The preceding considerations have not addressed the new dimension of threat evident from the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 on New York and Washington as well as from the admissions of Islamists apprehended afterwards. It is precisely this threat that makes it necessary to reconsider the use of nuclear power.
The confessions of two imprisoned al-Qaida leaders indicate that nuclear power plants were definitely among the targets considered by the terrorists. According to these statements, Mohammed Atta, who later piloted a Boeing 767 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, had already selected the two reactor blocks at the Indian Point power plant on the Hudson River as possible targets. In fact, there was already a code name for attacking the plant located only 40 kilometres from Manhattan, namely "electrical engineering". The plan was only discarded because the terrorists feared that anti-aircraft missiles might blow up a plane headed for the power plant beforehand.
Earlier and even more monstrous plans made by al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed, which called for ten passenger jets to be hijacked simultaneously, included by his own admission several nuclear power plants on the target list. It is therefore absolutely essential to take terrorist attacks more seriously when assessing the risks of nuclear power plants. Such attacks have become more probable by several orders of magnitude in the aftermath of September 11th 2001.
It seems certain that none of the 443 reactors in operation at the end of 2005 could withstand a deliberate crash by a large jet with a full tank of fuel. The reactor operators themselves unanimously confirmed this shortly after the attacks in New York and Washington. Their rapid admission also contained a tactical element; the point was to prevent debate about older and particularly vulnerable nuclear sites that might have come under public pressure to close down. In the meantime, scientific studies confirmed the managers' early statements. Many nuclear plants in Western industrial countries were designed with an eye to random crashes of small or military aircraft. Some planning scenarios even accounted for terrorist attacks using anti-tank rocket launchers, howitzers, or other weapons but a random crash by a fully tanked passenger jet was considered so improbable that no country took effective countermeasures against this scenario. The notion of a deliberate attack by which a passenger craft is transformed into a missile simply surpassed the imaginative capacity of the reactor engineers.
Immediately after the attacks in the USA, the Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit (GRS), a Cologne-based association concerned with the safety of nuclear reactors and other facilities, launched a comprehensive study into the vulnerability of German nuclear plants to air attacks. Commissioned by the German government, the study not only examined the structural strength of typical plants. Using a flight simulator at the Technical University in Berlin, half a dozen pilots crashed thousands of times at different speeds as well as points and angles of impact into German nuclear power plants, shown as detailed videos in the simulator cockpit. The test pilots - like the terrorists in New York and Washington - had previously flown only smaller propeller craft. Even so, approximately half of the simulated kamikaze attacks were said to be hits.
The results of this study were so alarming that they were never officially published and only later became public in the form of a classified, confidential summary. According to this document, every crash risked a nuclear inferno, especially in the older reactors, regardless of the type, size, or speed on impact of the passenger aircraft. The enormous shock on impact, or the subsequent kerosene fires, would either penetrate the containment directly or destroy the pipe system. In any event, a direct hit would very probably lead to a core melt and a large-scale release of radioactivity. The internal temporary storage facilities, in which spent fuel rods with enormous radioactive content cool down in tanks of water, would also be at great risk. It is true that reactors from later series in most countries feature more stable containment but according to the GRS study, the possibility cannot be excluded that a direct hit on these reactors at high speed would cause a major nuclear accident that would contaminate a large surrounding area.
The terrorism scenario of a targeted air attack does not eliminate the other fears that already existed around the world before September 11th 2001. Rather, it lends a more concrete and realistic basis to them. Certain industrialised countries with nuclear industries had already carefully examined the possibility of terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities by means of weapons or explosives from outside, or by means of violent or concealed entry to restricted areas. They had not however examined this possibility in light of the assailants deliberately prepared to die. The staggering possibility that individuals might attack a nuclear facility and expect to be the very first victims opens up dozens of scenarios that have yet to be taken into account.
From the perspective of extremist suicide bombers, an attack on a nuclear facility is anything but irrational. On the contrary, they know that a "successful" attack would not only cause an immediate inferno and suffering to millions, but would also probably cause many other nuclear power plants to be closed on precautionary grounds - thus triggering an economic earthquake in industrial countries against which the commercial consequences of September 11th would pale in comparison. As monstrous and unprecedented as the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were, they were largely concerned with the symbolic aim of striking and thus humiliating the US superpower at its economic, political, and military heart. An attack on a nuclear power plant would dispense with all such symbolism. It would hit the generation of electrical power, and thus the nerve centre and the entire infrastructure of an industrial society. The radioactive contamination of an entire region, possibly entailing the long-term evacuation of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, would finally erase the distinction between war and terror. No other attack, not even on the petroleum harbour of Rotterdam, would have a comparable psychological effect on Western industrial countries. Even if it failed in its objective of triggering a major nuclear accident, the results would be horrific. Public reaction would enflame debate over the catastrophic risks of nuclear power to a degree never seen before, and lead to the closure of many, if not all, plants in a number of industrialised countries.
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