Crimes Against Nature (22 page)

Nuclear plants are required to show that they can resist attacks by small groups of vandals who are not “enemies of the United States.” And the NRC periodically conducts mock attacks by such saboteurs, typically sending small forces of two or three attackers. Astoundingly, nearly 50 percent of the nation’s nuclear facilities routinely fail to repel even these feeble assaults, despite being notified of the time and date of the attack months in advance.
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Indian Point is apparently among the most poorly defended of the entire nuclear fleet. In a 2002 internal report by Entergy Nuclear, the plant’s Mississippi-based owner, obtained by Riverkeeper, Indian Point’s security guards acknowledged that the robust security force portrayed by Entergy in its advertising campaign and public pronouncements is a deception. Mock attackers were able to enter the plant practically at will. The head of one of the teams, Foster Zeh, attested that he could breach the perimeter fence and place dummy explosives around the spent-fuel pools in under 40 seconds. According to the internal report, the guards are undertrained, underequipped, overworked, demoralized, and out of shape. Only 19 percent believe they could defend the plant from attack. Most of them said they would flee if the plant were attacked.
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A recent Riverkeeper lawsuit against the NRC before the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals exposed “gaps” in plant security for the first time.
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There is, for example, no protection from air attacks at Indian Point. The FAA has refused to declare a no-fly zone over the plant, which lies in the approach path of Westchester County Airport. The FAA has given this protection to Disneyland, Disney World, and Crawford, Texas. They even provided it for my cousin Caroline Kennedy’s wedding on Cape Cod! In 2002, my brother Douglas, a reporter for Fox News, chartered a small airplane at Westchester Airport and flew directly over the plant with a film crew and circled it for 20 minutes, waiting in vain for someone to signal him off. Dr. Gordon Thompson, a research scientist at the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an expert on nuclear plant security, told me that a small private jet, chartered at Westchester County Airport and packed with explosives by a sophisticated but suicidal terrorist, could crash into the right building and precipitate a spent-fuel fire — releasing all the plant’s stored radiation.

There is also no defense against line-of-sight missile attacks from the west side of the Hudson, and only weak defenses against a marine attack on the plant’s cooling-water structures, and even those are intermittent; a patrol boat is docked alongside the plant, usually a small Boston whaler or buoy tender. Last summer we were cavorting back and forth in front of Indian Point in the Riverkeeper boat to test its defenses, when two guards finally approached us in a whaler. When we asked whether they were armed, they sheepishly told us no, and explained that they would need to radio back for directions if there were an attack. Their boat broke down on its way back to the plant and the crew had to radio for help. Buoys mark an exclusion zone that recreational boaters generally respect. Terrorists could penetrate the zone and reach the plant in a matter of seconds.

But it’s not just Indian Point that this White House is ignoring. On September 24, 2003, the GAO issued a report faulting the Bush administration for failing to bolster nuclear plant security nationwide.
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The GAO found that the dereliction at Indian Point is in fact the rule at nuclear plants across the United States. According to the report, the NRC deliberately stages softball mock attacks to give the impression of plant security, and has often shielded the industry by burying significant security breaches.
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NRC inspection reports routinely omit security violations such as a guard sleeping on duty or falsified security logs.

As it turns out, the sleeping-guard incident took place at Indian Point. The NRC report indicated that when two of its officials found a security guard napping at his post at the Indian Point 2 reactor last year, the agency decided not to issue a notice of violation because there was no terrorist attack on the plant during the half hour or so that the guard was sleeping.
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The GAO auditors said that, nationwide, the NRC habitually refused to issue formal citations and routinely minimized the significance of problems it found if the problems did not cause actual damage (a circumstance that would occur only if terrorists happened to strike the plant when the NRC investigators were present). The NRC further explained that it elected to treat the Indian Point incident as a “non-cited violation” because no single guard had been found sleeping “more than twice during the past year.”
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Who says the NRC doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Indian Point’s license requires its operator to demonstrate that there is a workable evacuation plan in the event of an emergency. However, Entergy Nuclear is not required to develop a plan for the 50-mile peak injury zone — which would involve the impossible task of evacuating New York City. The company has, however, developed an emergency plan to evacuate the plant’s 10-mile radius. It involves moving residents within the 10-mile radius to reception centers 11 to 15 miles from the plant. My local high school is a reception center. I doubt the evacuees will feel particularly safe there. Most of my neighbors intend to head for the hills as soon as the Indian Point emergency sirens sound. Entergy’s evacuation plan is so comically absurd that my neighbor Chevy Chase seriously considered a stand-up routine consisting of reading excerpts from the document.

In August 2002, Governor George Pataki commissioned a consulting firm headed by former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director James Lee Witt, the world’s leading expert on emergency planning, to assess Indian Point’s Emergency Response Plan. Witt’s exhaustive 550-page report criticized virtually every aspect of the plan and concluded that Entergy’s emergency plan is “not adequate to…protect the people from an unacceptable dose of radiation in the event of a release from Indian Point.” Witt added that the current evacuation plans “do not consider the reality and impacts of spontaneous evacuation.” His report pointed out that all emergency planning assumed a slow accidental release that could be kept secret for many hours in order to keep the roads clear while schoolchildren were evacuated.
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Entergy apparently has not heard of cell phones or CNN.

Fallout from the Witt report was dramatic. Westchester’s Republican congresswoman, Sue Kelly, who had been one of the few Congress members still defending the facility and its emergency plan, immediately joined approximately 260 elected officials, 35 municipalities, 56 environmental and civic groups, hundreds of business leaders, and several labor unions and school boards in calling for the shutdown of Indian Point. Four county governments (Orange, Rockland, Westchester, and Putnam) and the State of New York have refused to certify their evacuation plans to FEMA and the NRC. Adequate evacuation plans are a condition of a plant license but, not surprisingly, the NRC indicated it was willing to overlook an unworkable and unfixable emergency plan.

