Maine Yankee to critics: ‘You’re aiding the enemy’

As protesters worry publicly that terrorists could successfully attack Maine’s spent-fuel reserve, the company replies that discussion will compromise security

By Lance Tapley

Executives at Maine Yankee Atomic Power Plant have come out in opposition to public discussion of security measures for its deadly radioactive wastes. They claim such discussion might help potential terrorists.

They are responding to citizen groups that have sharply questioned the post-September-11 safety of the Wiscasset plant’s 900 tons of used reactor fuel. Some activists argue that the National Guard should surround the plant. They fear a terrorist attack that could contaminate huge portions of the state.

In a written statement on November 13, Maine Yankee told state government that public debate on the subject may be “aiding the enemy.” This position has floored activists.

After distributing the statement at a meeting in Augusta of the Advisory Commission on Radioactive Waste and Decommissioning (known as the “Radwaste Commission”), Maine Yankee’s chief nuclear officer Michael Meisner told the state panel that citizens “ultimately will have to rely on security experts” to judge if the plant, now halfway through a $600-million dismantling process, is safe.

In addition to worries about terrorists obtaining details of the plant’s security, the company’s statement expressed concern that open discussion would lead to “a potential deterioration in public confidence” in Maine Yankee. This could cause unnecessary “public anxiety.”

The state’s executive branch, in the person of the head of the Maine National Guard, Major Gen. Joseph Tinkham, agreed with Maine Yankee at the meeting that “all necessary security measures have been taken” at the plant. The company has ended tours, posted its property off-limits to hunters, set up concrete vehicle barriers, added more guards, and — it suggests — taken other, secret security actions.

The secret measures were convincing to Tinkham and Gov. Angus King, who were given a briefing on them arranged by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

“The governor and I were not satisfied until we had that classified briefing,” Tinkham told the Radwaste Commission. After the session, King continued to refuse to send the Guard to the plant. Thirteen governors have the Guard protecting nuclear installations, including Connecticut’s John Rowland, whose state also has a plant being decommissioned.

The public is “just going to have to trust the fact that we are doing our job and are doing it well,” said Tinkham.

His reassuring tone seems arrogant to Maine Yankee’s critics, who see the nuclear-power industry and the state and federal governments as historically on the same side, and they generally distrust them on safety issues.

It is “cowardly” for the company and the state “to pull in a general and have him say ‘you’re all safe, but I can’t say why because it’s classified,’ ” declared Edward Myers of South Bristol, a long-time Maine Yankee critic. He spoke at a public forum on radioactive waste safety attended by 70 people at the Wiscasset Middle School on the same day as the Radwaste Commission meeting. “Maine Yankee has made a profession out of the half-truth,” Myers asserted.

Raymond Shadis, spokesman for Friends of the Coast, the citizens’ group that organized the forum, scoffed at Maine Yankee’s claim that criticism aided potential terrorists. He doubted the plant has “anything miraculous in what they have hidden away” to protect the waste. “We know what we see” looking at the plant, he said. The critics see vulnerability. “Their statement criticizing public discussion is preposterous coming from an intruder-friendly plant,” he added.

While his group is pressing King on the issue of troops, it is also raising money for a lawsuit to force additional security measures. Shadis would not say if he intended to sue the governor, the NRC, Maine Yankee, or all of them.

Friends of the Coast is not alone in its demands. Outside the Radwaste Commission meeting, which was held at the Cross Office Building, Augusta-area Green Party activists picketed with signs asking that the Guard be sent to the plant. And the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association (SUCA) has asked that the state guard the facility at least until the NRC conducts, and Maine Yankee passes, a mock-terrorist attack to test its security weaknesses. The NRC conducts these “force-on-force” tests at several plants each year, but it has never done one with radioactive waste as the target.

“Over the years I have been forced to recognize that you cannot trust these people,” said Nigel Calder of Alna, speaking of Maine Yankee. He represented SUCA at the Wiscasset forum. “Their knee-jerk reaction is to say they’ve got it under control, but they have a long history of cutting corners . . . We need to determine our own comfort level.”

