The China Syndrome 2003

Foster Zeh has a problem. Like many whistle-blowers before him, he knew the risks of his actions. But now, as he sits in his modest kitchen in Red Hook, New York, he worries. He holds himself straight-backed and stoic in military fashion, hands palms-down on the table. He worries, he says, because a spokesman for his employer felt free to disparage him in the local paper. He worries because he's been on administrative leave for months and his company is affering him a paltry $18,000 to go away and shut up.

But mostly he worries about what he knows. Zeh worked as security supervisor at the Indian Point nuclear reactor station for five and a half years. He trained the guards, plotted stratery and ran mock assault dirlls. He is acutely aware of the Plant's potential for disaster--a catastrophe that could erase the lives of tens of thousandws of people in a matter of hours. Such vulnerability, he believes, makes Indian Point the most dangerous nuclear power plant in the United States.

Worst of all, he is sure that what is obvious to him is obvious to a terrorist.

"The chances of an attack on that plant are tremendously high," says Zeh. At six feet and 208 pounds, the 44-year-old security supervisor looks as imposing as he did when he played strong safety at New Mexico Highlands University. He's a bit fleshier now, with more girth and jowls. Wearing a muscle shirt and sporting a brush cut (a throwback to his days in the Army), he could be Bruce Willis' stunt double in Die Hard. He speaks with the authority of a law enforcement professional. "Al Qaeda knows the target sets. It's no secret. They have people studying nuclear engineering at universities here. They come from Syria, Yemen, all around the Middle East."

Before he was placed on administrative leave for, he believes, pointing out dangerous security lapses, Zeh was a model employee. In 2000 he received the commendation of Supervisor of the Millennium from Wackenhut Nuclear Security. Then he began to doubt.

"Nobody has ever rocked the boat like Foster has," says George McSpedon, an ex-Marine and former co-worker of Zeh's at Indian Point. "They're going to try to slander him any way they can. But Foster knows his stuff. If I had to sit in a trench over in Kuwait with somebody, I'd want that person to be Foster. I've always trusted him."

Over the years, Zeh has become increasingly concerned about the rickety, inept defense that protects America's most lethal "soft targets." In this case, the target is 35 miles from Times Square. Foster Zeh has decided to tell his story in full--for the first time--in these pages. He is going to talk about nuclear security from the inside out. He will report on dangerous conditions at Indian Point's spent-fuel pools that until now have been hidden from the public, denied by Indian Point officials and whitewashed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Zeh's allegations are convincing to many in the industry, and his assessments put New York City closer to a nuclear disaster than most people could imagine.

"It's one of the worst," says Pete Stockton when asked about Indian Point. Stockton was a special assistant to the secretary of energy in the Clinton administration and now works with a watchdog group called the Project on Government Oversight. "It's a lack of thought in their defensive plan, it's fatigued guards who work too much overtime, it's the training of the guards, everything. Few of our plants are ready for a real terrorist attack."

Security at nuclear plants now is comparable to security at the nation's airports before September 11--a weak government agency sets the standards, and the utilities hire the cops themselves. In 2002, during his State of the Union address, President Bush warned the nation of vulnerabilities at nuclear facilities. "A year later, the NRC has done nothing to improve the safety and security of our nation's nuclear power plants," says Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. With five other senators, Reid has recently reintroduced the Nuclear Security Act after it stalled in Congress last year. "In fact, the only step the NRC has taken is to say it's unable to calculate the risk of a terrorist attack and will therefore not include that as a risk factor when it considers opening new facilities. The NRC has been so negligent that one third of the employees working for the agency question its dedication to safety. Something must be done."

But, as Foster Zeh was to learn, telling the world about the dangers of a nuclear power plant operating in Manhattan's shadow would have dangers all its own.

Zeh stands on a bank of the Hudson, looking across a bend in the river at Indian Point's three signature containment domes. They loom over the river valley like giant concrete sculptures while steam rises lazily from adjacent buildings. He points to the northernmost dome. "That's Indian Point 2," he says. "The other big one is Indian Point 3. The small one in the middle is Indian Point 1--it was shut down in 1974 because it had no emergency core cooling system." The other two have been operating since the mid-Seventies, and they have had all sorts of operational failures--including the release of radioactive water in 1993 and again in 2000.