Despite numerous requests by Riverkeeper and local politicians, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has refused to meet with local leaders or take any position on the issue or investigate the matter. But Ridge went the extra mile to protect Entergy’s profit margins. On July 25, 2003, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security issued a determination that the emergency evacuation plan for Indian Point “would be adequate in protecting public health and safety in the event of a release.”

The administration has independent power to shut down the plant under the EPA’s Clean Water Act authority, and to require security and emergency preparedness improvements through the DHS, the NRC, the DoE, and FEMA. Entergy rakes in approximately $1 million a day from the electricity produced by Indian Point and has shared its profits generously with the president and his party. Entergy is a major player within the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). Entergy president Donald Hintz is chairman of the NEI’s board of directors.

Contributions from companies and organizations on NEI’s 2001 members roster total $29.2 million in soft money from 1991 to June 30, 2001, with 63 percent going to Republicans.
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NEI itself contributed $643,202 during the same period.
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It also spent nearly $10.8 million lobbying Congress and the executive branch from January 1996 through June 30, 2001. These have been great investments; NEI met with Energy Department officials 19 times while the Cheney task force was at work.

In her April 8, 2004, testimony before the September 11 Commission, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice swore under oath to the nation that the administration was doing everything in its power to “harden terrorist targets” in the United States. But, as we have seen, this administration is doing next to nothing.

The idea that industry will step up to the plate on its own is pure folly. In July 2003, the Conference Board, a business research group, found that American corporations have hiked security expenditures less than 4 percent on average since the September 11 attacks.
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As terrorism expert Rand Beers told me, “Of course, there’s no such thing as a perfect defense, but we’re remiss if we don’t try to protect our citizens. We know for sure, from interrogation of terrorists, that security measures have value, they discourage attacks. So, the idea that we should leave the barn door open, we should simply say
que sera sera
— the American people don’t ask presidents or administrations to behave in that fashion. That is such a dereliction of duty as far as I could see.” Beers’ dissatisfaction with President Bush’s inertia when it comes to protecting Americans prompted him to resign in March 2003, after providing counterterrorism advice to every president since Ronald Reagan.

Tragic as it was, September 11 was a gift of sorts to George Bush. As of August 2001, jobs were vanishing, the stock market was sinking, and the public was disgusted with Bush’s policies on the environment. But after the terrorist attacks, Bush’s poll numbers soared. The public rallied to support its commander in chief as he sought to avenge the innocent lives we lost. But while the war against terror has required great sacrifices from American taxpayers — and vastly greater sacrifices from our fighting soldiers — President Bush has been unwilling to ask his friends and corporate paymasters to ante up their share. He has not challenged Detroit to end America’s reliance on Middle East oil. He has not asked the Saudi princes to cooperate with the FBI. He won’t ask the richest 1 percent to give up their tax cuts to help fund the war. He has not even attended a single funeral for our war dead. Instead he has used September 11 as a rationale to justify everything from the daily body-bag count to the swollen deficit. He has used the war on terror to implement Dick Cheney’s neo-con agenda — invade Iraq, sink the UN, enrich Halliburton, reward the rich, open our lands to oil and mineral development, destroy our wetlands, hand obscene tax breaks and subsidies to the energy barons, and take a blowtorch to our constitutional rights and environmental laws — all in the name of homeland security.

Meanwhile, as our nation spends hundreds of billions of dollars searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we are ignoring 15,000 WMDs on American soil.

F
or the last couple of years I’ve traveled around the country on an informal speaking tour, sounding the alarm about George W. Bush’s record on the environment. I’ve spoken to hundreds of audiences, including conservative women’s groups; public school teachers; civic, religious, and business groups; trade associations; farm organizations; rural coalitions; and colleges. As I talk about the plundering of our shared heritage, I urge these Americans to help protect the air and water, landscapes and wildlife, that enrich our nation and inform our character and values.

The universally positive response to my speeches confirms national polls that consistently show strong support for environmental protection across party lines.

But I invariably hear the same refrain from audiences: “Why haven’t I heard any of this before? Why aren’t the environmentalists getting the word out?” The fact is, there is no lack of effort on our part to inform the public, but we often hit a stone wall: the media. They are simply unwilling to cover environmental issues.

To some extent this has always been true. In 1963, President Kennedy and Senator Gaylord Nelson made a cross-country tour to alert Americans to the environmental crisis.
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In speech after speech Kennedy warned that air and water pollution, species extinction, and pesticide poisoning were threats to our nation’s future. But as he later complained to Nelson, the press asked only about national defense or power politics and never mentioned the environment in its stories. In fact, it was Nelson’s experience on that trip that inspired him to organize the first Earth Day eight years later.
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Now the crisis that President Kennedy predicted is upon us. Ocean fisheries have dropped to 10 percent of their 1950s levels,
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the earth is warming, the ice caps and glaciers are melting, and sea levels are rising.
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Asthma rates in this country are doubling every five years.
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Industrial polluters have made most of the country’s fish too poisonous to eat. The world is now experiencing extinctions of species at a rate that rivals the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
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Nearly 3 billion people lack sufficient fresh water for basic needs, and over 1 billion are threatened with starvation from desertification. Hundreds of millions of desperate people have been displaced by environmental disasters; the presence of these refugees puts added pressure on the local ecology, often leading to wars and further environmental degradation. All this at a time when our president is engaged in the radical destruction of 30 years of environmental law. These things are certainly newsworthy.