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DHS Funding: Dueling for Dollars

The big-money question in securing critical infrastructures is: Who pays how much, and for what? Or, in the case of the electric power industry: Where do you draw the line between ratepayers and taxpayers?

May 01, 2004 — CSO — The target might be New York's Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear power plant located within 50 miles of 20 million people and with such a clouded safety record that the top Google hit for "Indian Point" is a well-funded organization trying to shut it down. It might be the symbolic Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which 25 years ago had a partial reactor meltdown that took more than a decade and a billion dollars to clean up. But really, it could be any of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors that were described in al-Qaida training manuals found in Afghanistan, and were reportedly the planned targets of a second wave of airliner attacks.

In this case, though, the "where" matters much less than the "how." How many terrorists will there be? How will they be armed? What type of vehicle will they be driving, and how many tons of explosives will it hold?

All these questions are, of course, crucial for scenario-planning in the nuclear power industry. But more than that, they have significant economic implications for any CSO whose company is grappling with how to pay for federally mandated security improvements. That's because the answers form a threshold known in nuclear energy industry parlance as the design basis threat (DBT). Established by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the DBT defines the number of attackers, type of firepower and amount of explosives that guards at a nuclear power plant must be prepared for. Defending against any attack up to the level of the DBT is the responsibility of the company that operates the facility; anything above the DBT is the responsibility of the federal government.

More to the point: Anything above the DBT becomes an expense (and a liability) of the federal government. And not surprising, the DBT is a moving target. "Since 9/11, the X number of adversaries has increased, the X capabilities of those adversaries have increased, and the X number of explosives has increased," says Roy Lane, director of nuclear security for Exelon in Chicago, the country's largest operator of nuclear power plants. (The X's of the revised DBT are so closely guarded that the NRC threatened to take legal action against a watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, that planned to publish details.)

To comply with this new security threshold, Exelon Nuclear, a subsidiary of Exelon Corp., had to hire more security officers, who carry more firepower and go through more training. But the additional security isn't just about guards and guns. Exelon also had to push out the perimeter of its protected area and add new checkpoints, the better to defend against explosives detonated outside buildings where reactors are housed and spent fuel rods are stored. The company also had to redesign barriers to make them bullet-resistant, increase screening of individuals with access to the plants, restrict visitors and, as Lane says with the secrecy typical of the industry, "a few other things I don't want to go into."