Terrorism and Nuclear Reactors: Airplane Collisions

• After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, terrorism fears have on hijacked commercial jet planes that can be used effectively as guided missiles against a range of targets, most notably used against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
• According to a spokeswoman for the association of German electric power utilities, "No power plant in the world could withstand an airborne terror attack like the one on September 11."
• To quote NRC spokesman Victor Dricks, "we never considered that (a plane crashing into a power plant) a credible threat prior to September 11."
• According to the NRC, "deterministic protection requirements are imposed only when the likelihood of a crash is found to be unacceptably high." Plants that are deemed to have a sufficiently low probability of aircraft impact (less than 1 part in 10 million) are not required to have any type of protection against this threat.
• Only five reactors have a design intended to withstand an airplane collision, and only Three Mile Island units 1 and 2 were designed to withstand the impact of a large plane, weighing up to 200,000 pounds at 230 miles per hour.
• The engine block is the densest region of the airplane, and thus has the most destructive potential. Our analysis indicates that the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engine featured on a Boeing 767-200ER, similar to the one that hit the World Trade Center, could easily penetrate the containment structure.
• Air patrols are a useful, albeit expensive and not entirely effective, method of stopping hijacked planes.
• According to the NRC, "there would be enormous command and control problems and a large potential for unintended consequences and collateral damage if [anti-aircraft] weaponry were deployed."
• There has been strong support among pilots to have Congress explicitly grant them the specific right to carry firearms on board their aircrafts. This is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective deterrent against a hijacking.
• Using special frangible bullets - bullets not made of lead but highly compressed powdered alloys that shatter when hit against a hard surface - would lessen the risk of a rapid depressurization of the cabin and minimize the amount of ricochet, although they have essentially the same stopping power as normal lead bullets.

Prepared by the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School undergraduate task force on Nuclear Reactor Terrorism, May 2002. Prepared for the Coalition for Peace Action as part of the Princeton University Community Based Learning Initiative.