Article

Meeting to stop terrorism

The sense of threat to nuclear facilities has heightened in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States
T.R. Reid - The Washington Post

LONDON – The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency has called an emergency session for Friday to examine new ways to prevent nuclear terrorism.

The sense of threat to nuclear facilities has heightened in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, said Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the U.N.-linked agency, which sets nuclear-safety standards. There are more than 10,000 possible sources of radioactive material around the planet for a terrorist to steal, he noted in an interview Thursday. Some of these are well-guarded military facilities, but others are essentially wide open, including hospital radiotherapy rooms and college physics labs.

Nuclear power plants and spent-fuel facilities could also be targets for World Trade Center-style attacks, experts say. With that threat in mind, the U.S. government on Wednesday banned aircraft from flying over atomic reactors.

“We don’t want to alarm anybody, but we now have to prepare for the worst-case scenario – a terrorist who obtains some kind of nuclear weapon,” said El Baradei.

Officials at the agency said representatives from dozens of nations will attend the day-long session at its Vienna headquarters, including 100 or more from U.S. government agencies and nuclear facilities

Graham Andrew, a technical expert at the IAEA, said there is not much risk that terrorists could build an actual atomic bomb, because “it would be difficult for anybody to obtain enough nuclear material to do that.”

The more likely possibility is the creation of a so-called “dirty bomb” – a conventional plastic or TNT explosive salted with some quantity of nuclear isotopes. The resulting explosion could spread radioactivity across a metropolitan area. “It might not be strong enough to cause serious health problems, but it could create panic,” Andrew said. “And that is the terrorists’ goal.”

For example, the radioactive isotope cobalt 60 is widely used for radiotherapy in cancer wards, and thus can be found in hospitals all over the world. There are also hundreds of small research reactors at universities and laboratories “that could be a ready source of nuclear materials,” Andrew said.

George Bunn, an analyst at Stanford’s Institute for International Studies, who will speak at the Friday seminar, said he thinks the greatest risk of nuclear terrorism involves possible attacks on nuclear power plants or fuel factories. ”You’d be looking at a man-made Chernobyl,” Bunn said in an interview.