That was long before terrorism became an issue in our nation, and prior to some of the more advanced designs for nuclear systems that are available today. I think the plants we can construct today are safe enough, but there is still the issue of waste and now there is the issue of terrorism. It is hard to devise a scenario that would provide the terrorists of the world with more bang for the buck than a successful attack on a nuclear plant or waste storage area. The amount of damage that could be done to the environment in either of those scenarios is immense, especially if the facility in question had a city in its downstream plume of radioactivity. The cost of losing New York City is only exceeded by the cost of operating it on an ongoing basis. Just kidding, New York produces an enormous amount of value in spite of the fact that Wall Street has lost seven trillion dollars of our money in their last burst bubble. Replacing the two buildings of the World Trade Center alone will cost over two billion dollars. Wall Street has lost that on a good day in the equities trading business during the last year.

The value of any city is easily enough established based on real estate costs and infrastructure values. New York would cost over two trillion dollars to replace even if we could begin to replace it just by building another city elsewhere. That is a cost equal to the entire annual national budget. Just absorbing the cost of that loss alone would damage our economy for decades. That does not include the loss of human life that could easily be associated with such an event. What is the true value of all that human talent and training, some of which is irreplaceable? It is clear that we should try to prevent the destruction of such a city regardless of the cost. But there is little standing between terrorists and the Indian Point Nuclear plant except a few under-armed guards and a chain link fence. Indian Point could irradiate significant areas of New York City if it were successfully attacked.

Of course we are assured that even successful terrorist attack on the nuclear plant at Indian point could not reach NY City but I find those assurances miss some possibilities. The prospect of an assault succeeding is certainly greater than fifty percent, since the test assaults succeeded fifty percent of the time at similar facilities. Once the terrorists are in they could do anything they wished to the facility under their control. We must assume they are prepared to die so nothing that kills them slowly will prevent them from exposing them selves to radioactivity. That makes them far more effective than anyone in the threat analysis business might expect.

A large petroleum fire can send a plume into the air higher and farther than the ten mile long plume that is the worst case developed by the experts. There are large numbers of stored spent fuel rods containing a lot of radioactive material on the plant site. Piling those in a truck and driving to NY City where an air fuel bomb could create a spectacular disaster is possible. An air fuel bomb could also use the reactor vessel as a containment vessel. Not to mention the use of a suitcase nuclear bomb to blow the contents of the reactor and the storage ponds into the stratosphere. There they would cause huge damage over a wide spread area far larger than the maximum event posed by the threat analysis now in place.

How likely are such events? We have no way of calculating the likelihood of such an attack all we can do is try to prevent it. The best way to do that is to use sufficient numbers of adequately armed guards to make an attack less likely to succeed. That may be expensive but it pales in comparison to even the worst case analyses already approved by the experts. The resistance to such a simple solution is as incomprehensible to me as the lies we were told about the safety and costs of nuclear power in the 1970's. I am willing to say that we should use existing nuclear plants as long as we can keep them safe but these "threat experts" are hard to believe and harder to trust with so many lives. We are spending billions on Iraq to make ourselves safe but we can't afford to adequately guard nuclear facilities at home near one of our greatest cities? That is stupid enough for it to be hard to believe that anyone could say it, but as of now it is our public policy! God bless and keep you and all of us safe from our terrorists and our threat analysts alike.