does that tally together?

John Large: I am a technologist. What I feel about it is one of enthusiasm because it's high technology. Because any technologist really falls in love with things like racing cars and steam engines and nuclear power. What I have to say about nuclear power is – one of the problems is its devastating consequences, so you have to be absolutely sure that this very hazardous high-technology is within our complete control. If there is any doubt, or things go wrong, then radiation is not particularly forgiving. So we have to be sure that this is an unsinkable ship.

RT: Are we moving closer towards making nuclear power an unsinkable ship?

J.L.: In many ways it’s going further away from our reach. The main problem is the economics of nuclear power. You have a very hazardous process – a nuclear reactor, the nuclear fuel particularly – so you have to put on all sorts of safeguards, you have to bolt on to all sorts of safety systems, containments to ensure that if something does go wrong it’s contained or controlled. And the problem is, all of this costs a lot of money and a lot of science and technology. That means the nuclear power stations have to get bigger the more sophisticated they become to actually stop an untoward release of radiation – the more equipment needs to be strapped on to, the more costly they become – so that means in response they have to become bigger units. Also they have to stretch the use of the fuel. They have to get more energy out of the fuel. And to do this you have to burn the fuel up. It stays in the reactor longer. And that means more radiation being stored in the fuel. So if you have an accident, more radiation could be released from that extended life, greater burn-up fuel, which means you have to add more containment. So it’s like chasing your own tail. We haven’t yet reached the situation where we contain what some would call a monster but I would call it a continuing technological challenge.

RT: One of the things that you do is advise foreign governments on a project that you took part in was the raising of the wreckage of the Kursk submarine from the bottom of the Barents sea. How much did you know about the wreckage before it was brought up?

J.L.: Very little in fact. Myself, my team of nuclear experts and also the recovery crew,
Mammoet-Smit, the Dutch salvage company, they knew very little about it. So in fact we were finding out as we went along. We had a very tight window to actually recover the Kursk over a summer period because the sea state conditions would deteriorate. Also President Putin guaranteed to recover the Kursk within a year, so we were really tight-pushed, and it was ‘learn as you go along’. We had to put a number of, if you like, consequence-control measures to make sure if we didn’t know, whatever could happen was within our control. So it was a very exciting and technically challenging project in that respect.

RT: And how dangerous was it? I mean you assessed the nuclear hazards before you started.

J.L.: It was extremely dangerous because, first of all, the Kursk was severely damaged by the explosion in the torpedo room. We weren’t sure of the state of the two reactors onboard the Kusrk. We weren’t sure that all of the torpedoes in the front end exploded or blown up or fragmented bits of torpedo around. We had to take account of the ship itself, the boat itself and its nuclear reactors and weapons, as it was designed which was new to us because we were western engineers, western technologists looking at the Soviet system. We then had to take into account the amount of damage that had been caused by the sinking. And then the aggregation of the system, because the ship’s been in the water for a year abandoned. And then we had to take account of the way in which the Dutch were gonna actually pull this boat, yank this boat, out of the seabed and transport it, deliver it to the Russians in a place called Severomorsk. So all of those factors, which were highly interacted, had to be taken into account.

RT: It must’ve been quite a moving moment when you saw the wreckage surface eventually.

J.L.: Well, we were elated but then on the other hand we were very sad. Because every member of my team and every member of the salvage crew, about 150-160 people, were elated that we’ve achieved this load first. But then very saddened to know the fate of the people, the sailors inside that submarine that suffered during those first 135 seconds in which most of them perished.

RT: When the wreckage came up was that the point at which it became clear what had actually happened?

J.L.: There was a great deal of to and fro between ourselves, the technical team assessing the risk and hazards, and the Russian authority, the Northern Fleet. It was a military secret. And there were we from the West having to understand all that military secrecy, all the technology to actually make sure it could be raised safely. The real point here is, we mustn’t look badly upon the Russian technology as being fouled; on the Russian navy having to employ the Smit salvagers and the UK scientists to actually work towards this salvage. You know, if their own navy lost one of its nuclear-powered submarines it also would be unable to recover that submarine. It would have to seek independent advice on how to do it. It would have to employ maybe a Dutch salvage crew. So there is nothing exceptional about this Russian failure that would not apply to the Royal navy. To the US navy as well.

