Nearly four years after the September 11, 2001, hijacked airplane strikes on New York and Washington, NRC chairman Nils Diaz said, "Both nuclear security and safety are better than they have ever been and both are getting better."

"What we have done in the last three and a half years is to make it very difficult for anyone to find ways to attempt acts of radiological sabotage, even more difficult to succeed in doing real harm, and to be very prepared to protect our people in the very unlikely event of radiological release," he said.

Protective barriers have been moved farther away from nuclear reactors, the number of guards has increased and towers have been installed to shoot potential intruders, Diaz said at a news conference here.

"We have hardened both the security and the safety of the power plants," he said.

"We found that general aviation, in general, is not a significant threat to a nuclear power plant," Diaz said, adding that power plants are even safe from a helicopter packed with explosives.

But critics say efforts have not gone far enough to protect the country from a terrorist attack since September 11, which sparked fears that an airplane could be hijacked and used as a missile against a nuclear power plant, triggering a radiological disaster.

"To say that we are better than we have been before is to say that we had an F before and we may have a D-minus now," Daniel Hirsch, president of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a California-based nuclear watchdog group, told

"There has been marginal progress and there remains massive vulnerability," Hirsch said.

His group has proposed that power plants put up beam shields to protect reactors from a potential airplane attack and has petitioned the NRC to upgrade its regulations to boost plant readiness against on-the-ground assailants.

The NRC released a report Monday on security that includes conclusions of engineering studies into the threat of a commercial airplane attack on nuclear facilities.

"For the facilities analyzed, the vulnerability studies confirm that the likelihood of both damaging the reactor core and releasing radioactivity that could affect public health and safety is low," the report said.

The NRC report said that in the "unlikely event of a radiological release" caused by a "large aircraft" crash, "the studies indicate that there would be time to implement the required on-site mitigating actions."

Diaz conceded that a large aircraft could cause considerable damage, but there are steps to limit it.

"Everybody realizes that if a large aircraft crashes anyplace you're going to have significant industrial damage, you're going to have significant loss of life, you're going to have a significant problem," Diaz said.

"What we're doing with power plants is making sure that that problem does not propagate to a significant radiological release," he said.

But Hirsch said that even with mitigating actions, tens of thousands could be killed in an attack against a power plant.

"To say that the risk is low is what the NRC has said for its entire existence about any risk at reactors," he said. "Even if the risk is low the consequences are catastrophic."

"It's a low-tech attack on our high-tech industry that could produce a quasi-nuclear effect on our population," he said.

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