Press Release

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Summary and Recommendations

Chapter 2: Energy System Security Criteria

Chapter 3: The Bush Administration and the IEER Energy Plans

Chapter 4: Vulnerability Comparison: The Bush and IEER Energy Plans

Chapter 5: Policy Recommendations

References

In 1980, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) published a report that it had commissioned on energy with the prescient title: Energy, Vulnerability and War. The potential disruption of oil imports, the potential for attacks on nuclear reactors and the damage that they could cause were studied in detail. The report also set forth recommendations that would reduce energy sector vulnerabilities and the consequences in case of accident, terrorist attack, or war. The findings were startlingly similar to those that a commission appointed by President Truman, known as the Paley Commission after its chairman, had recommended, looking ahead to potential oil import vulnerabilities.

Both reports found that nuclear power would not be very helpful in addressing oil security issues and that security considerations required vigorous development and implementation of renewable energy sources. While the 1980 FEMA report was prepared and written well after environmental protection had become a major item in the U.S. and world political consciousness, that was not the case for the 1952 Paley Commission report.

Despite the Paley Commission's analysis, nuclear power was vigorously pursued. It is still heavily subsided by the government via an insurance program known as the Price Anderson Act, which would likely not cover the public for even ten cents on the dollar in case of a massive accident or attack. Plutonium and highly radioactive waste are stored in vulnerable ways that could result in catastrophic damage in case of attack. Such a vulnerability makes these facilities more attractive as terrorist targets. Renewable energy sources have, for the most part, languished.

In the meantime, the U.S. has become enmeshed in anti-democratic alliances and opportunistic politics and practices for the sake of oil. Ironically, these very alliances have contributed to long-term instability and insecurity. Even a diversification of U.S. oil imports has left the United States is more vulnerable today than it was during the 1973 energy crisis. This is because the United States imports a far larger proportion of its oil requirements and the absolute level of net imports, at 11 million barrels a day is immense accounting for almost a quarter of world oil imports. There are also other vulnerabilities in the form of nuclear power plants, storage of spent fuel in pools, and of plutonium that has become surplus to military requirements.

We will examine the energy system according to criteria that correspond to the following three questions:

1. Are the core functions resilient to supply, transportation, transmission, and economic shocks? Those shocks may come from accidents, terrorist attacks, war, or natural disasters.
2. Is the value of any single target so high as judged by the potential for catastrophic consequences that it would be an attractive target? By the same token, is it possible to reduce the consequences of an attack by technical measures so that major systems would become unattractive as targets?
3. What is the potential scale and duration of disruption for the U.S. and global economy should an attack on vulnerable installations be carried out?

We will examine the following areas in which energy system vulnerabilities exist:⁹

• Oil, focusing on oil imports.
• Nuclear power - existing plants
• Vulnerabilities of new nuclear power proposals.
• Plutonium and highly enriched uranium vulnerabilities.
• Emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important contributor to greenhouse gas build up.
• The potential for massive disruption of the energy system by single point attacks on the infrastructure, in particular on the electricity system.

Oil has been at the center of security and military issues ever since it became a crucial fuel in the conduct of war during the first part of the twentieth century. After World War II, the transportation systems of the wealthy countries became centered on oil, with everyday life and commerce completely intertwined with easy and assured availability of increasing amounts of oil. For these reasons, oil is and has been, through much of the twentieth century, one of the central aspects of the violent tangle of Middle Eastern, European, Soviet/Russian, U.S., and world politics.

For instance, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came after the U.S. imposed an oil embargo to prevent Japan from getting access to and eventual control of Indonesian oil,¹⁰ which belonged neither to Japan, nor to the United States, nor to the Dutch colonialists who then ruled Indonesia. The battle for Stalingrad during World War II, which proved to be a decisive turning point in the war for the Allies, was also centered on oil. Hitler had insisted on stopping the siege of Moscow and opening a second front toward Stalingrad so as to be able to seize the Caspian Sea oil fields that had been the prize for oil magnates, such as Rockefeller and Nobel, since the end of the nineteenth century.