RAY SHADIS: “A handful of armed men hiding in a sheet-metal building on an exposed peninsula with 900 tons of the deadliest material we have in Maine and no outer defense perimeter — there’s no way to turn this into a pretty picture by revealing secrets on how well armed the guys in the tin box may be.”

Why citizens want to discuss things publicly

A number of citizens — particularly people who live near the plant and who have long been critics of its operation — have had their concerns about Maine Yankee revived. Similar anxiety has been awakened around nuclear plants all over the country since the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Although the reactor was shut down in 1996 because it was expensively (and critics said dangerously) beginning to wear out, all of the radioactive fuel used since it started up in 1972 is stored at the plant. The waste is inside a metal building in an open, 40-foot-deep pool of water enclosed in six-foot-thick, reinforced-concrete walls. The water blocks much of the still-strong radioactivity from the 1432 used (or “spent,” in the industry’s nomenclature) nuclear-fuel assemblies, each 12 feet long by eight inches square. The water also cools them. The assemblies, each composed of a bundle of uranium fuel rods that had been inside the reactor, are hot in both senses of the word. Radioactivity generates heat. In the reactor, they created steam to drive turbines that generated electricity.

The federal government promised decades ago to find a place to bury spent fuel from the nation’s commercial reactors — 103 are now in operation — but it has been unable to come up with a geologically and politically acceptable graveyard. In recent years, the State of Nevada has successfully resisted the feds’ desire to use remote Yucca Mountain for a repository. So Maine Yankee may have to store its fuel indefinitely.

To have storage with less upkeep, the plant plans within several months to begin moving the radioactive assemblies from the pool and put them into 60 air-tight, 17-foot-tall, steel-and-concrete “dry casks” standing like radioactive tombs on six acres of the Maine Yankee site. This cask facility is to be all that is left of the plant when it is finally dismantled in 2004. There also will be four casks containing radioactive metal left over from the reactor’s disassembly. The fat cylinders can be seen from a public road and from the Back River, which flows by the plant.

How dangerous is the spent fuel? Consider one isotope (one variety) of one element: highly harmful Cesium-137, which results from the splitting of atoms of uranium. The rods in the Wiscasset pool contain 50 million curies of it — a curie being a measure of radioactivity potency — according to Gordon Thompson of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Mass, a physicist who spoke at the Wiscasset forum. He said the disastrous Chernobyl reactor meltdown in Ukraine in 1986 released just 2.5 million curies of Cesium-137.

How physically harmful is the invisible radiation from this and other radioactive elements in the spent fuel? If an unprotected person stood a yard away from a spent-fuel-rod assembly for 10 seconds, he or she would be certain to die within a matter of weeks, if not sooner.

Thompson quoted an NRC report that concluded the assemblies within a partially drained spent-fuel pool could heat up and catch fire within a day even after the fuel has been radioactively decaying for a number of years. In an “accelerated fire” — for example, if an airplane loaded with jet fuel crashed onto the pool — the assemblies would ignite much faster. Jet fuel has many times more chemical energy pound-for-pound than TNT, Thompson said. He also thought people with military experience would face no huge problem blowing apart a storage cask.

As a result of the terrorist attacks, the NRC is restudying security at both active nuclear power plants and decommissioned ones. Thompson was not optimistic about its actions unless citizens were aggressively concerned. “The NRC has proven itself to be unreliable and untrustworthy on [safety] issues,” he said.

Another expert at the forum, nuclear engineer David Lochbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC, said that if the contents of just one of the 1432 fuel assemblies at Maine Yankee were vaporized into the air in a fire, more radioactivity would be spread than from a Hiroshima-type atomic-bomb blast. It could kill thousands of people.

