Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (May/June 2003) Pages 46 to 47

A successful terrorist attack on a U.S. nuclear power plant would pose a higher risk and come at a greater cost than an assault on nearly any other target. Dozens of U.S. nuclear plant sites have the potential of exposing hundreds of thousands of people to radiation that would be dispersed in the air; that radioactivity would also render large and valuable areas of land essentially uninhabitable for many deacdes.

Yet efforts to harden nuclear targets have not even begun, even though the need to protect them became painfully clear on Septemeber 11, 2001, when the vulnerability of major structures to attack by aircraft was stunningly demonstrated . Instead, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its constituency of cost-sensitive energy companies has stumbled along, at first denying the problem, then offering political excuses as to why it cannot take decisive action to the protect the public.

The nuclear industry asserts that the cost and time it would take to sufficiently harden or retrofit these power plants makes taking safety measures impractical. But what if there were a low-cost way to quickly improve a nuclear facility's survivability?

There is a way. It's called "Beamhenge."

Beamhenge is simply a line of steel beams set vertically in deep concrete foundations connected by bracing beams, a web of high-strength cables, wires, and netting linking the vertical beams to form a protective screen -- the nuclear-grade equivalent of fences erected around golf driving ranges., Beamhenge would not need to completely encircle the nuclear plant -- it would merely need to shield the vulnerable side or sides of the facilities key structures. Depending on the nuclear plant's geography and vulnerabilities, Beamhenge could be a single row or closely spaced beams or multiple rows of more widely spaced beams. The height of the beams and the length of the Beamhenge would depend on the configuration being protected from likely incoming trajectories.

The main purpose of Beamhenge would be to slow down an attack, fragment the attacking aircraft into smaller pieces, disperse the mass of jet fuel, and protect the more vulnerable containment, spent fuel pool, and other structures located within the perimeter from being breached by the mass of the projectiles. The beams would tend to scatter the jet fuel and slow down other projectiles like the fuselage.

The structure would also provide some degree of protection against surface-to surface and air-to-surface missiles, as well as other ballistic and self-propelled ordinance. The metal mesh netting strung between the vertical beams would not stop a projectile, but would serve to trigger detonation of its warhead before it reached the facility's walls.

In fact the possibility that an attack by air would lead to a catastrophe could be rendered from "more likely than not" to "essentially unlikely" for the expenditure of a fraction of one percent of the construction cost of the average facility, and the protective structure could be built in a few months. Even if the project were evaluated in terms of economic costs only, with no consideration of the value of human lives, a price in the low tens of millions of dollars for each facility should be difficult to resist. The total cost may seem high, but it would still be less than the total of the one-time loans the government arranged for the airline industry in the days following September 11.

A more pertinent question -- one the public should be asking now, before terrorists strike again---is why the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has yet to implement a project like Beamhenge?