![]() The assumption was the plane was traveling at 350 miles an hour, the approximate speed of the jet that hit the Pentagon and the velocity that the consultants believe a pilot would maintain to maneuver a plane into a site built low to the ground. The study considered what would happen if the relatively large Boeing 767 squarely crashed into a power plant's nuclear containment building - the structure where nuclear reactors are located, with a tank full of fuel. "Confidence is predicated on the fact that nuclear plant structures have thick concrete walls with heavy reinforcing steel, and are designed to withstand large earthquakes, extreme overpressures and hurricane force winds," the EPRI report said. "Public health and safety would be protected" in such an attack, he said. ![]() Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association of utilities and nuclear energy firms that asked the research institute to conduct the report. "The results of this study validate the industry's confidence that nuclear power plants are robust and protect the fuel from impacts of a large commercial aircraft," said Joe F. Only a 10-page summary of the lengthier study was released publicly, with the rest withheld for security reasons. Nuclear industry officials insist the study was scientifically sound, and was conducted by highly reputable engineering consultants using real-life scenarios involving a terrorist strike on a nuclear plant. "We can't take anything the industry says at face value." "They knew the answers they wanted and worked backwards," said Edwin Lyman, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, an organization critical of the industry's safety claims. The danger exists that a direct strike could cause the meltdown of a plant's nuclear core that would spread wind-borne radiation to thousands of people, skeptics of the report said. 11, 2001, according to a new scientific study by a utility industry research group.Ĭritics of the nuclear industry said the study released earlier this week by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) was skewed to draw a preordained conclusion proclaiming the safety of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants. nuclear power plants would survive a direct hit by a fully fueled passenger airliner piloted by suicide hijackers bent on repeating the catastrophic attacks of Sept.
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