Oil has also entangled the western powers in alliances with repressive regimes, such as the former Shah of Iran or the vast Saudi royal family with its thousands of princes. The long-term consequences of this approach to energy have been considerable. For instance, the CIA-supported overthrow of an elected government in Iran in 1953 (in reaction to nationalization of the Iranian oil industry) and its replacement by the Shah of Iran¹¹ led to two and a half decades of repression in which substantial dissent was only possible in the mosques. The process was part of the dynamic that led up to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. The same pattern of alliances with undemocratic regimes has been re-emerging in Central Asia¹² and is being accelerated by the post-September 11 crisis.

Several past military crises, with nuclear implications, have been around the question of oil:

• Iran right after World War II
• the 1956 Suez crisis (involving a principal oil transport route)
• Lebanon-Iraq crisis in 1958
• the Israel-Egypt war and the associated Arab oil embargo in 1973
• the 1979 revolution in Iran followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
• the 1991 Gulf War.

The present war in the South Asian-Central Asian region also has oil-related considerations as well as potential nuclear dimensions. There has been much great power rivalry in the region, dating back to Victorian and Czarist times. One British and U.S. goal in modern times, for instance, was to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining access to an Indian Ocean warm water port in the region or a strong political foothold so close to the world's largest oil reserves. Much of the mess in the Persian Gulf, Central Asian, South Asian regions, including some of the motivation for the U.S. support of the Islamic opposition to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan at the end of 1979, had that as a motive.

The war in Afghanistan has nuclear terrorism implications, the possibility for U.S.-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, and higher nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan. Depending on its effect on the general situation in the Middle East, the war also has possible long-term implications for nuclear proliferation in the region.

Security concerns related to oil have been of two types. First there has been the issue of reliance on oil imports from areas of the world, notably the Middle East, where there has been repeated military conflict. Second, there have been concerns about the security of oil-related facilities (and other large-scale energy related facilities in the United States), in the event of an attack inside the United States. We consider the first kind of vulnerability in this section.

One of the strengths of the US position in the 1930s and most of the 1940s was that it was either an exporter or virtually self sufficient in oil.¹³ But the enormous growth in the number of automobiles in the decade as well as the rapid growth of other uses of petroleum resulted in the United States becoming a consistent net importer by the end of the 1940s. By 1960, the U.S. was importing almost one-fifth of its consumption. This trend was clearly evident in the 1950s. Moreover, it was occurring at a time when Western Europe was also becoming highly dependent on imported oil. Imports of other resources were also growing, including strategic commodities like aluminum.

One of the official reviews of the resource situation in the early 1950s was conducted by a commission appointed by President Truman, called The President's Materials Policy Commission, which came to be known as the Paley Commission, after its chairman. In the energy sector, the prime area of concern that the Paley Commission addressed was petroleum. It concluded in its 1952 report that there may be oil shortages by the 1970s. While it did not devote a great deal of attention to non-fossil fuel energy sources, its conclusions about them were as follows:

Currently U.S. oil imports are at 11 million barrels a day, with about 25 percent coming from the Persian Gulf area (see Figure 8.) Overall, about 40 percent of the world's oil exports come from the Persian Gulf region, which holds two thirds of the world's proven oil reserves (see Figure 9 - world oil reserves).

(View figure 8.)

(View figure 9.)

Rising U.S. oil imports in the context of growing oil imports in developing countries will create greater dependence on Persian Gulf area supplies worldwide. Sustained U.S. oil imports over 10 million barrels per day raise the risk of severe disruptions that could have grave military and economic consequences. At 10 million barrels a day, US imports would consume 10 percent of the entire world's recoverable oil reserves in three decades. By the same token, a direction of declining US imports to well below 10 million barrels per day would not only greatly reduce the impact of a disruption but also the threat of one. It is not necessary to have zero imports to greatly reduce oil-related vulnerabilities.

It is possible that the Caspian Sea and Central Asian regions have far greater oil reserves than are currently formally recognized in oil industry and official energy data. But the tapping of such reserves may not reduce security vulnerabilities and may, indeed, increase them. These are regions in which there is U.S.-Russian competition for influence, despite the cooperation between the two countries over the Afghanistan war and reductions in strategic nuclear arsenals.¹⁶ Indeed, large-scale exports of oil from the Central Asian and Caspian Sea regions hold the potential for new, possibly equally serious vulnerabilities, since these regions could become arenas for competition between two or more nuclear weapons states, including the United States, Russia, China, and possibly Pakistan, and India.

