[2] Various acts of civil disobedience since 1980 by the peace group Plowshares have demonstrated extraordinary breaches of security at nuclear weapons plants in the United States.
Non-proliferation policy experts have questioned "the use of private contractors to provide security at facilities that manufacture and store the government's most dangerous military material".
Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010 that is believed to have been created by the United States and Israel to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facilities.
[16][17][18] The EU Commission’s research center (JRC) investigated in spring 2021 in a report and concluded that the terrorist risk of nuclear power plants is vanishingly small, and that even successful terrorism will have relatively insignificant consequences.
JRC, finds that hydropower/dams and oil and gas infrastructure pose a significantly greater terrorist risk, although this is still an extremely unlikely hypothetical scenario [19] American physicist and nuclear energy critic Amory Lovins, in his 1982 book Brittle Power, argued that the energy generation and distribution system of the United States is "brittle" (easily shattered by accident or malice) and that this poses a grave and growing threat to national security, life, and liberty.
But deliberate attacks involving large airliners loaded with fuel, such as those that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were not considered when design requirements for today's fleet of reactors were determined.
It was in 1972 when three hijackers took control of a domestic passenger flight along the east coast of the U.S. and threatened to crash the plane into a U.S. nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
[23][24] In February 1993, a man drove his car past a checkpoint at the Three Mile Island Nuclear plant, then broke through an entry gate.
Many terrorist groups are eager to acquire the fissile material needed to make a crude nuclear device, or a dirty bomb.
According to a 2004 report by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, "The human, environmental, and economic costs from a successful attack on a nuclear power plant that results in the release of substantial quantities of radioactive material to the environment could be great.
At an NPP, the adversary force attempts to reach and simulate damage to key safety systems and components, defined as "target sets" that protect the reactor's core or the spent fuel pool, which could potentially cause a radioactive release to the environment.
[38] In 2009, a paper published in the United States Military Academy's journal alleged that Pakistan's nuclear sites had been attacked by al-Qaeda and the Taliban at least three times.
[29] However, the then Director General ISPR Athar Abbas said the claims were "factually incorrect", adding that the sites were "military facilities, not nuclear installations".
During the Manhattan Project, physicist Richard Feynman was barred from entering certain nuclear facilities; he would crack safes and violate other rules as pranks to reveal deficiencies in security.
Khan wrote a letter to the Pakistani Prime Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, offering to help start a nuclear weapons program for his home country.
Soon after their conversations, Khan started delivering instructions and blueprints to Pakistan, which he got access to through his work translating the sophisticated G-1 and G-2 centrifuge designs from German to Dutch.
On July 28, 2012, three members of Plowshares cut through fences at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which manufactures US nuclear weapons and stockpiles highly enriched uranium.
[3] Non-proliferation policy experts are concerned about the relative ease with which these unarmed, unsophisticated protesters could cut through a fence and walk into the center of the facility.
[43] On December 5, 2011, two anti-nuclear campaigners breached the perimeter of the Cruas Nuclear Power Plant in France, escaping detection for more than 14 hours, while posting videos of their sit-in on the internet.
[44] Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010 that is believed to have been created by the United States and Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.
[56] Idaho National Laboratory ran the Aurora Experiment in 2007 to demonstrate how a cyber attack could destroy physical components of the electric grid.
[57] The experiment used a computer program to rapidly open and close a diesel generator's circuit breakers out of phase from the rest of the grid and explode.
[60] 172,000 people living within a 30 kilometre radius of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been forced or advised to evacuate the area.
[60] However, government plans for remote siting of nuclear plants in rural areas, and the transmission of electricity by high-voltage direct current lines to industrial regions would enhance safety and security.
On the other hand, nuclear plant security would be at elevated risk during a natural or man-made electromagnetic pulse event, and the ensuing civil disorder in surrounding areas.
In his book Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow says that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled nuclear reactor systems.