Something catches Zeh's eye, and he points again. "See the glare from that windshield? That's a security vehicle--the guard just gave his position away. Notice that all the guard stations are on the roofs of the low buildings, which leaves them vulnerable to being shot at from the hills that form a basin around the plant." Later he drives past the guard post at the entrance to Indian Point's driveway. Not only is there no guard, but the gate is wide open.

Zeh studies lines of fire through force of habit. Ever since his first job as director of the internal fraud division at Gimbel's, Zeh has been obsessed with the security business, auditing corporate security courses at colleges and attending every seminar, conference and convention he could find. "I wanted to learn as much about guards, gates and guns as possible," Zeh explains. "If some guy was giving a speech like 'How to Harden a Target,' I'd be sitting front and center."

Zeh, a New York native, joined the Army in his 20s and was trained as a combat air traffic controller. After tours of duty in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf, he was stationed at West Point, where he guarded visiting dignitaries. With a rucksack full of military awards, including the Medal of Heroism from the American Legion, Zeh went back home to upstate New York and looked for something in his backyard that he could be paid to protect. He was hired by Wackenhut as a security officer at Indian Point 2 in 1997.

Zeh remembers watching Wackenhut's slick, action-packed recruiting video and being inspired--the guards were portrayed as an elite paramilitary force. Instead of chasing shoplifters and eating doughnuts, they rappelled out of helicopters and practiced counterterrorism tactics. The gear was impressive too: Kevlar vests, cordless microphone headsets and big guns with infrared sights.

Zeh believed he was in good company. Fellow recruits included a gunnery sergeant with 25 years' experience in the Marine Corps and another classmate with 15 years of military service. "We were so excited," he recalls of his early trainee days. "We thought we were getting the chance to serve our country again. But it was a big con. There weren't any SWAT drills or fancy equipment. The job was about sitting on a folding chair and staring at a door."

However, there was one sight that (continued on page 78)China Syndrom(continued from page 68) transfixed Zeh. When he visited the Indian Point 2 spent-fuel pool during one of his first on-the-job-training shifts in the summer of 1997, he couldn't believe his eyes. Housed in an unremarkable metal structure was what could have been mistaken for an Olympic-size swimming pool, if it weren't for the handrail encircling it and the eerie glow emanating from the water in it. Zeh looked closely and watched a steady stream of bubbles, generated by the circulating currents below, make their way up from the luminous depths. The bubbles contained minute quantities of radon gas, released when they popped at the surface. The air was stifling, thick with humidity and heat. It was like a YMCA from hell.

Known as "shrink-off," the turquoise light is generated by the thousand or so spent-fuel rods submerged like pulsing neon bulbs. Zeh gazed at the plant's mother lode of nuclear waste. (About 800 tons of irradiated fuel rods are currently stored at Indian Point 2's spent-fuel pool. Indian Point 3's pool holds more than 600 tons of nuclear waste. Indian Point 1, decommissioned in 1974, has its own pool of 100 tons of what the plant workers call "old shit." It leaks 25 gallons of water a day. According to the NRC and Entergy, the water is recovered in a drain and does not pose a hazard to the public.)

"Sheer insanity," Zeh told his supervisor when he learned the building's only guard post was under the cavernous roof three flights up. "Everyone has access to the fuel-storage building, even janitors. They can walk in and actually look at the racks in the water." Then there was the storage building itself. It looked like a decrepit airplane hangar with masonry walls and a leaky tin roof. This metal shack and a lone guard were all that stood between someone bent on destruction and one of the largest amounts of radioactive waste on the Eastern seaboard.

After just a year on the job, Zeh began complaining to his superiors about security lapses and inadequate training procedures. "There were guards who arrived more concerned with getting breakfast orders in than they were with actually getting on post. And it's only gotten worse," he says incredulously.