RT: In 2001 you wrote a paper about the danger of the terrorist attack on a nuclear plant. What were your findings?

J.L.: Originally I was instructed by one of the international environment groups to actually consider the effect of a terrorist attack on a nuclear installation. [The] nuclear installation was in Britain, it was Sellafield, big reprocessing works in Cumbria. When I looked at the publicly available information for Sellafield – what was there, where its radioactive waste was stored, how much radioactive waste, what the conditions of the storage were, what the structural details of the stores were – I was actually alarmed. I was able as engineer, but a member of public effectively, go to local planning authorities, go to various sources and put together, collect together all the information I required, or I would require if I was a terrorist, to actually fashion an attack, a real attack on that particular plant.

Afterwards I applied the findings of that report to a notional nuclear power plant which could be subject to threat, and said, “What were the implications of 9/11 on these big hazardous plants? Were they found safe?” And the answer was no, because the way in which we design these plants is by looking at random accidental events that could affect the plant. In other words, flooding, earthquake, storm, tempest, or perhaps a gismo falling off of the reactor itself.

We don’t assess, or never assess, the ability of nuclear plants to survive a threat coming from a terrorist, for example. So all the safety analysis is done on accidents, based on the fact that accidents can happen, some random event. Whereas what we saw on 9/11 was an intelligent intentional attack that deliberately sought out the weaknesses of those two skyscrapers. So I argued, “Could that be the case for nuclear power plants?” And my conclusion was, yes.

RT: And your report was suppressed by the government, if I’m not mistaken.

J.L.: Yes, it was. And they tried to hold it back and tried to stop publication.

RT: Why do you think the government was so keen to not have that information in any kind of public domain?

J.L.: We had a whole armada of nuclear power stations in Britain, America, in Europe generally that could not be adapted. You couldn’t make them stronger, you couldn’t build extra containments, you couldn’t change the management systems. So that generation, several generations of nuclear power plants were still at risk from terrorist attack. And the government obviously didn’t want to highlight that.

RT: Now the government’s going to build 8 new power stations in the next 9 years, 8 new nuclear power stations. Have your findings been taken into account in the design of that new generation of generators?

J.L.: Well, I would say no. I mean, the French designers, Areva, for the proposed bulk of the nuclear power plants, new builds in Britain have argued that their plants are terrorist-proof inasmuch as they can withstand an aircraft crash. Well, first of all I doubt whether they can withstand a fully-fuelled airline crash. Because you don’t necessarily have to penetrate the concrete. What you could do is simply annihilate all the operators. You know, the big aircraft coming down with a 150 tons or so of aviation fuel exploding on the site may well be enough to actually put all the operators out of action, if not kill them outright. So there are major problems there. But also, it’s “How do you design something to withstand malicious action?” It could be terrorists running in with guns and cannons and explosive packs; it could be a saboteur inside; it could be a passive insider that just passes information on to an outside group; or it could be an active insider who actually does things himself lots of time as it is. It could be someone the Americans call “Farmer Brown”, some agreed member of public who’s so zany, he or she believes an attack of a nuclear power plant is worthwhile. How do you actually defend against that range of problems?

RT: What would be the effect of an attack say like the Oklahoma bombing on a nuclear power plant?

J.L.: A major attack on a fuel plant may well fragment and volatize the fuel elements. This would spread over the regions around the power station. If the energy of the attack was enough it would fluff the fuel particles into the air, and then you could have a global dispersion rather similar to Chernobyl. So the limits are unbound in many ways.

RT: Which country in your opinion poses the biggest nuclear threat in the world today?

J.L.: Any country that has some nuclear activity. It could be France, Britain, America, Russia. It could be Ukraine, it could be North Korea, Iran etc. Our problem is, we don’t know where the threat will come from. If it’s an intentional threat, then clearly one would look towards North Korea and perhaps, in a few years time, Iran with their nuclear weapons development programs. We might look towards Israel and its particular position in the Middle East, with its nuclear weapon capability. So those are the deliberate, if you like, concoctions of where a nuclear holocaust can come from. But then when you look at countries like Britain, France which, incidentally, also have nuclear weapons, so there is nothing to stop us using them as well. But we might look towards the power plants, the big power plants. France and Britain, who knows, there may be a mistake, may be an error, there for the grace of God is another Titanic sinking. It could be any country, least of all where you’d expect it.