Another black eye for GA

Hi,

Recently, Tom Sixkiller posted:

"Neil Gould" wrote in message
What's the security risk, here? What do you think would happen if
someone flew a Cherokee into a plant?
Here are some things to consider:

* The easiest "target" would be one of the cooling towers. A Cherokee
would simply compact itself on the side of the towers and fall off.

* The reactor in the plants around here is surrounded by other
buildings. It would be *very* difficult to hit the building that
contains the reactor. But, the result of doing so with a Cherokee
would be similar to the result of the 172 that hit the office
building in Fla. You might break a window or two in the building.

The fear of danger caused by someone flying a GA plane into a nuclear
power plant is simply irrational. There is a *far* greater risk of
catastrophe from poor maintenance practices in the every day use of
these plants, as can be exemplified by the Davis-Besse fiasco that
we're dealing with here in Ohio.

Poor maintenance in a government run/regulated facility?

The nuclear plants in Ohio are run by private companies, just as other
utilities. I suspect that many, if not most plants are owned and operated
by private utilities.

As for poor regulation... well, that's one of the by-products of relaxed
rules and deregulation. In this particular case, the Davis-Besse plant has
been down for the last couple of years because of maintenance and
operation problems. The problem that got the most attention was a hole
about the size of a football eaten almost all the way through the reactor
lid by dripping acid. Had that gone far enough that the operating pressure
caused the lid to fracture, a good portion of Northern Ohio would have
been in deep trouble.

The point, though, is that we are supposedly under tightened
security, so "why wasn't the action deal with more severely"?

The fact is, we're under the *illusion* of tightened security, based on
being pointlessly harrassed in fairly meaningless ways. And, in areas
where we have some *real* problems, we're far too laxadaisical. A Cherokee
is just not likely to do any serious damage to a building, much less one
built to the standards of a nuclear (or *any*) power plant. Visit one
sometime, and imagine yourself in the cockpit trying to do some damage. To
present such as scenario as a plausible threat to our safety is one
version of terrorist activity, as far as I'm concerned.

Neil