Rather than act on any of Zeh's observations, both Wackenhut and Consolidated Edison, which was then the owner and operator of the Indian Point 2 nuclear reactor, praised his job performance. Eventually Zeh worked his way to the top of Indian Point 2's wage scale, pulling down $22.09 an hour as a shift supervisor. Along with the higher pay came greater responsibilities, from training new recruits in the classroom and on the firing range to coordinating the mock attack drills that the NRC uses to test a plant's ability to defend itself.

"My friends in the CIA, FBI and Secret Service constantly talked about how we are approaching a boiling point and that it's just a matter of time before somebody realizes how vulnerable we are," he says. "After 9/11, I started studying possible terrorist scenarios. The tactical aspect was always in my mind, but it took the attack on the twin towers for me to realize that in a 50-mile radius of Indian Point there are 20 million people. I would never have thought about it that way."

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Nuclear power plants are simple operations, really. They harness the heat of a controlled nuclear reaction to produce steam, which drives turbines and creates electricity. Indian Point 2 and 3 are pressurized-water reactors. As with the other 101 commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S., the IP reactors use enriched uranium as fuel, manufactured as rods of pellets bundled in a protective zirconium casing. These rods are placed in the reactor and bombarded with neutrons, causing some of the uranium atoms to fission, or split, into two lighter atoms, thereby releasing a tremendous amount of heat.

After 18 to 24 months in a reactor, the uranium in fuel rods still generates a great deal of heat and radioactivity but is no longer efficient for use in generating electricity. Like all domestic nuclear power plants, Indian Point removes these intensely radioactive spent rods and stores them in cooling water.

Reactors are housed in containment domes constructed of steel-reinforced concrete from three and a half to six feet thick. The idea is that if an accident occurred, the dome would contain the radioactivity--if, of course, the dome remained intact. (Radioactive atoms have trouble passing through substances such as lead, concrete and water.) Loss of the plant's cooling system can lead to a meltdown of the reactor's core. The fuel gets so hot (5000 degrees) that it melts through the concrete and metal foundation beneath the reactor, and keeps going, and going, thus earning its designation, the China Syndrome.

Because there is no explosion, the immediate result of a meltdown is far less dramatic than that of a hydrogen bomb. The danger lies in the extreme amounts of radioactivity, either airborne or in the form of contaminated water, released into the atmosphere. More than 4000 Ukrainians have died from cancer and other diseases from exposure to fallout produced by Chernobyl's meltdown in 1986. Ukraine's Health Ministry estimates one in 16 of the country's 49 million inhabitants suffers from serious health disorders linked to the accident. People in Kiev, 70 miles south of Chernobyl, are known to use Geiger counters when they buy fresh produce. The Ukrainian government has specified an 18-mile exclusionary zone around the plant as uninhabitable.

While a reactor's containment dome serves as an inviting and symbolic terrorist target, spent-fuel pools are considerably softer targets. In the U.S. they contain on average 10 to 20 times more radioactive material than a reactor core. And none of the pools have containment domes. A pool's waste is a nasty cocktail of fission products that includes unimaginable amounts of cesium-137--a volatile radioactive isotope with a half-life of 30 years. The Chernobyl disaster sent about 2.4 million curies of cesium-137 into the atmosphere, accounting for much of the radiation exposure that ruined the land around the plant. The spent-fuel pools at Indian Point 2 and 3 contain more than 75 million curies of cesium-137.

Foster Zeh often contemplates an exclusionary zone around Indian Point. The ecological impact from the release of radiation in the pools would render one of the earth's most densely populated areas a toxic wasteland. Moreover, the death toll could be well into six figures, one of the worst ever from a man-made event.

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On September 8, 2002 at seven A.M., Zeh was called into Entergy's front office and told he had been hand-picked to participate in an important NRC drill: the Attachment 3 Inspection, an exercise designed to evaluate Indian Point's early warning detection system and the guard force's ability to foil a simulated terrorist attack. But instead of the minimum standard four attackers (three outsiders and one accomplice), the Indian Point guard force (continued on page 140)China Syndrom(continued from page 78) would be required to defeat the assault of only one mock terrorist--Foster Zeh.

