Terry Tehan, head of the Rhode Island Nuclear Science Center, stands in front of the research reactor on URI’s Bay campus. “I’ve got enough security protections here to make you cry,” he says.

The Providence Journal Ruben W. Perez

NARRAGANSETT — Since 1962, Rhode Island’s only nuclear reactor has been housed in what resembles a giant sugar cube on a hill at the University of Rhode Island’s Bay Campus; a five-story windowless block of concrete, painted white, and hiding in plain sight along Reactor Road.

Inside, protected behind 2-foot-thick concrete walls and submerged in 24 feet of cobalt-blue water, glows a 2-megawatt reactor, about the size of a trash can.

For generations, scientists from several institutions have split atoms inside the reactor and used the irradiated neutrons the process produces to identify elements in air and soil and to track medicines streaming through blood and organs.

The reactor is 1 of 37 research reactors in the United States that, as a group, asserts a recent federal audit, have been underestimated by nuclear regulatory officials as potential terrorist targets.

But Terry Tehan, director of the Rhode Island Nuclear Science Center, a six-member staff that runs the reactor, said the GAO report “is not realistic.”

Tehan said the reactor has substantial security measures. Unarmed campus police are the first line of defense, backed up by armed Narragansett town police, who patrol the area and could be there in minutes.

“I’ve got guns,” Tehan says, referring to the Narragansett police. “I’ve got enough security protections here to make you cry.”

In a Jan. 31 report, the GAO accused the National Regulatory Commission of underestimating the potential for terrorist attacks at some of the research reactors, 33 of which are on college campuses around the country. (Four others are operated by national laboratories under the federal Department of Energy.)

The GAO faulted the NRC for not listening to its own independent researchers hired to evaluate the risk at the reactors, particularly when it came to the potential theft of nuclear fuel, the damage to a reactor in the event of a car or truck bomb and the potential for an accidental runaway reaction.

The audit noted that at some research reactors, unarmed campus police would respond to a breach in security, even though some of the reactors run on weapons-grade enriched uranium.

In rebuttal, the NRC has accused the GAO of issuing an unbalanced assessment — a criticism echoed in Narragansett because, as Tehan explains, not all research reactors are the same.

The GAO report said in some cases the reactors were situated in the middle of crowded campuses with security procedures that hadn’t changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“That’s not the case here,” said Tehan. “This isn’t in the basement of some engineering building.”

If a security breach occurred at the Narragansett reactor, Tehan said, armed local police “right on up to SWAT teams” would be at the building within minutes. He won’t say exactly how many minutes a response would take for security reasons, but the NRC tests the local protocol twice a year.

“And we have agreements with the FBI and even the FAA [Federal Aviation Authority]. If a plane is buzzing around above us, we know about it, trust me.”

Tehan, who is paid $148,000 annually, heads the Rhode Island Atomic Energy Commission, with a budget of $1.48 million, and his staff oversee the operation of the reactor.

The Rhode Island Nuclear Science Center reactor was built with more than $1 million in federal money procured during the Cold War by then-U.S. Sen. John O. Pastore, who at the time sat on an important congressional nuclear power commission, said Tehan.

Designers built the reactor on top of two World War II gun fortifications to take advantage of the hundreds of cubic feet of surrounding concrete to contain radioactive leaks and protect the reactor from attack.

At the time, the reactor used highly enriched uranium, which could be used to make nuclear bombs if stolen. But since 1994 the reactor has used only low-enriched uranium, unsuitable for bomb manufacturing, Tehan said.

Still the fuel is highly radioactive and anyone trying to remove it would likely receive a fatal dose of radiation in a few minutes.

Though it is not used for energy purposes, the reactor could potentially produce two megawatts of electricity. In comparison, the two operational reactors at the Millstone Power Station in Waterford, Conn., the nearest commercial nuclear power plant, generate more than 2,000 megawatts.

Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Nuclear Science Center has also surrounded the reactor building with dozens of entrenched posts and jersey barriers to prevent any vehicles from getting too close. All staff must also pass background checks; even the graduate students and scientists using the laboratories surrounding the reactor chamber must produce picture identification before entering the building.

Unlike some of the reactors noted in the GAO report, the Narragansett reactor is designed to shut down before any runaway nuclear reaction could take place. The reactor has a “negative void coefficient” that automatically stops the reactive process if there is a loss of coolant water.

David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project of the Union of Concerned Scientists, agreed with Tehan’s characterization of URI’s reactor. He said the reactor’s design and its use of the low-enriched fuel made it less vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Researchers from URI, Brown University, Providence College and MIT use the reactor regularly for cancer and environmental research, said Tehan. The University of New Hampshire has also used the facility recently to track ozone depletion. And a private stem cell consulting business has contracted with the center to use the reactor to produce medical isotopes.

Maybe some of the research reactors noted in the GAO report deserve the criticism they received, Tehan said, because “there are some that do have lax security. I know, I’ve seen them, but we’ve never been that way.”

Tehan said many of the security measures in place at the Narragansett research reactor were set using standards designed for nuclear power plants.

“You would have to be Superman” to try to breach the security measures in place, he said. And you would still fail.

“And you’d be dead.”

tmooney@projo.com