Fanning Flames of Froppery

Minnesota's 41-year-old lawyer-turned-Governor, Tim Pawlenty, is probably just jealous that Disney has so much clout, and he doesn't. Since March, he's been asking the FAA to give him some TFRs around his state's nuclear power plants; the FAA (and even the TSA and FBI) are telling him to get a life; the threat just isn't there [like it is at Disney? --ed].

The feds have, of course, recently poured benzine on the fires of froppery, as well, with their occasional scares of GA attacks on one target or another; but of all the potential targets in Minnesota, they say, the nuclear plants are really quite well-protected, by their design.

The age-old question of what to do with spent fuel (a possible ingredient for a 'dirty bomb') continues to be a political football. Anti-nuclear agitators are again bringing up the notion that the rods (which they don't want buried near them) are a potential target -- maybe somebody could fly a small plane into their storage facilities, and fill the air with radioactive waste.

Governors have to deal with all the people that the press deems worthy of listening to, so Pawlenty, whether he believes there's a threat or not, must make noises claiming that he does, and hope that, when the feds turn him down, his hands, at least, will look clean to voters.

The Governor and the anti-nuclear crowd (who are also screaming about a repeat of September 11, except with the bad guys' flying an airliner into a spent-fuel storage dump) cannot say how a TFR could prevent any such attack, however.

FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro, without addressing the merits of the scare, explained the airspace problem TFRs cause: "If there were even more TFRs," he said, "We'd wind up squeezing aircraft into fewer airspace pathways. We don't want to do that, because that would create the potential for safety and efficiency problems."

Engineer/physicist Gordon Thompson, who heads the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge (MA), said in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that a small plane full of explosives and piloted by a fanatic who knew how to fly, who had memorized the nuclear plant's layout, would have "high accuracy of delivery, high expectation of success... and [face] essentially no defense." Thompson didn't say how a 3000-foot floor above the facility would alter that scenario.

FMI: www.faa.gov; www.governor.state.mn.us