Even with such a stacked deck, Entergy needed assurance that the guards would prevail. "They told me to have a bad day," Zeh says. "They said they knew what I was capable of doing, but that I should just forget about it and let the guards win. They needed this Attachment 3 to stay open.

"I was indignant. There was no way I was going to be a yes-man for Entergy," Zeh says now. The more he thought about the superintendent's order, the more incensed he became. Over his entire career, he had tried to perform at the highest level possible. Now his boss was telling him to "have a bad day."

"I had put up with lies about security at Indian Point for almost six years, and I decided this was the time to take a stand," Zeh says. At the time he said nothing, but he had no intention of letting the guards win. He saw the test as an opportunity to force Entergy to ratchet up security. He realized that he was risking his job, but he was determined. "There are three things you can't take away from me," he would later say with the conviction of a former military man. "My duty, my honor and my country. I have too much pride to do otherwise."

To test the early warning system, Zeh decided to use the most realistic scenario in his arsenal: He was going to attack the 239-acre nuclear complex from the shoreline of the Hudson River. When he forced his big frame under the security perimeter, the bells at Central Alarm stayed silent. The NRC inspector frowned. When Zeh was able to do it four more times, all within the same 30-yard zone, the inspector was livid. He demanded to know what was wrong. Zeh stood up and explained that he was able to breach the fence because management had ramped down the sensitivity on the wires to prevent nuisance alarms caused by animals and winds whipping off the Hudson.

The second phase of the Attachment 3 Inspection involved a tabletop drill--Zeh versus two of Indian Point's security supervisors. The war game exercise was played with magnetic pieces on wall-mounted boards, broken up much like a chess board to represent various sections of the plant. Attacking players use magnetic pieces marked with an A; defense pieces are marked with an S. The game is timed--two minutes to reach a given target set (say, cooling system and backup system) and destroy it (causing a radiological release) before you're taken out by the arriving security force.

While the superintendent grimaced, Zeh went after Indian Point 2's soft underbelly, the spent-fuel pool. Click! He defeated the fence with faux explosives. Click! He sought cover behind a maze of trailers and Dumpsters bordering the spent-fuel pool known as the "mobile park area." The security force was unable to get a clear shot at Zeh. The NRC inspector scrawled notes on a clipboard as Zeh continued his assault.

Just before Zeh could move his marker to enter the fuel-storage building, an Entergy representative abruptly called a time-out. Everyone was speechless. There were not supposed to be any timeouts in tabletop drills. Win or lose, the game was played out to its conclusion. A moment passed. Zeh was taken out into the hall to discuss the proceedings.

Before Zeh could explain his honorable intentions, the Entergy representative ripped into him. "He told me to 'shut the fuck up!"' Zeh recounts. "He didn't want me to tell them about the Dumpsters and trailers." That's when Zeh knew the game was over.

Back in the conference room, the superintendent took Zeh's place and completed the drill for him. Without Zeh moving the magnetic pieces around the board, the defending security force easily prevailed. The NRC inspector gave Indian Point a passing grade on the Attachment 3 Inspection.

•

There is no greater threat to the New York City metropolitan area than Indian Point's spent-fuel pools. Zeh knew it, and so did everyone else who was watching him in the conference room.

Gordon Thompson is executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a nonprofit group that conducts technical and policy analysis to promote international security. He is considered one of the top authorities on spent-fuel pools--his policies concerning nuclear safety have been accepted or adopted by agencies around the world.

"The spent-fuel pool technology," says Thompson, "was put in place in the Seventies to hold a relatively small amount of extremely toxic material. Spent-fuel pools in the U.S. have been abused in order to store substantially more than they were designed to hold--perhaps five times more than is appropriate. That means that the waste material is at a very high packing density." The higher the density, the hotter the mix.

"These pools weren't designed to resist attack," says Thompson. "I've been talking about this issue for 25 years. The risk of attack is substantially higher these days, and it's rising. Draining a spent-fuel pool is within the capabilities of a well-trained paramilitary unit.