Our main criterion for petroleum related vulnerabilities will be oil imports, with high vulnerabilities being defined as sustained imports over 10 million barrels a day and very high vulnerabilities as over 15 million barrels a day. U.S. oil imports of less than five million barrels a day would essentially eliminate the potential for catastrophic disruption, particularly if it were accompanied by a decline in European imports as well.

In 1980, the Federal Emergency Management Agency commissioned a report on the security vulnerabilities associated with the energy system.¹⁷ This study identified a host of security vulnerabilities associated with the energy system, with oil imports and nuclear power plants being identified as the ones with the potential for the most severe negative impacts in case of war, attack, or disruption.

For instance, in regard to nuclear power plants it noted:

The report also discusses sabotage of nuclear power plants, or using threats of attacks on nuclear power plants "as a means of coercion."¹⁹ The Paley Commission had also been very critical of nuclear energy and took a dim view of its potential.²⁰ Like the Paley Commission, the FEMA report recommended greater reliance on renewable energy sources of security reasons. (Global warming was not yet a major policy concern in 1980 though the problem was getting greater attention in some scientific circles.)

The most vulnerable parts of the nuclear power system currently, in terms of catastrophic consequences, that would cause long-term disruption are nuclear reactors and nuclear spent fuel pools. We will discuss power plants in this section and spent fuel pools in the next.

The potential catastrophic consequences associated with nuclear power plants and spent fuel storage in pools, which is an essential component of present reactor design, cannot be mitigated by technical measures. Nuclear power plants provide over 20 percent of the electricity generated in the United States and cannot all be shut down overnight. And even if they could, the vulnerabilities relating to spent fuel storage in pools will persist for a few years.

Nuclear power plants in more than one country have been the objects of terrorist attacks both during construction and after commissioning.²¹ Evidently, in the short-term better preventive security measures are needed and are being implemented. In the long-term the only solution is to shut down the existing nuclear power plants and to not grant them license extensions. The consequences of a complete loss of containment by accident or attack could very well be on the same scale as the 1986 Chernobyl accident. If the secondary containment is breached, the total releases of iodine-131, could for instance, be in the millions of curies, compared with the official estimate of 15 curies for the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. The official estimate for release of iodine-131 after the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union, was 7.3 million curies. There are persuasive arguments that this is an underestimate.²²

Many reactors are relatively close to populated areas. The health, environmental, and economic damage would be immense. Moreover, a single successful attack would bring about a crisis in the electricity sector since it would create severe pressures for a precipitous shut down of all nuclear power plants. That would present choices that would be immeasurably worse than the ones that are involved in an orderly phase out. A plan for phase out can be accelerated if it exists. But if nuclear power is in the process of being expanded, the economic damage would be compounded because the choices would be far more limited and each would exact a heavy price.

Extending power plant licenses would only extend the vulnerability for prolonged periods of time, which is entirely unnecessary, given that goals in relation to reductions of greenhouse gas emissions can be accomplished by other means, as we will discuss. An orderly phase out of nuclear power plants as their licenses expire has long been desirable for a host of proliferation, safety, and environmental reasons, even though nuclear power plants can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should also undertake a thorough review of reactors and spent fuel pools (see below) that may face special vulnerabilities and consider whether such reactors should be shut before their licenses expire.

As a precautionary measure, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should also order the distribution of potassium iodide tablets to public health institutions, such as hospitals, for distribution in case a massive accident or attack on a nuclear power plant results in large iodine-131 releases. A public education campaign about when and how such tablets might be used is an important public health safeguard in the interim while nuclear power plants are still in operation. Within about three months of closure, iodine-131 ceases to be a risk at closed power plants, when only spent fuel is stored, since it has a half-life of only about 8 days.

