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Belgium confront alarming danger: Vulnerability of its nuclear plants (w/video)

 
Published March 26, 2016

BRUSSELS — As a dragnet aimed at Islamic State operatives spiraled across Brussels and into at least five European countries Friday, authorities were also focusing on a narrower but increasingly alarming threat: the vulnerability of Belgium's nuclear power plants.

The investigation into this week's deadly terror attacks in Brussels has raised fresh alarm that Islamic State, also known as ISIS, was seeking to attack, infiltrate, sabotage or obtain nuclear or radioactive material in a country with a troubled history of security lapses at its nuclear sites, a weak intelligence apparatus, and a deeply rooted terrorist network.

On Friday, authorities stripped the security badges of several workers at one of two plants where all non-essential employees were sent home hours after the attacks at Brussels Airport and one of the city's busiest subway stations three days before. Surveillance video of a top official at another Belgian nuclear facility was discovered last year in the apartment of a suspected militant linked to the suicide bombers who unleashed the horror here in Brussels, as well as those who carried out the massacre that killed 130 people in Paris in November.

Asked on Thursday at a London think tank whether there was a danger of ISIS obtaining a nuclear weapon, the British defense secretary, Michael Fallon, said that "was a new and emerging threat."

While the prospect of terrorists being able to obtain enough highly enriched uranium and then turn it into a nuclear fission bomb seems far-fetched to many experts, they say the fabrication of some kind of dirty bomb from radioactive waste is more conceivable. There are a variety of other risks involving Belgium's facilities, including terrorists somehow shutting down the privately operated plants that provide nearly half of Belgium's power.

The fears at the nuclear power plant are of "an accident in which someone explodes a bomb inside the plant," said Sebastien Berg, spokesman for Belgium'ss nuclear energy agency. "The other danger is that they fly something into the plant from outside." That "could stop the cooling process of the used fuel," Berg explained, and in turn shut down the plant.

The revelation of the surveillance footage was the first evidence of ISIS having a focused interest in nuclear material. But Belgium's facilities have had a worrisome track record of breaches, prompting warnings from Washington and other foreign capitals.

Experts say the most remote of the potential nuclear-related risks is that ISIS operatives would be able to obtain highly enriched uranium. Even the danger of a dirty bomb is limited, they said, because much radioactive waste is so toxic it would likely sicken or kill the people trying to steal it.