News & Events

Nils Diaz: The level of safety in reactors is a continuous improvement that has really been remarkable, especially the last 10 to 15 years...the reality is that nuclear power plants in this country and abroad are operated at a much higher level of safety than what they were.

If you look at our reports to Congress for the past many, many years, the only real issues were the large amounts of radiation were either given to a person as an internal or external radiation event, really comes from the medical and from the industrial communities.

We used to be a safety agency. We just always did public health and safety, public health and safety. Well, 9/11 changed that completely. We are now a safety, security and preparedness agency. We are no longer one-dimensional. These three areas, safety, security, and preparedness are being integrated in a synergistic manner so each one reinforces each other.

We actually increased the security for access control, security for protection against ground, a land-based attack. We issued new water-based criteria, and we required the licensees to actually be prepared to deal with the potential effects of an aircraft attack. And out of that came a continuing study which is called our Aircraft Vulnerability Study. The studies, as you know, are classified but they do confirm that the power reactor facilities are the most protected civilian facilities in the country…. a defense-in-depth [approach] gives us time to deal with unexpected events no matter where they come from.

What we have learned in the last two and a half years is a sophisticated set of analyses that I believe have ever been done on power reactors is that we have time, and time is on our side. And therefore, we have concluded that the potential radiological consequences from aircraft attacks on nuclear power reactors are low.