The Bush administration's energy plan contains four major proposals for new nuclear facilities that, if implemented, would greatly increase nuclear vulnerabilities, in addition to those associated with the prolongation of the licenses of existing nuclear power plants. They are:

1. The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR)
2. New Advanced Reactors (implicitly including a new type of sodium-cooled breeder reactor called the Integral Fast Reactor or the Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor).²³
3. New reactors associated with transmutation of certain components of nuclear waste.²⁴
4. Reprocessing of spent fuel either in association with scheme 2 and/or 3 above, as well as possible reprocessing as currently done for light water reactor spent fuel in France.²⁵

We will discuss these briefly. In addition to safety issues associated with PBMR, it is proposed to be built without a secondary containment.²⁶ That would make it highly vulnerable to a variety of terrorist attacks far more feasible than the massive attacks of September 11. While its detailed design has not been revealed, gas reactors of this general type that depend on natural convective cooling in case of loss of coolant accidents are understood to be more vulnerable to certain kinds of attack than current light water reactors.

Sodium-cooled reactors can have explosive accidents if there is contact between water and the liquid sodium. Liquid sodium catches fire on contact with air. These reactors are designed to contain far more plutonium as a fuel than current reactors, which generate plutonium in the course of their operation, but in which the percentage of plutonium is generally under 1 percent at any time (unless they are fueled with plutonium fuel - see below). As a result, the consequences of an attack on such reactors could be even more catastrophic than with current commercial reactors.

It is possible to build nuclear reactors underground, but the cost, safety, and siting issues related to such proposals are largely unknown. The only long-term practical experience with large underground reactors is in Russia, where three reactors that produced power as well as plutonium for military purposes were built inside a mountain in Siberia (Krasnoyarsk-26).²⁷ New vulnerabilities would likely be created, for instance to groundwater resources, in case of accidents, natural disasters, or attacks. Resistance to siting may lead to large number of reactors at a few sites, reviving old nuclear energy "park" proposals. Moreover, such highly centralized underground facilities would be attractive targets because of the scale of potential damage. For the same reason, the surface transmission facilities associated with such plants would also be vulnerable. Interconnected power sources that are less centralized are essential to increasing electricity system security and decreasing economic vulnerability to attack.²⁸

In sum, the number of operating nuclear reactors, the variety of attacks that can result in catastrophic releases of radioactivity, and the degree of concentration of generation and key transmission facilities are crucial vulnerability criteria.

Spent fuel pools are large pools of water where the discharged used nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear reactors is stored. All commercial U.S. nuclear reactors use ordinary water as a coolant and moderator ("Light water reactors, or LWRs) and require spent fuel pools.

Releases of long-lived radionuclides radioactivity from a massive spent fuel pool accident of or attack can be larger than those from a reactor. This is because the inventory of log-lived radionuclides in spent fuel pools is typically far larger than in reactors. For instance, Gordon Thompson, a physicist, has calculated that a fire at a spent fuel pool of the Millstone power plant in Connecticut could result in a release of cesium-137 larger than the estimated release from the Chernobyl accident.²⁹

The length of time for which spent fuel must be stored in pools is at least three years. Spent fuel pools in the United States contain most of the 40,000 metric tons or so of spent fuel discharged so far from U.S. power reactors, though increasing amounts of spent fuel are now in on-site dry storage casks.

Most spent fuel pools are not inside reactor secondary containment buildings. As a result they are vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks, unlike the reactors, which are vulnerable only to the most severe ones. Dry storage is less vulnerable for several reasons. First, it is not subject to meltdown in case of containment breach since only relatively cool fuel can be stored in dry casks. The consequences of an attack can still be very severe however, especially in case of the dispersal of radioactivity that would be attendant on a petroleum fire in case of an aircraft attack. Above surface dry storage of spent fuel also is a vulnerable form, but this can be addressed by on-site or near to site subsurface storage. We assume that whatever the policy in relation to nuclear power that retrievable subsurface storage of dry casks will be implemented.³⁰ Therefore the main vulnerability arising from spent fuel will be associated with the spent fuel stored in the pools. We assume that reactors will be of the light water reactor design, the only one licensed to date in the United States, and that, on average only about 5 years of spent fuel discharges will be stored in pools. In practice, economic pressures will be great to store more of the fuel in spent fuel pools in order to avoid the costs of dry cask storage. We assume that dry casks will be stored in subsurface silos, so that this would be a relatively small source of vulnerability within the context of a nuclear energy system.