"The NRC's own studies show that a spent-fuel fire is a physical reality," he continues. "In these highly packed pools, all you have to do is take away the water and the fuel will spontaneously ignite and burn. It's all laid out in NRC technical literature."

Without the cooling water, exposed fuel rods reach a temperature of more than 900 degrees centigrade, causing the zirconium cladding of the fuel-rod casing to burn. Once ignited, the fire would release large amounts of radioactivity into the air. As the zirconium burns, an exothermic reaction occurs and what little water is left becomes, in effect, gasoline and fuels an inferno that will burn for days.

The official NRC opinion is that Indian Point's three pools are completely secure because they are set below grade in bedrock--hard to hit by a plane and difficult to drain. Foster Zeh knows that isn't true. The Indian Point 2 pool is actually more above ground than below.

Housed in a nondescript outbuilding with a tin roof, the pool is 30 feet wide by 60 feet long and 40 feet deep. The NRC requires that 22 feet of water cover the rods; Entergy claims fuel rods at Indian Point are covered by 25 feet of water. The important issue, however, is how much of the pool's 40-foot depth is below grade. Foster Zeh, who has been in the IP 2 fuel-storage building countless times, describes the cement walls of the spent-fuel pool towering at least 30 feet in the air on three of the pool's four sides. The fuel rods, approximately 12 feet long at the minimum, stand lengthwise--top to bottom--at the floor of the pool, which means that if the walls were breached by explosives (let alone an aircraft), the tops of the rods would be exposed to the atmosphere.

Few outsiders have been inside these buildings. In his five-plus years at Indian Point, Zeh says he's never seen the IP 2 spent-fuel building opened to the public or the press. When Hillary Rodham Clinton visited recently, she didn't get a peek. People ask, of course, but nobody gains entrance. Zeh says the reason is obvious: It would blow Entergy's assurances concerning the impregnable "below grade" spent-fuel pools.

David Lochbaum is one of the world's leading authorities on spent-fuel pools. "It's my understanding, from visits to Indian Point and looking at drawings while working as a consultant at Indian Point 3, that the spent-fuel pools are largely underground, except for the side facing the river," he says. "My recollection is that the above-ground portion of the pool walls is approximately 15 feet or so. But it's moot whether it's zero feet [as Entergy asserts], 15 feet or 30 feet [as Foster claims]. Because of the topography, the pool wall on the Hudson River side of the building is nearly all above ground. It's reasonable to assume that terrorists would target that wall."

"A ground attack where terrorists gain access to spent-fuel storage building is a more likely scenario with the greatest chance of success," says Zeh. "If they positioned explosives on the outside of the spent-fuel pool walls and dropped powerful charges into the pool itself, they would uncover the fuel and trigger a fire. Indian Point ran mock attack drills to test the security force's ability to defend against such an attack. Mock attackers, including me, were able to gain access to the spent-fuel storage building in under 40 seconds and position mock explosives. Were those explosives real, there would have been a catastrophe."

George McSpedon was security supervisor at Indian Point 2 from 1997 to 1998. After leaving Wackenhut, he worked as a New York City policeman for four years before joining the Pough-keepsie police department. McSpedon confirms Zeh's description of the IP spent-fuel structure. "Three sides of IP 2's SFP are completely exposed," he says, "and they stand at least 30 feet tall. The protected wall is the north one." McSpedon and Zeh agree that the north wall is shielded by an adjacent building. As for the pools being below grade, says McSpedon, "It's bullshit, plain and simple. The NRC and Entergy have been using the embedded-in-bedrock excuse from day one--the pools are vulnerable as hell."

"Foster's a straight-up guy," says McSpedon. "The two of us went through an adversary course together. We'd get into the plant and melt it down every time."

