Nuclear plant info available to public

[IDemo]

NBC News investigation finds sensitive documents in libraries

By Lisa Myers, Amna Nawaz & the NBC Investigative Unit
NBC News
Updated: 1 hour, 31 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - What if an airplane were to crash into a nuclear plant? How long would it take terrorists to penetrate security barriers outside nuclear facilities? What are the most vulnerable parts of a nuclear plant to attack in order to inflict maximum damage?

The answers to all those questions, and many more, are available to the public, as NBC News discovered in a recent hidden-camera investigation. Accessing that very information — along with thousands of other sensitive documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) — is as easy as walking into a public library, finding the right files, printing them out and walking out with the documents in hand, no questions asked.

Many of the documents we were able to access were among the thousands of files the NRC pulled from its Web site after 9/11, deemed too sensitive to be available to the public. But that same effort to clean out sensitive information, it seems, was never made with NRC’s document collections in public libraries across the country.

Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, who also served as co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, calls this inconsistency “appalling.”

“What this means is that we've given the terrorists an easy map in order to find out about our nuclear facilities,” says Kean. “It's the worst possible thing we could be doing.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15922717/

[tridim]

1. What ever happened with Bush's release of nuclear secrets online?

That story died rather quickly.

[IDemo]

2. Looks like the NRC got the job half done

They pulled the documents off the website but left them at your local library.

[TheMadMonk]

3. The biggest nuclear secret of them all.

THERE IS NO SECRET.

Beating this drum makes us no different to the Repukes beating their myriad "secrecy drums".

The basic theory of nuclear energy is simple enough for a moderately intelligent kid in their mid teens to get their head around. Cripes I just rediscovered an old cache of How and Why Wonder Books from the seventies that includes one explaining it to ten year olds.

The engineering side of the matter isn't that much more complex. Though admittedly plutonium has a propensity to self-extinguish unless that engineering is done near perfectly, as North Korea has just discovered. Making one with uranium can be done with little more than steam pipe and black powder, and of course the uranium. Everything else is refinements on that basic idea.

The biggest problem in bomb making is the logistics and huge expense of creating the infrastructure necessary to produce weapons grade materials. Or sourcing them from someone who has that infrastructure.

As for doing a 9/11 on a reactor (or more likely the associated waste storage facility), all anyone needs is a very basic idea of the facility's layout (Google Earth should just about do it) and an understanding of civil engineering.

These "secrets" discovered in public libraries probably consist largely of decades old documents that nobody has bothered with in ages.

[Sirveri]

5. It's a little more complicated than that.

Just hitting the reactor building may or may not do the trick based on reactor design. In addition with a full knowledge of the layout of the plant and their instrumentation you could use more stealthy approaches to cause a really nasty accident which would require less people to pull off (however those people would require more training). The waste storage centers, it all depends on how they store the waste which is something I'm not too familiar with. That said, it would probably be easier to find a Russian nuke or a Pakistan made bomb and just use one of those.

[Javaman]

4. So what is this saying? hide the documents and NOT protect the nuke facilities?

that concept seems par for the course under moron*.

They get their panties in a bunch over these crap. If the nuclear facilities were properly protected, then it wouldn't make a difference to them who got this information? If they would just do their fucking jobs, then none of this would matter.

I just want to scream at the sky and punch something!

[hunter]

6. What a crock.

I suspect they are simply casting about for some excuse to cover up their own shit.

It would be a huge mistake to go back to the bad old days when everything nuclear was secret, and we were supposed to blindly trust the government and nuclear industry to do the right thing.

Often they didn't.