PBMRs would not have spent fuel in pools. However, the use of graphite-coated fuel the lack of a secondary containment mean that the spent fuel inventory associated with the reactor would be, roughly speaking, as vulnerable to attack as LWR spent fuel pools. The graphite-coated fuel could catch fire, resulting in a catastrophic spread of radioactivity. A modular graphite reactor of the type proposed would have a considerably smaller inventory of radionuclides than current LWRs. Underground power plants would mitigate the spread of radioactivity via the air pathway, but may not prevent it. Moreover, they may possibly aggravate the water-related long-term contamination problems.

Advanced sodium-cooled reactors would be accompanied by reprocessing and fuel fabrication facilities, and associated spent fuel storage. There would be some degree of vulnerability in such facilities, but the degree would depend on the designs, which have not been explicitly proposed in the Bush energy plan. All plutonium separation plants and plutonium fuel use is accompanied by special proliferation vulnerabilities, as discussed below.

United States stocks of plutonium and highly enriched uranium are almost entirely held within the nuclear weapons complex or by the Pentagon, the latter in the form of nuclear weapons. Consideration of nuclear materials inside nuclear weapons is beyond the scope of this report. Only a small part of the U.S. stock of plutonium (1.5 metric tons) is of commercial origin, while the rest is military. About 50 metric tons has been declared surplus to military needs and more may be put into the surplus category, if the recent tentative U.S.-Russian agreement during the November 2001 summit of Presidents Bush and Putin to reduce strategic nuclear arsenal to about 2,000 warheads each is implemented.

The U.S. government proposes to use most of the surplus plutonium as a fuel in nuclear reactors. This plutonium fuel would be a mixture of weapons-grade plutonium (roughly five percent) and depleted uranium, both in oxide chemical form, with the physical form being ceramic pellets. IEER has discussed the proliferation-related vulnerabilities of plutonium fuel, also called mixed oxide or MOX fuel, at length in other publications.³¹ The main points to be highlighted in the context of September 11, 2001 are:

• Transporting fresh plutonium fuel increases the chances of diversion in cases of terrorist attack. It is relatively simple to re-extract the weapons-grade plutonium from the mixed oxide ceramic pellets and obtain material suitable for use in nuclear weapons. This cannot be done with present low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel. It would take massive enrichment facilities to make highly enriched uranium (HEU) from LEU.
• Storage of fresh plutonium fuel at nuclear power plants would increase the attractiveness of nuclear power plants as a target.
• Use of plutonium fuel would make the consequences of an accident or attack more serious.³²
• The storage of plutonium spent fuel in pools (a necessity for some years after discharge) at nuclear power plants would make the consequences of an attack on spent fuel pools more catastrophic.

Prolonged storage of plutonium without making that storage more secure carries its own risks. Many of these risks have been analyzed from an environmental and security standpoint prior to September 11, 2001.³³ September 11 has pointed up more vulnerabilities. There is precedent for a commercial airliner having been hijacked to threaten a nuclear weapons facility. On November 12, 1972 three men hijacked a Southern Airways, DC-9 commercial jet airliner and threatened the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant, a site with nuclear reactors, radioactive waste, a huge uranium enrichment plant, and stores of highly enriched uranium and other radioactive and non-radioactive hazardous materials. The hijackers did not know how to fly a plane, wanted money.³⁴ They were promised money and taken to Cuba where they were arrested, tried, and convicted (and later also extradited to the United States). Today, large amounts of surplus plutonium are stored at various sites. While the degree of the problem varies, plutonium storage sites are vulnerable to attack, much as even heavily reinforced nuclear power plants are vulnerable.

While prevention of attack through improved security is imperative, it is not enough where plutonium storage is concerned. Unlike nuclear power plants, plutonium cannot simply be phased out.³⁵ It is like long-lived radioactive waste, and it is necessary to minimize the consequences of an attack should one occur. By the latter criterion, current methods of plutonium storage are sorely inadequate. It is stored in a variety of buildings, mostly above ground in forms that could catch fire (metal) or that are relatively easily dispersible in air, such as plutonium oxide.

