A coalition of watchdog groups petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday to address “significant structural vulnerability to terrorism” at 32 U.S. commercial nuclear power reactors, including two at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant near Southport.
The petition calls for emergency NRC hearings. A main area of concern cited by the N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, and other groups, are the spent fuel pools used at boiling water reactors like the ones at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant.
Mike McCracken, a spokesman for plant operator Progress Energy, said Tuesday that adequate security safeguards are already in place at the Brunswick nuclear plant, and the spent fuel pools are well protected.
“The nuclear industry has mislead the public to believe that its reactors are all heavily fortified. It has been no secret to would-be attackers only to the public that many plants such as Brunswick I and II have waste cooling pools that are hardly protected at all,” N.C. WARN Director Jim Warren said.
NEW YORK (AP) — A New York man admitted meeting with a high-ranking member of al-Qaida in Pakistan in a scheme to smuggle money, night-vision goggles and other equipment to the terrorist network, according to a court transcript released Tuesday.
Mohammed Junaid Babar also acknowledged aiding a foiled bomb plot in London, according to the transcript, which was made public two months after Babar secretly pleaded guilty to charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization. He agreed to cooperate with authorities as part of a plea deal.
The transcript says Babar told a judge he met with an unidentified al-Qaida official earlier this year in South Waziristan, a tribal area near the border of Afghanistan. He said he and others had provided money, goggles, sleeping bags and other goods to the terrorist group beginning in 2003.
“I understood that the money and supplies that I had given to al-Qaida were supposed to used in Afghanistan against U.S. or international forces,” he said.
Babar, 29, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, also described arranging lodging and transportation for recruits to a “jihad training camp” and providing ammonium nitrate and other materials for the bomb plot in London.
The scheme to blow up pubs, restaurants and train stations was foiled in late March when British authorities arrested eight suspects and seized 1,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which can be used to make explosives, from a storage locker in London.
Babar, who grew up in Queens, was put on a terror watch list after authorities became aware of inflammatory remarks he made to a television reporter in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Babar said despite the fact his mother had escaped from the ninth floor of one of the World Trade Center’s towers, his loyalty was “to the Muslims, not the Americans.” He also announced his intention to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“I’m willing to kill Americans,” he said in the televised interview, adding that he had no plans to return to New York.
In April, Babar returned to New York, where police and FBI agents put him under surveillance and eventually arrested him.
Babar, who was being held without bail, faces up to 70 years in prison. No sentencing date was set.