Lucas Heights nuke site safe from harm, say officials

CANBERRA - Australian officials have moved to reassure the nation that its sole nuclear reactor is safe from terrorist attack.

The assurances follow revelations that the 47-year-old Lucas Heights research reactor in the southern suburbs of Sydney may have been a target for an alleged terror group rounded up last week.

Police said that while there was no direct evidence of a planned assault on the reactor, three of the alleged terrorists had been found in the area with a trail bike, and that a lock on a gate to an access road to a reservoir near the facility had been recently cut. Earlier alarms had included fears of an attack after documents were seized in Auckland before the Sydney Olympics and reports that French terror suspect Willy Brigitte had considered the reactor a possible target.

Yesterday Prime Minister John Howard warned that Australia faced a new danger not only from evil and hostility towards its way of life, but also from "total irrationality".

"When you're dealing with people ... willing to give their own lives in a fanatical cause the equation alters, and that makes the nature of dealing with terrorism that much more difficult," he told Sydney Radio 2GB.

But officials said any plan to attack Lucas Heights would run against tight security that included round-the-clock patrolling by armed guards, fencing, checkpoints and barriers, security cameras and an electronic pass system.

Although the due-to-be-replaced high flux reactor was built long before the threat of kamikaze aircraft assaults by terrorists and is vulnerable to attack from the air, it is protected by an air exclusion zone forbidding approach by planes.

A 1997 analysis of the consequences of a large aircraft crashing into the reactor found that any subsequent public health risk would be low, as it uses only 7kg of uranium at low temperatures and under low pressure, compared with about 150kg used in most power reactors. "This is a small reactor with the core the size of a small washing machine," the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto), which operates Lucas Heights, said.

A New South Wales Health report quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald reported that while up to 130,000 people could be affected if radiation from the destruction of the reactor was blown across the city, a child within 3km would have only a one in 10,000 chance of developing thyroid cancer.

Ansto said security was coordinated with intelligence agencies. When police questioned the three suspects near the facility - in an area used for trail bike riding and bushwalking - they did not consider the men a threat. The fenced area in which a gate lock had been cut enclosed a Sydney Water Board reservoir and was not part of the Ansto site, which was several hundred metres distant.

Reactor revamp

* Work will begin next month on a 20MW research reactor.

* It will replace the plant by early 2007.

* Its core will be at the bottom of a 14m pool, protected by 2m of concrete.

* Steel mesh grills will protect it against the impact of a light aircraft crash.