Core concerns

It's a sultry day on the gritty industrial fringe of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, and as pedestrians stroll by, none of them even bother to glance at a dome that looks like a city water tank.

It's not. But if the public mistakes a nuclear reactor for a water tank, that's fine with John Bernard, director of the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory. Less attention is better. He knows, however, that neither he nor federal authorities can assume a terrorist is so inattentive.

So Dr. Bernard, a beefy man with close-cropped hair, has studied a theoretical airliner crash into the MIT containment dome, a feat that would require great flying skills, given that the structure is only a few stories tall. An engine might get through the shell, the study showed.

Bernard has also examined a hypothetical truck-bomb explosion. "The truck-bomb scenario is more likely, more realistic," he says. "But honestly, with two feet of steel-reinforced concrete, even that isn't going to bother us."

Perhaps so. But after years of being virtually ignored as a security threat because of their relatively small amounts of nuclear fuel, the nation's 26 university research reactors – and hundreds of other research reactors worldwide (see story) – are being fingered by nuclear security experts as prime terrorist targets.

The result is a real educational dilemma for universities with nuclear-engineering programs: Can campus reactors be outfitted with enough security to thwart terrorists and still make economic sense? With such heavy guarding, can colleges avoid creating the impression that they're on the verge of war?

"Nobody wants to talk about university research reactors," says George Bunn, an architect of arms control and a nuclear consultant to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. "But they're a big problem because, typically, research reactors are much closer to city populations. The one at the University of Wisconsin is in the middle of Madison. The one at MIT is on a city street."

Big nuclear power plants like the one at Three Mile Island in Middletown, Pa., were the focal point after Sept. 11 because of their large quantities of nuclear fuel. Now – because of doubts about the preparedness of campus police forces, the bomb-grade nuclear fuel in some of the reactors, and the reactors' proximity to large populations – US campus nuclear programs are under a magnifying lens.

Theft and sabotage are the critical threats. Theft of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium (HEU) fuel, like that used at MIT and five other US research reactors, could enable terrorists to build a nuclear weapon, says a new report by Dr. Bunn. Another recent report, by Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom, says the 300 or so HEU-fueled research reactors in the US and worldwide "remain dangerously insecure."

Commercial US power reactors and most research reactors in the US do not use bomb-grade uranium. Low-enriched uranium (LEU) is the fuel of choice.

Yet since Sept. 11, some experts say that terrorists might try to use conventional explosives to blow up an LEU reactor in a city or on campus, creating a "dirty bomb" that spreads radioactivity and panic. Spent fuel could be stolen for the same purpose.

Unlike the one at MIT, most university reactors in the US do not even have a protective containment dome. Many are housed in ordinary lab buildings. But it is their proximity to masses of people that is the big concern.

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