Bob Alvarez, a senior policy advisor to the Secretary of Energy from 1993 to 1999, weighs in: "The fuel pools are not protected by bedrock. But what really worries me is that nuclear power plants are clearly on the short list of terrorist targets--they're always mentioned when the government issues alerts." (During his State of the Union speech in January 2002, President Bush revealed that "diagrams of American nuclear power plants" were discovered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.) "Even worse, Indian Point has wedged a flatbed truck loaded with tanks of highly flammable compressed hydrogen between the pool area and the reactor. I worked in the DOE nuclear weapons program, which is no paragon of safety, and we didn't even do that. That's like having a bomb right next to your two most vital radiological areas. And it's still there! Entergy says, 'We don't have to move it because it meets the NRC safety regulations."'

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"The NRC is a captive regulatory agency, controlled by the same industry they've been entrusted to oversee," says Gordon Thompson. "Credible threats from Congress have been made to drastically cut the agency's budget unless it is friendly to the industry."

"There's a revolving door between NRC personnel and the utilities," says Alvarez. "The higher-paying jobs are in the private sector. If you behave yourself, once you punch your ticket with the NRC you can get an annuity and go work for the industry and make even more money. But if you rock the boat, you're banned." In fact, Entergy has at least one former NRC inspector on its staff whose wife also happens to work for the commission.

Entergy spokesperson Jim Steets insists the plant is safe. "Mr. Zeh offers his opinion on things he has no knowledge or expertise on," he says. "You can call this an old boy's network if you like, but there are federal regulations we must comply with that include implementing enhanced security measures since September 11. We spent $7 million improving security, and there have been security inspections performed by the NRC since Zeh made his allegations."

When asked about Zeh's version of events concerning the Attachment 3 Inspection, Steets says only, "That sounds incredible to me." Fifteen minutes later he calls back: "All of what he said is untrue. He was removed from the tabletop, but that's because of his inability to perform." Of all the security officers in the plant, why would Entergy choose Zeh if there was a possibility that he would underperform? Steets says, "There was an expectation that he could perform, but he couldn't."

Major Bob Ryan was Zeh's supervisor at West Point in 1993 and 1994, and he has nothing but praise for Zeh. "Foster is of outstanding character," Ryan says. "When he told me something, I could always count on it being truthful and correct. He's a very courageous soldier and 100 percent dependable. Whatever he has said about Indian Point I would take to the bank."

As for the NRC's response to the charge that its tests were rigged? "The allegations Mr. Zeh has made are still being looked at by us," says an anonymous spokesperson. "We don't comment on ongoing investigations."

Seven weeks after the Attachment 3 Inspection, Foster Zeh was pulled off his shift by Entergy investigators and placed on immediate administrative leave.

Last December, a copy of an internal report on security--which had been completed nearly a year earlier and was never shared with Zeh or any of the 59 guards surveyed--was given to The New York Times by Riverkeeper, an environmental group headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Zeh was quoted briefly in the ensuing article--the first time he spoke out in public. As for Entergy, spokesperson Jim Steets said the problems were inherited (Entergy bought Indian Point 3 from the New York Power Authority--Steets' previous employer--in 2000, and Indian Point 2 from Consolidated Edison in September 2001).

The report's most surprising statistic is that 81 percent of the security officers surveyed felt they could not adequately defend the plant, and almost all agreed that more security was needed. Another troubling detail: Security officers at IP 2 patrolled the grounds without a chambered round in either their Glock or their rifle. The self-flagellation continued: Fifty percent of the guard force was overweight, applicants with no experience were being hired, snowball fights were an on-duty sport, security drills were not only dumbed down but rigged and everyone was forced to work absurd overtime (often six or seven days straight on 12- to 16-hour shifts, regardless of health). And these employees weren't a bunch of save-the-whales types. They were as pronuke as you could get, security personnel whose livelihoods depended on the continued existence of nuclear power.

Two days after the Times article ran, Zeh's wife silently handed him a copy of the local Times Herald-Record newspaper. The story that covered the security crisis at the plant included a personal attack. "He was an impressive security officer when we hired him," Entergy spokesperson Steets was quoted as saying, but now "he's gone over the edge." "The accusations about me are killing me," Zeh says now. "It's especially devastating because I have a 15-year-old daughter. The parents of her classmates read the newspapers and the kids in school talk about it."

