Due to recent terrorist attacks in Brussels' airport and subway station, Belgian officials have beefed up the security measures in their nuclear facilities. The government fears that the country's nuclear plants might be targeted by the Islamic State. According to investigations, the terrorist might attack, sabotage or infiltrate the plant to gain access to nuclear materials.
After the attack, all nonessential personnel with access to Tihange and Doel power plants were sent home and their security badges were revoked. Military was also deployed and security was heightened at both sites.
The Belgian government had already positioned 140 soldiers to guard the nuclear plants.
A surveillance footage of a Belgian official was also found in the apartment of Mohamed Bakkali who was a suspect of last years' Paris attack. The video — which was shot through a hidden camera in a bush — showed the coming in and out of a Belgian official in his home in the Flanders region.
Belgian officials have not yet released a statement whether the video poses a threat to anyone or to a nuclear plant. However, investigators are still looking if Bakkali is associated with the El Bakraoui brothers — Ibrahim El Bakraoui and Khalid El Bakraoui. The El Bakraoui brothers were the suicide bombers in the recent bombing at the airport and metro station in Brussels which claimed 31 lives.
"There is no element today that suggests a concrete threat to nuclear sites," said Sebastien Berg, spokesman for Belgium's Federal Agency for Nuclear Control. "We can't ignore the terrorist threat," he added.
Berg added that the fears at the nuclear plants are of "an accident in which someone explodes a bomb inside the plant, [and] the other danger is that they fly something into the plant from the outside," that could cause stoppage of the used fuel's cooling process, which could turn down the plant.
Looking at a perspective that the terrorist might obtain radioactive materials from nuclear plants and try to make it into nuclear fission bombs is far-fetched, experts said. Creating dirty bomb from the radioactive wastes released from the plants is implausible since the wastes are so toxic that people trying to steal it would probably get sick or killed.
Belgium already had a long track record of minor breaches in their nuclear facilities. In 2013, the Belgian nuclear agency's system was hacked and shut down briefly and two individuals managed to scale the fence of research reactor in the municipality of Mol to steal an equipment.
The major breaching concern initially happened in 2012 where two people resigned from the nuclear plant in Doel and joined the jihadist group in Syria. One of them died in a Syrian attack while the other was freed from prison last year, convicted of terror-related offense.
"[Islamic State] has an apocalyptic ideology and believes there is going to be a final war with the United States and would need very powerful weapons to do so," said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear security specialist at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Photo: IAEA Imagebank | Flickr