Besides storage vulnerabilities, the two large reprocessing plants at the Savannah River Site are still open, though they are running at very low capacity, processing very small amounts of materials. In doing so they are adding to the stock of high-level liquid radioactive waste (stored in large underground tanks) and the stock of separated plutonium.

Instead of initiating an urgent review of plutonium storage and reprocessing plants with a view to shutting down unnecessary facilities and improving storage forms and methods, the Bush administration is continuing with its plan to spend money on developing commercial plutonium fuel as a normal part of the U.S. nuclear power system. This would reverse a quarter century of bipartisan nuclear non-proliferation policy though five previous administrations. It would exacerbate both proliferation pressures and vulnerabilities to attack, rather than reduce them.

It is shocking that the momentous events of September 11 have not led to an urgent reappraisal of plutonium-related energy policies, especially since this is an area where the consequences of an attack would be among the most severe and where solutions to greatly reducing vulnerabilities can be implemented within a relatively short time, compared to say, those related to existing nuclear reactors.

The most intense present debate concerning global warming over the past few years has occurred over the Kyoto Protocol, the global agreement under which industrial countries pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by modest amounts relative to 1990 by about the year 2010. There are a variety of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorinated hydrocarbons known collectively as halocarbons, which are widely used in air-conditioning, refrigeration, and various industrial applications. The United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, but did not ratify it. The Bush administration has announced that it will not abide by this treaty, but the other signatories have gone ahead and negotiated specific targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions as well as how they might be achieved.

Global warming, which would likely lead to a severe disruption of the Earth's climatic and hydrologic system, among other things, is not only an environmental issue. Drastic climate change in a short period time could have disastrous implications for human health, for the health of ecosystems on which the global economy depends, on coastal countries and populations, on property values, and on jobs. Any one of these factors could have unpredictable security implications. For instance, massive refugee crises caused by severe weather and flooding of coastal lands could result in tensions between countries, as for instance between Bangladesh and India, or Mexico and the United States. More locally, a recent report of the Natural Resources Defense Council provides an example of the kinds of disruptions to local ecosystems and economies that could occur.³⁶

Reducing the build up of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is therefore imperative not only for environmental reasons, but also for reasons of human health, economy and security.

While the current stage of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, requires very modest reductions, generally less than 10 percent for the most industrialized countries, it will be necessary to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions on the order of 50 percent within several decades if we are to mitigate the risks of severe catastrophe. Yet the Bush administration has rejected the treaty and failed, to date, to present an alternative plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Several studies, including the 1980 FEMA study and the 1982 book Brittle Power, discuss the vulnerabilities of the energy production and pipeline infrastructure to wartime or terrorist attack.³⁷ Generating stations, electricity transformer and switching stations, and transmissions lines are also potential targets. Such facilities have been targets of U.S. bombing in recent years in wartime, for instance in Yugoslavia. Indeed, they have been targets since World War II when bombing of industrial infrastructure was a central part of the goal of strategic bombing. The vulnerabilities of such facilities have been discussed in detail in the 1980 FEMA study and we will not discus them in detail here. The September 11 events have shown that those vulnerabilities are not only theoretical for the United States.

Indeed, there have been terrorist attacks on U.S. electricity infrastructure in the past. Amory and L. Hunter Lovins cite several examples, among them three 1970 attacks on the Pacific Intertie (a major electricity transmission line) and the 1974 bombing of transmission towers in Oregon forests "by two extortionists threatening to black out Portland if they were not paid a million dollars."³⁸ Of these vulnerabilities, the potential for a highly centralized, increasingly interconnected grid to crash if a strategic portion of it collapses due to overload, accident, weather, or attack, is arguably the most important non-nuclear vulnerability of electrical systems.³⁹ Almost all high-voltage electricity transport is overhead lines, as are the main switching and transformer facilities. Such vulnerabilities were also discussed in detail in the 1980 FEMA report.

The trend towards de-regulated electricity systems with a national grid would exacerbate the vulnerabilities of the grid. This is because the siting of power plants would be determined significantly by local environmental, regulatory, and land use considerations. Closeness to energy supplies or consumers would decline in relative importance as siting factors. The financial vulnerability of electric power systems may also grow in case an attack disrupts a major portion of the electricity supply. Since electricity cannot be stored, this vulnerability is far greater with electric power systems than with any other portion of the energy system. The chaotic financial situation around electricity deregulation and sales in California would be much more complex were the shortages to result from a physical disruption of the electricity system as a result of an attack on one or more key elements of a national transmission grid.

