Intruders
at a South African nuclear facility last year may have had inside
knowledge of the site's security systems, CBS News's "60 Minutes"
reported yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 22).
(Nov. 24) -
Intruders broke into South Africa’s Pelindaba nuclear plant last year (Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa photo).
The plant at Pelindaba is home to weapon-grade uranium removed from
South Africa's nuclear arsenal shortly before the end of Apartheid rule
in the 1990s. On Nov. 7, 2007, a team of four intruders breached a
perimeter fence and entered a control room, shooting one of two workers
present that night. Meanwhile, another group penetrated the perimeter
fence at a different spot and encountered security forces. Both groups
fled successfully, apparently without taking anything of value, CBS
reported.
That one team was able to bypass an electrified fence suggests
insider knowledge, CBS reported, describing how one individual wriggled
under the fence for 20 minutes and then cut power to the fence after
disabling alarm systems.
"They knew what they were doing. Definitely," said plant manager Ari Van Der Bijl.
South African nuclear officials, however, have not concluded that
the raid was intended to steal nuclear material or was even related to
the plant's nuclear nature.
"I think that it was a piece of random criminality, frankly," said
Rob Adam, head of the nation's Nuclear Energy Corporation. "I don't
think that there was any concerted attack of a nuclear nature. You had
one technically sophisticated individual with some friends."
"It was probably a burglary attempt from what evidence we have,"
agreed Abdul Minty, South Africa's ambassador to the International
Atomic Energy Agency. "The Pelindaba facility is off a main road.
There's a lot of traffic on that road. So if they felt that here is a
facility that has gates, that has security, maybe there's something
valuable."
Nuclear terror expert Matthew Bunn, of Harvard University's Managing the Atom project, disagreed strongly (see GSN, Nov. 18).
"These people cut through a 10,000-volt security fence," he said.
"They disabled sophisticated electronic intrusion detectors. They went
straight to the emergency control center of the site. These people knew
what kind of site they were in and knew what they were doing."
"It does suggest that they had someone inside who was going to help
them make sure that the security alarms didn't go off and that security
forces didn't respond in time," Bunn added.
Minty said South Africa has rejected U.S. offers to remove the uranium to a more secure facility.
"Why should we get rid of it when others don't? Why are we less
secure than others?" he said, again dismissing the notion that the
intruders could have been nuclear thieves.
"No, no. It's how you interpret events," he said. "So we are of
course concerned about it that anyone gets into it, but we have taken
steps to try and prevent that in [the] future" (Scott Pelley, CBS News, "60 Minutes," Nov. 23).