The Insider Threat

There has been more than 120 acts of sabotage at US nuclear plants. Most of these acts were perpetrated by disgruntled workers at every level of employment including control room operators and security guards. Employees have cut electrical cables, dumped chemicals into fuel pools and water systems, set fires, drilled holes in equipment, smashed security cameras, sabotaged diesel generators and committed numerous other offenses. The NRC has a "two-man" rule which is supposed to prevent sabotage by permitting entrance into vital areas only if accompanied by a co-worker. But, not all of the plants follow these rules to the letter.

Forty days after the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, control room operators at the Surry plant in Virginia poured sodium hydroxide onto new fuel assemblies. The fuel was stored in an area which was locked and alarmed. The NRC notified other plants that the FBI was on-site conducting an extensive investigation. They also warned that this incident "could possibly provoke similar behavior on the part of other persons."

During labor negotiations at the Salem plant in New Jersey, someone intentionally tripped a steam generator feedwater pump. To a small degree, this event imitated the Three Mile Island trip which led to the accident three years prior.

In 1981 a major portion of the emergency core cooling system was disabled at the Beaver Valley nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Someone sabotaged the emergency diesel generators at the Nine Mile Point reactor in New York the same year.

On January 3, 1961 a love triangle apparently got in the way of research at an experimental reactor in Idaho with a grizzly display of destruction. Three men were at work on top of the reactor. One of the workers intentionally caused a damaging condition known as a power excursion by withdrawing a control rod too far. The nuclear reaction rapidly increased and the resulting steam explosion destroyed the reactor, killing the saboteur and the two other workers. At first only two bodies could be found. The other body was impaled by a control rod through the groin, out the shoulder and pinned to the roof. The dead men were highly contaminated and could not receive a normal funeral and burial. This event was classified a murder/suicide.

The NRC's "Design Basis Threat," the rules defining what security threats nuclear plants must protect against, assumes that an attack against a plant will may include one insider. The insider is assumed to provide passive (leaving a door or vehicle barrier open) or active participation (disabling safety systems). It is also assumed that the insider will provide knowledge to the attacking group.

The NRC has known about this problem since 1975 when a systems analyst wrote a now classified report on using publicly available documents to plan an act sabotage. Up until that time, the NRC had not taken the sabotage issue seriously. The author described scenarios where a saboteur wouldn't need sophisticated tools or explosives. He says that he included only common tools found at any hardware store to write the report. He even used things like popsicle sticks. "A janitor could be trained to do it. And there are things he could do to be sure it's irreversible," he said at a Sandia National Laboratories safety conference when he presented the report 20 years ago. The author does not now have a copy of his report. Every once in a while he checks to see if it is still classified. He wants a copy if it becomes available.

At the time when he made this statement, he believed that it was easy to sabotage a plant. Now he realizes that it's even easier than he first thought. He said that he dreams up other clever ways from time to time. In fact, the Sandia National Laboratories have concluded that "there is still virtually no protection from sabotage acts of an insider."

There have been numerous events at US plants that raise concerns. Safeguarded documents including portions of security plans stored on computer disks have disappeared. The Millstone plant in Connecticut has lost security documents on numerous occasions in what may have been an organized effort to steal the entire plan. After each incident, the licensee claimed that there was no significant damage to security.

Security guards have attempted or committed suicide at several plants. A document control worker was murdered at the Catawba plant in South Carolina. A recent "Unsolved Mysteries" television program asked for any information about a suspicious death at a uranium processing plant in Fernald Ohio. A worker may have been murdered by incineration in what the show called a nuclear furnace.

At the Turkey Point plant in Florida, a security guard accidentally discharged his gun. The bullet pierced his truck. Realizing that this would result in his dismissal, he attempted to cover-up the accident by faking a shoot-out. He told his superiors that while patrolling the shoreline, he stumbled upon drug dealers in boats. To help his story along, he shot more holes in the truck.

At the Comanche Peak plant in Texas, a security officer was found bound, gagged and unconscious on the roof of a fire protection building. Her weapon lay 25 feet away.

Central alarm station wires were cut at the South Texas plant by an employee who was about to be laid off. A firewatch employee at Braidwood Illinois vandalized wires and fire proofing. Someone tampered with a fire protection valve at the Clinton plant also located in Illinois.

Fitness For Duty Programs are designed to prevent disgruntled or unbalanced workers from having access to the safety systems. Three Mile Island allowed one worker to continue his duties despite being ordered by a judge to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet for crimes he committed. The man admitted to breaking into a woman's home on three occasions and "masturbating on her underwear."

Between July 1999 and December 2002 at TMI and Peach Bottom, 143 applicants or workers tested positive for drugs or alcohol. By far, the majority of the incidents were applicants who never set foot on either site.

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$10,000 Reward

Someone rendered important safety equipment unusable by pouring glue into three lockable switches on the backup control panel at Florida Power and Light Company's St. Lucie nuclear power plant on August 14, 1996. The back-up control room is used to gain control of a plant during an emergency if the main control room is not working or uninhabitable. If the reactor could not be controlled from the main control room, the loss of the switches could have been devastating. The company is offering a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of the saboteur. FBI and NRC investigators are examining records and conducting interviews in an attempt to find the culprit. Meanwhile, security has been "beefed-up" at the Crystal River and Turkey Point nuclear plants also located in Florida. Three weeks prior to this act of sabotage, someone glued locker doors shut at St. Lucie. It is possible that a disgruntled employee is upset with the cost-cutting measures that some employees are alleging by Florida Power and Light