- More than three and a half million people could be killed
by a terrorist attack on a British nuclear plant, concludes a series of
three reports so alarming that even Greenpeace - which commissioned them
- is unwilling to publish them.
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- The reports - whose findings the Government has also
sought to suppress - show that terrorists could identify the most dangerous
parts of the plants from publicly available information and crash aircraft
into them, releasing vast amounts of radioactivity.
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- Now MPs and peers have launched an investigation by the
Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology into the revelations as
part of a formal inquiry into "the possible risks and consequences
of a terrorist attack at a nuclear facility in the UK". They decided
to set up the inquiry last month - at the urging of the House of Commons
Defence Select Committee - drawing on the reports and other material, even
though ministers warned that much of the information they needed was secret
and would not be made available to them.
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- The reports show that Britain could face a far greater
threat than the danger of ricin, constantly quoted by ministers, or the
warnings of a rocket attack on an aircraft that led to last week's deployment
of tanks at Heathrow. Yet one of their authors - John Large, an independent
nuclear expert - says that the Government has reacted to it with "staggering
indolence".
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- The three reports, commissioned by Greenpeace after the
11 September attacks, cover the vulnerability of Britain's nuclear installations,
the possibility of an attack from the air and the consequences of the resulting
disaster. They were completed at the end of 2001, but the pressure group
has sat on them for over a year, unable to decide what to do with them.
They are still being kept a closely guarded secret.
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- The first, by Dr Large, concludes that Britain's nuclear
plants are "almost totally ill-prepared" for an airborne terrorist
attack. The second, by an aviation expert, suggests that it would only
take four minutes for an airliner to divert from its regular flight path
to attack the most dangerous target of all, the Sellafield nuclear complex
in Cumbria. And the third, by leading scientist Dr Frank Barnaby, estimates
that, at worst, 3.6 million people could die as a result.
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- Dr Large said last night that he had found it "astonishingly
easy" to get information on targets at Sellafield and other nuclear
plants, and that he had been sent official reports identifying them without
any attempt to check on his bona fides.
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- He said: "A terrorist cell charged with attacking
Sellafield could readily obtain sufficient information from publicly available
documents to identify highly hazardous and vulnerable targets for which
there exists little defence in depth."
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- Dr Barnaby - a former Aldermaston scientist, who was
for 10 years director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
- concludes that a jumbo jet crashing into Sellafield could cause a fireball
over a mile high.
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- He says that 25 times as much radioactivity as was emitted
by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 would be likely to be released, eventually
killing 1.1 million people from cancer. In the worst case scenario, the
number of deaths could reach 3.6 million.
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- Dr Large was so alarmed by his findings that he asked
Greenpeace not to publish his report, and stamped the words "Not for
Open Publication" on every page.
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- Greenpeace, for its part, has been paralysed by indecision
by the reports, unable to decide even to disclose their findings to ministers
or officials to try to get them to act on the vulnerabilities they identified.
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- The pressure group is highly sensitive about this, and
has only now decided - after repeated questioning by The Independent on
Sunday - "to seek to stimulate this debate within government over
the next months".
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- Shaun Birnie, a nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace International,
said last week that there had been "months of debate" inside
the organisation about what to do with the reports, with some activists
fearing that the Government might take action against it.
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- He admitted: "We never got round to agreeing how
to use this report" but threatened that any suggestion in this article
that Greenpeace had sat on the report would damage relations with the IoS.
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- Challenged to explain the organisation's lack of urgency
at a time of an increasing terrorist threat, he said: "There is no
reason to rush this. A year is a very, very short time in the half life
of plutonium."
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=378739
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