Nuclear plant safetyPart Three: Bechtel and the Y-12 security breach
With an annual security budget of $150 million, the Y-12 Nuclear Complex at Oakridge, Tennessee, prided itself on its high-tech security system built to protect more than 179 tons of uranium. After Sister Megan Rice, age 82, and two confederates, both senior citizens, too — the three were armed with nothing but wire cutters and flashlights — broke into the Y-12 facility on 28 July 2012, one security guard was fired. Numerous investigations and reports, however, show that last July’s incident was but one in a series of security failures and breaches at nuclear sites under the supervision of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). In May, Sister Rice and her aging collaborators will stand trial. Bechtel, a major contractor sharing responsibility for the documented security lapses at Y-12, has just received a federal nuclear plant security contract worth more than $22 billion.
After Sister Megan Rice, age 82, and two confederates, both senior citizens, too — the three were armed with nothing but wire cutters and flashlights — broke into the Y-12 Nuclear Complex at Oakridge, Tennessee, in the predawn hours of 28 July 2012, full blame was immediately placed upon a lone security guard. The guard was fired.
With an annual security budget of $150 million, the Y-12 facility prided itself on its high-tech security system built to protect more than 179 tons of uranium. However, a closer examination of government reports, including an August 2012 Special Report1 authored by Gregory H. Friedman, Inspector General of the Department of Energy, suggests that poor communications between the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its contractors is responsible for numerous security and safety problems at Y-12. These problems included: inoperable security equipment; an inadequate security force; no timetables for the maintenance of security equipment; and lack of physical barriers. ). The Friedman report documented eight different actions that should immediately be taken to strengthen security at Y-12.
According to additional government documents, problems at Y-12 and other facilities around the country have a long and disturbing history. In fact, five months prior to Sister Megan Rice’s stroll past security into the Y-12 facility, Gene Aloise, Director of Natural Resources and Environment for the GAO, testified before the House Subcommittee on Strategic Forces of the Committee on Armed Services that there had been more than ten years of serious security and safety problems at various sites managed by the NNSA, including Y-12 (see Aloise’s 16 February 2012 testimony2).
The monumental breach at Y-12 can be best understood, then, not as an aberration by a single security guard, but as yet another lapse in long-standing security failures at a number of facilities under the management of the NNSA; these security failures reflected a decade of systemic problems between NNSA and its private contractors.