“The spent-fuel risk at Maine Yankee is real,” Lochbaum said, but “the security is surreal” because the NRC has never tested the security of a spent-fuel pool. His organization is pushing the idea of the force-on-force test for the plant. Maine Yankee says it has no opinion on such a test. Last January, Lochbaum publicly had criticized the NRC for not considering a terrorist attack in a report it produced on dangers to a spent-fuel pool. The report said there was a very small risk of a very dangerous fire starting in a pool if there were such events as an earthquake or a building fire.

Lochbaum does not trust Maine Yankee to attend properly to security concerns. He recalled that five years ago, when a whistleblower employee at the plant alerted the Union of Concerned Scientists to safety deficiencies, the NRC’s subsequent investigation “found 75 pages of problems that needed to be fixed,” he said.

The concerns go on and on

Other concerns and questions about the spent fuel that activist citizens want to have discussed are:

• Can anything be done about a hijacked airliner crashing into the plant? Spent-fuel pools are not designed to take the crash of a big jet (the same is true of containment domes of operating plants). Gen. Tinkham and the speakers at the Wiscasset forum — including Paul Blanch, a Maine Yankee consultant — agree that a “no-fly” zone around the plant, given the speed of airplanes, would be worthless against an attacker. They see it only as a security blanket for the public because combat fighters don’t patrol the skies above Maine. The people who believe Maine Yankee’s security is adequate, however, tend to think any attackers — if they were interested in a place so remote from population centers — would not be able to aim a plane precisely enough to hit a spent-fuel pool. “I wouldn’t want to bet my farm on their inability to hit it,” commented Lochbaum. (Earlier this month a no-fly zone was briefly ordered for the Maine Yankee area after a national terrorist alert.)

• Because of the vulnerability of the waste pool, rough consensus exists, including among plant critics, that moving to cask storage is prudent. Some people are not entirely confident of the casks’ ability to withstand terrorist attack. Lochbaum felt tests should be done on how easy it is to pierce a cask before fuel is put in them.

Although Maine Yankee has permission from the NRC to go to casks, Gov. King is not quite confident with their security arrangements. The state has no legal say in the matter, but Gen. Tinkham told the Radwaste Commission that he felt sure, if the governor opposed putting the assemblies into the casks now, “they’re not going to send federal troops in here” to enforce Maine Yankee’s and the NRC’s wishes. Maine Yankee’s Meisner pledged to cooperate with the governor.

• Some critics feel the plant is exposed to military-weapon attack from nearby roads or fields or from the river. To prove a point about the lack of security, a Westport selectman drove his covered pickup truck one evening into the middle of the Maine Yankee property without being stopped. This was a month after September 11. The incident received some publicity. Since then, security has been increased.

Shadis said the value of a perimeter guarded by a few dozen soldiers would be to slow down intruders, provide early warning of an attack, and deter attackers because of “the perception of the military being there.” Nationally, authorities have expressed fears about nuclear plants as terrorist targets. The FBI is looking for six men who were stopped by the police in the Midwest and then released. They had pictures and descriptions of nuclear power plants, box cutters, and Israeli passports.

Gen. Tinkham felt that because under many scenarios the fuel assemblies would not ignite immediately “in the amount of time it would take terrorists to do anything we would have time to retake that site with soldiers.” Maine Yankee’s executives are officially neutral on the Guard question, but they do not seem enthusiastic about soldiers posted around their plant.

• The critics are also concerned with post-reactor-shutdown cutbacks in safety. When the reactor stopped running, Maine Yankee successfully lobbied the NRC for permission to drop many safety provisions. Guard towers were removed. Most of the sirens that dotted the region were taken down. Emergency planning was scaled back. The plant is now exempt from notifying state and local officials and the public of certain information about radiation threats. It doesn’t have to notify officials of an emergency until 60 minutes have passed. Friends of the Coast wants these actions reviewed. Shadis has written the governor asking that the sirens be reinstalled. Maine Yankee doesn’t believe any changes are necessary in the current security set-up.

