Ten years ago
today I joined a group of nuclear security
and terrorism experts for a meal in Central London, following a day of discussion
of terrorist threats on nuclear waste stores.
The reason for the
meeting was the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM-1) had convened
a group
of security specialists to advise CoRWM on security aspects of radioactive
waste management and storage facilities.
Less than 10 hours after the dinner, a bomb
destroyed a London bus barely two minutes around the corner from the restaurant, one of four bombs
to be detonated by suicide bombers that
rush hour morning on London Public Transport, killing 52 people, and injuring a
further 700.
It was a black coincidence that this meeting of
terrorist specialists should have met so close to a terrorist outrage
When the group met for the second time, in
London on 13-14 December 2005, the specialists unanimously agreed on a
statement, and conveyed to CoRWM their strong belief that the statement should
appear at a prominent place in the final documentation of the CoRWM process
then under way, which it did. The statement reads:
“The
security Specialists appointed to the CoRWM Specialist Security Workshop
recognize
that CoRWM is not responsible for the priority that is being given to the
conditioning
and mode of storage of nuclear waste forms prior to their transportation to
the
selected storage/disposal facility that may not occur for some decades into the
future.
However, it
is our unanimous opinion that greater attention should be given to the
current
management of radioactive waste held in the UK, in the context of its
vulnerability
to potential terrorist attacks. We are not aware of any UK Government
programme
that is addressing this issue with adequate detail or priority, and consider it
unacceptable
for some vulnerable waste forms, such as spent fuel, to remain in their
current
condition and mode of storage. We urge the Government to take the required
action and
to instruct the NDA, in cooperation with the regulators, to produce an
implementation
plan for categorising and reducing the vulnerability of the UK’s
inventory
of radioactive waste to potential acts of terrorism, through conditioning and
placement in
storage options with an engineered capability specifically designed to resist a
major terrorist attack.”
“This report assumes that a security
event is a deliberate, planned attack. The underlying motives for the attack
are not important here, except to the extent that they affect the probability
of the event. It is important, however, to understand the specific objectives
that attackers might hope to achieve by attacking a radioactive-waste facility
or transport operation. These objectives can be categorized within three
general purposes: releasing radioactive material directly; misappropriating
radioactive material for subsequent malicious use; and misappropriating fissile
material, also for subsequent malicious use.”
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