Read Erwin's letter

South Carolina's nuclear plants remain a vulnerable target for terrorists and need military protection

Excuse my ignorance but who is currently guarding them?

--wonder what all this costs the taxpayer in general, and wouldn't it be 'capitalist-fair" to pass on the true costs to the electric consumer for this additional necessary "guarding" of the monopoly utility? Got no probs with the guards, got big probs with it being funded out of general revenue. These are private for -profit corporations, let them and their insurance carriers and customers pay for the guarding. I feel the same way about gas at the pump. too, let the true cost of the oil companies middle eastern/islamic mercenary armies be shown at a direct pump price increase, and not hidden and socialist-subsidised as part of the "federal defense" budget.

the security teams the plants have in place... I dont know who Duke uses... but I know SCANA uses Wackenhut (and so does the Dept of Energy)... including their SWAT teams... In addition, the initial security measures at these plants included (specifically the Duke one in the Upstate) posting of SC Highway Patrol officers on the road in front of the plant in two checkpoints...

Thanks for the response.

So Mark Erwin was am ambassador--so what!

How does that in any way qualify him to judge the safety and security of an American nuclear power plant?? I've seen nuke plants during construction, and they are TOUGH. Although nobody has actually done the experiment, my guess is that they would shrug off a WTC-style plane collision with no effect to speak of.

Everything can not be made 100% secure. It isn't just skyscrapers, sport's arenas, and nuclear facilities – it's also reservoirs, crops, livestock, food processing plants, schools and bridges and tunnels.
Our best possible defense is good intel.

..good intel, is so right, hard to fathom our well paid spooks have botched the job so badly.

Somethin'stinks,

I don't buy this crap about them being so well hidden!

I know!! Let's federalize the security at the nuclear power plants. Then they can hire high school dropouts and we will all be safer! God bless the federal payroll.

The security at TVA's Nuke plants seems very good. I won't go into details, but the contract guards do not look like rent-a-cops, they look more like SWAT team members that spend all of their off hours at the gym and get their weapons from a Delta Force armory.

I didnt mean to imply they're rent-a-cops... I've known multiple people who were Wackenhut employees who were not rent-a-cops... they have pretty robust special response/swat teams... lots of training schools...

http://www.terraserver.com/

http://www.mapquest.com/

http://www.nucleartourist.com/notice.htm

http://www.nucleartourist.com/us/address.htm

The western mind is not aligned to make a threat assesment where: the attackers are considered collateral damage at the planning stage, and where civilian casualties are the prime targets.

Sadly there is way too much data still on the net!

The scariest thing that I have come to the realization of is that the "threat assesment" is made from the perspective of how agencies procure and perform costs analysis. As an example: a handheld GPS position in a freghtcar as it goes through a major city.... Literally a remote controlled or unmanned vehicle.. (a boat in particular...) and the navigational data easily supplied on the WWW.

Now the building of a system by the government involves layers of admin, nice offices, OSHA, etc., etc., GSA SCHEDULES... all of these things make the attackes seem less plausible from the cost perspective. (on the part of centralized planners.) But again any process engineer could easily pull off an attack.

While I was living in Coumbia, SC I took a drive out to see the dam that provides electricity, I was amazed that an earthen dam held that damn much water at that level above that many people over a causeway... SCARY!

Maybe Freepers might want to illustrate the amount of data by locating as many power plants as possible with TerraServer, or just the ones in your neighborhood.

While I remain optomistic that India and Pakistan will not resort to "sheer madness" with nuclear materials I still fear the ability of a madman utilizing a truck bomb like Timothy McVeigh on a dam similar to the one in Columbia, SC.

I KNOW THAT INFORMATION WAS REMOVED FROM THE WEBSITES OF THE NRC AND THE EPA BASED ON THE SOLE CRITERION THAT COMMON SENSE DICTATED THAT THAT BE DONE.

I also know that you cannot forsee or mitigate every threat... But the use of the military on active assignment at nuclear repositories of materials is COMMON SENSE and is now a necessity until a permament storage facility can be utilized at Yucca which incidentally is the "ONLY" feasible area where missle defense might actually work (a small area)

Its not a matter of "if" but "when" and the costs are so high that making certain that it does not happen is the only course of action.

While I'm not a fan of "profiling" or a "witch-hunt" in the absence of real solutions, and while I know that the agencies need some PR and ways to soothe the masses, the reality of 9-11 dictates that these agencies transcend rhetoric and get genuinely involved with reality.

A "poster boy" designated and trageted for the media and public consumption by the agencies is no longer adequate protection against the raw realities that confront us.

9-11 is not over, it is just round one and the US has gotten off the ropes after being sucker punched... We were lucky that these terrorists choose the towers and not three power plants.

The attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example, were five years in the making, he said, and the fatal bombing of the USS Cole was actually a second attempt

When is the D.C. crowd going to add the OK City bombing and TWA flight to the list of terrorist attacks???????????

I'll believe we have begun to take homeland security seriously when I see anti-aircraft batteries perched atop high value targets. Superdome to Nuke plant to Sears Tower.

FYI, there are some changes being made in the Lake Murray Dam....

For more info see: A quicktime movie on the Lake Murray Dam and the new backup dam

There have been other recent news stories on it...

I hardly think a former ambassardor qualifies as a security expert. Erwin's just another liberal looking for big brother to take care of us.

I have visited a number of nuclear plants, and worked at several (as I am doing now). Nuclear plants are hardened (you won't get in) targets with top notch security forces. A terrorist with half a brain will choose one of the many far easier targets. A terrorist with less than half a brain will go down hard.

Nuke plants are in the country. Military protects the country.

No, we don't need the military to be stationed inside Nuke plants.

Isn't nuclear power great? ....Always remember: solar power doesn't work. It's just not developed enough... Barf!

.

Thanks for the link, PJQ. And you're absolutely right about Wackenhut.