Entergy has yet to reinstate Zeh's employment. And in a January 30, 2003 New York Times story about the plant, an NRC commissioner insisted that the spent fuel was safe, secure and almost entirely below ground. Zeh is bitter about the way Indian Point management has treated him. Although he is being paid while on administrative leave, he is losing at least $180 a week in overtime wages. He rejected Entergy's settlement offer in exchange for his resignation. "I want to be officially reinstated so I can clear my name and leave on my own," he says. "This is not an obsession for me. I spend my time with my family, I have a life." These days, he does security for several protective service agencies and helped guard Bill Clinton when he appeared at a fund-raiser in New York.

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"We're all born with a 20 to 25 percent chance of getting cancer," says the NRC's Edward McGaffigan, who is cavalier about the dangers at Indian Point. He doesn't understand what the fuss is all about. "Al Qaeda is going to strike where they get the largest bang for their limited buck," he says. "If they study one of these plants, it's unlikely they'd say, 'Let's attack this.' As for the results of a pool fire, it's not a vast area that's uninhabitable. It's a limited area, and you get almost no deaths. When we run the models outside the facility, we typically get zero immediate deaths. We will get so-called stochastic deaths, an increase in a person's probability of contracting cancer sometime in the future." McGaffigan's statement contradicts a February 2001 NRC report that revealed that illnesses and loss of life from a spent-fuel pool fire would be horrific and its impact would be felt hundreds of miles away.

David Lochbaum points out that the water intake for the cooling systems at Indian Point is "exposed and vulnerable." He says the plant's diesel water pumps have a redundancy system, but the design is a problem--all nine pumps are situated next to one another and can be taken out with one assault.

Nuclear security expert Pete Stockton calls Zeh a hero. He backs up Zeh's allegations about sleeping guards, out-of-shape guards, guards who can't shoot straight and guards who would fold like a card table upon hearing the battle cry "Allah Akbar!" He says he knows the mock attack drills are rigged. Listen to Stockton long enough and you'll realize that Indian Point and virtually every other nuclear plant in the country are indefensible targets. "That's why the NRC talks about the thickness of the containment domes," says Stockton. "Because if you talk about anything else, it's a very short conversation. Foster doesn't like short conversations. The guy likes to talk, god bless him."

"The Chances of an Attack are High. Al Qaeda Knows The Target Sets. They Have People Studying Nuclear Engineering at Universities Here."

The Kill Zone Imagine a Ground Zero The Size of Rhode Island

50 Miles Peak Injury Zone

Twenty million people live within this zone. Though radiation here would not reach the 450,000 millirems needed to cause immediate death, residents would be at risk for increased rates of cancer and other radiation-related diseases. (Chernobyl--which is not near a major city--left 70,000 people disabled and a total of 3.4 million affected by radiation.) Food and water would likely be poisoned as far as 40 miles out--an area that includes all of New York City's major reservoirs.

17.5 Miles Peak Fatality Zone

According to a 1982 NRC study, a meltdown at one of Indian Point's two reactors could cause up to 50,000 deaths in the first year, 14,000 additional cancer deaths and 167,000 cases of radiation-related disabilities. The study's estimate of maximum property damage was $580 billion (in today's dollars but not adjusted for increased property values). A huge swath of land would be lost for decades. (The 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl left 12,400 square miles uninhabitable.)

10 Miles Evacuation Zone

About 300,000 people live within Indian Point's evacuation area. Getting them out ahead of a radioactive cloud would be tough. Studies show that nearly three-quarters of emergency workers would ditch duties to aid their own families. There would also be a massive "shadow evacuation." During the 1979 Three Mile Island crisis, 3400 people were ordered to evacuate but 144,000 tried to flee and clogged roads--a nightmare scenario in the congested New York area and tri-state suburbs.

The Spent-Fuel Pool Looks Like an Olympic Pool, Except for The Glow from The Water. The Air is Stifling, Like a YMCA from Hell.

"My friends in intelligence constantly talk about how we are approaching a boiling point," says Zeh.