• Shadis and others are critical of the state’s expertise in evaluating the situation at Maine Yankee. A 20-year veteran of anti-nuclear crusades, Shadis in the 1980s organized the first of three unsuccessful state referendums to shut down the plant. Now on the staff of the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution, and recently a citizen member of the NRC’s reactor oversight panel, he has made a career of questioning nuclear power. He has strong opinions on who is able to cut the nuclear mustard.

Of Gen.Tinkham: “He may be a security guy, but he doesn’t know anything about nuclear,” he said. The 17-member Radwaste Commission, he claimed, is lopsidedly pro-nuclear. State officials and legislators are the majority on it. “There is no one from the environmental community,” he said, except Donald Hudson, the president of the Chewonki Foundation, an environmental school in Wiscasset, “but he’s not exactly an activist.” At its recent meeting, the commission, headed by Democratic State Sen. Sharon Treat of Gardiner, did not seem aggressive in pursuing safety issues. Shadis also said “it’s hard to forget” Gov. King’s history with Central Maine Power Co. (CMP), the principal owner of Maine Yankee. Before becoming governor, King made millions of dollars in business deals resulting from his CMP relationship.

And Shadis feels that the state is ill-served by Paula Craighead, the state nuclear safety advisor and the top policymaker for King on decommissioning issues. “She doesn’t understand anything about technical nuclear issues,” he claimed.

King is fixated on getting the wastes out of Maine

Craighead, a lawyer who used to be King’s assistant counsel, feels that several years on the job have given her plenty of experience with nuclear issues. In any case, she sees her experience in mediation and negotiation as most important. Skills in this area are undoubtedly needed with issues so prone to quarrels, but she spends much of her time loudly and repeatedly advocating the administration’s position: Get the federal government to move the waste out of Maine. Even though Maine generated the waste, “it is unacceptable to the state . . . to host the stranded radioactive materials,” she told the Radwaste Commission meeting.

The reason King is hesitating — post-terrorist-attacks — to fully bless dry-cask security, Craighead said in an interview, is because “the law says the waste is supposed to be leaving,” and “there’s never going to be adequate security in the state for the long term” for these dangerous wastes. “A couple of people down the road” guarding the casks is not a safe situation given the events of September 11, she added, compared to the guards and 500 workers currently at the plant. Maine Yankee projects about 15 people at the site monitoring the casks. In three shifts, this would mean five people at a time.

Basically, King does not want to do anything to encourage long-term storage here. He implicitly agrees with the activists that Maine Yankee’s security plans for the wastes are insufficient. If his worst fears are confirmed and the wastes remain in Maine, he has demanded of the NRC that “the same security measures required at the Maine Yankee plant as of today’s date will apply in 2005.” Although in his correspondence with federal officials he admits “a US permanent repository is still many years away,” he is lobbying for an interim storage outside of Maine.

At the same time that Craighead detailed King’s concerns about the security of radioactive wastes at the plant in the future — she said he has spent a lot of time on the issue recently — she also downplayed the possibility of dramatic effects from a terrorist attack in the near term. Maine Yankee’s position is similar: Widespread contamination is virtually, if not absolutely, impossible. “If the pool were drained as the result of an act of sabotage or accident the fuel would not ignite and would certainly not explode” is the plant’s official view. However, Craighead admitted to the Radwaste Commission that the state’s four-member Technical Advisory Panel “of internationally recognized experts” on nuclear power felt there was a “remote possibility” of an explosion spreading a deadly radioactive gas.

Although federal law required the wastes to be moved to a national repository by 1998 (and Maine Yankee has begun a suit against the federal government for breach of contract on its failure to do this), how realistic is King’s position that pressuring to move the wastes out of Maine takes first priority, given the seemingly endless federal postponements in creating a nuclear-waste repository?

“King is shadow-boxing with the Department of Energy,” Shadis claimed. “The fuel is likely to be here for a generation or two, so we had better protect it and be protected from it.” The company has said it is likely spent fuel will remain in Wiscasset through at least 2023.