Lovins and Lovins have also noted that:

The table below summarizes oil and nuclear vulnerabilities and their potential severity. ⁴¹ New reactors vulnerabilities could be reduced by requiring secondary containment that would withstand an attack of the scale of September 11. But there is no indication to date that such a requirement will be imposed.

Next: Chapter 3: The Bush Administration and the IEER Energy Plans

⁹ See Lovins and Lovins 1982 and Makhijani and Saleska 1995 for further discussion of system criteria.
¹⁰ Yergin 1991.
¹¹ For a history of oil politics, see Yergin 1991.
¹² Klare 2001 and Allison and Jonson eds. 2001.
¹³ This section on the Paley Commission is drawn mainly from Makhijani and Saleska 1999.
¹⁴ Paley Commission 1952, Vol. IV, p. 220.
¹⁵ Energy Policy Project 1974. The author of the present report was one of the co-authors of the 1974 Energy Policy Project report.
¹⁶ See Klare 2001 and Allison and Jonson eds. 2001 for discussions of security issues, great power politics, regional rivalries, and oil-related questions in Central Asia.
¹⁷ FEMA 1980.
¹⁸ FEMA 1980, p. 12.
¹⁹ FEMA 1980, p. 13, in a quote from Bennett Bamberg.
²⁰ Paley Commission 1952, Vol. III, p. 39.
²¹ Lovins and Lovins 1982, pp. 142-146.
²² Makhijani and Saleska 1999, pp. 154-155
²³ The Bush Energy Plan 2001 does not make an explicit reference to sodium-cooled reactors, but the implication is clear enough, since it does mention advanced reactors and a reprocessing technology known as pyroprocessing, which is associated with some liquid metal cooled reactor designs, including the Integral Fast Reactor.
²⁴ For a discussion of transmutation technology see Makhijani, Zerriffi, and Makhijani 2001.
²⁵ Makhijani 2001a and Makhijani 2001b.
²⁶ Makhijani 2001c.
²⁷ Makhijani, Hu, and Yih., eds. 1995, p. 300.
²⁸ FEMA 1980.
²⁹ Thompson 2001.
³⁰ IEER has published many analyses of the proposed U.S. deep repository for spent fuel and military high-level waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. For a variety of reasons, many of which are not repeated in this report, this is a poor project that should be replaced by a scientifically sound repository program. See various issues of Science for Democratic Action and Makhijani and Saleska 1992.
³¹ Makhijani and Makhijani 1995 and various articles in Science for Democratic Action.
³² Lyman 2001 has analyzed the consequences of a meltdown accident in a light water reactor using plutonium fuel. The same results would apply to a terrorist attack that result in a meltdown. Gerald Pollack in pointed out in a 1987 study (Pollack 1987) that "the kinds of damage that a terrorist attack could cause are similar in many ways to that which could result from a reactor accident occurring during normal operations."
³³ NAS 1994, Makhijani and Makhijani 1995.
³⁴ See Blair with Hass 1977 for an account of the hijacking. Chapter 5 recounts the Oak Ridge related aspects.
³⁵ Transmutation can reduce the inventory of plutonium over the long term but it greatly increases proliferation risk since it involves reprocessing. See Makhijani, Zerriffi, and Makhijani 2001.
³⁶ Fiedler, Mays, and Siry, eds., 2001.
³⁷ FEMA 1980; Lovins and Lovins 1982.
³⁸ Lovins and Lovins 1982, p. 128.
³⁹ The 1965 New York City black out and the more recent ones in 1998 in Montreal and in Auckland, New Zealand are examples of system failures for technical and (in the case of Montreal) weather-related reasons.
⁴⁰ Lovins and Lovins 1982, p. 124.
⁴¹ The merits of nuclear power plants in reducing greenhouse gas emissions relative to combined cycle natural gas plants are compared in IEER's web page at http://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-5/sustain.html
⁴² IPPNW and IEER 1992.