Fergie's Tech Blog

U.S. Nuclear Plant Info Available to Public?

Lisa Myers, Amna Nawaz & the NBC Investigative Unit:

What if an airplane were to crash into a nuclear plant? How long would it take terrorists to penetrate security barriers outside nuclear facilities? What are the most vulnerable parts of a nuclear plant to attack in order to inflict maximum damage?

The answers to all those questions, and many more, are available to the public, as NBC News discovered in a recent hidden-camera investigation. Accessing that very information — along with thousands of other sensitive documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) — is as easy as walking into a public library, finding the right files, printing them out and walking out with the documents in hand, no questions asked.

Many of the documents we were able to access were among the thousands of files the NRC pulled from its Web site after 9/11, deemed too sensitive to be available to the public. But that same effort to clean out sensitive information, it seems, was never made with NRC’s document collections in public libraries across the country.

posted by Fergie @ 11/27/2006 06:15:00 PM