Faced with this objection, Craighead talks of sending spent fuel to reprocessing plants in Europe, where much of the waste from the 338 reactors outside the US goes. Reprocessing plants process the used fuel to extract uranium and plutonium that can be reused in reactors, or used for nuclear weapons. Or she speculates on getting the United States to reverse its long-time policy of not having a spent-fuel reprocessing facility built in this country. A reprocessing plant would tend to support a continued reliance on nuclear power, or, some people fear, proliferation of nuclear weapons. Craighead suggests nuclear power may be an environmentally attractive alternative to fossil-fuel plants that contribute to global warming.

WHAT WILL SECURITY LOOK LIKE HERE? Activists are concerned that the future of Maine Yankee does not include adequate protection for the people who live nearby.

A solution to the trust issue?

Trust is at the radioactive core of the issue separating Maine Yankee and state government from the plant’s critics. A constant political dynamic has played out for 25 years. The critics say we have a problem. Maine Yankee says we don’t have a problem. The state usually says we don’t have a problem. Ironically, on September 10 it appeared that the political sides were finally coming together into positions of trust. In a joint press conference on that day, Maine Yankee, the state, and Friends of the Coast announced an agreement on how the company would deal with radiation monitoring and other “license termination” issues after the plant disappeared. The rhetoric was harmonious.

The next day the world changed, as in so many other matters. On this issue, an adversarial relationship instantly reappeared. Some citizens got extremely concerned about the security of that big pool of deadly radiation. And now Maine Yankee has suggested that public discussion is potentially “aiding the enemy.”

The governor’s office distances Angus King from that kind of language. “He is in favor of public debate on the level of security,” said King’s press aide, John Ripley. While not wanting to see unnecessary details of the plant’s security revealed, King “errs on the side of openness,” he insisted.

But one cannot help having the impression that the corporate and political establishment is exasperated with Maine Yankee’s doubters. Gen. Tinkham, who is also commissioner of the Department of Defense, Veterans, and Emergency Management, said he couldn’t ascribe any credibility to a terrorist attack on the spent-fuel pool and questioned the need of a force-on-force test. Of the critics, he said: “They’ve honed their anxiety to a fine point. I’ll probably be fired for saying this, but we shouldn’t be spending all our time holding the hands of these people from Wiscasset.”

Nevertheless, he suggested a possible solution to the trust problem: “Maybe we could ask the NRC if one of these people could have a background investigation and be sworn to secrecy — on penalty of going to prison — and get a classified briefing.”

Others have parallel, share-the-classified-information thoughts. Sen. Treat, the Radwaste Commission chair, suggested that her group might feel more comfortable about Maine Yankee security if it could have an executive session at which more could be revealed than the commission has learned to date.

And Sally Sutton had a similar idea. Informed of Maine Yankee’s “aiding the enemy” language, the long-time American Civil Liberties Union’s Maine director deplored it as part of “a dangerous trend” nationally in the War on Terrorism for the public to be shut out of information. “The people of Maine have the right to know if they are safe,” Sutton said.

But she, too, suggested an “independent verification” process that would keep “legitimate security issues confidential.” Perhaps the state’s Public Advocate Office could fill this bill, she thought. This agency, which works for the governor advocating consumer interests on utility issues, is headed by lawyer Stephen Ward.

Shadis, commenting on whether he would agree personally to a classified briefing, did not want to be co-opted and thought an adversarial stance could be useful: “This deal has already been suggested to me. If I went for it, I would be in jail for saying as much as I have already said. A handful of armed men hiding in a sheet-metal building on an exposed peninsula with 900 tons of the deadliest material we have in Maine and no outer defense perimeter — there’s no way to turn this into a pretty picture by revealing secrets on how well armed the guys in the tin box may be.”

He added: “We depended very much on experts prior to September 11, and they failed us miserably. Now we’re in a state of war, a war on our homeland. Each and every one of us has to be a defender of our homeland.”

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.