Presidential hopeful Howard Dean, who accuses President Bush of being weak on homeland security, was warned repeatedly as Vermont governor about security lapses at his state’s nuclear power plant and was told the state was ill-prepared for a disaster at its most attractive terrorist target.

The warnings, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press, began in 1991 when a group of students were brought into a secure area of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant without proper screening. On at least two occasions, a gun or mock terrorists passed undetected into the plant during security tests.

During Dean’s final year in office in 2002, an audit concluded that despite a decade of repeated warnings of poor safety at Vermont Yankee, Dean’s administration was poorly prepared for a nuclear disaster.

“The lack of funding and overarching coordination at the state level directly impacts the ability of the state, local and power plant planners to be adequately prepared for a real emergency at Vermont Yankee,” state Auditor Elizabeth M. Ready wrote in a study issued five months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Security was so lax at Vermont Yankee that in August 2001, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staged a drill in which three mock terrorists gained access to the plant. The agency gave Vermont Yankee the worst security rating among the nation’s 103 reactors.

The NRC has primary responsibility for safety at Vermont Yankee. But Vermont laws required an active state role by creating a panel to review security and performance and requiring plant operators to set aside money for the state to use in the event of a nuclear disaster.

Acknowledging weakness

Dean’s campaign said Saturday it ultimately was the federal government’s responsibility to ensure security at the plant, but that he badgered Vermont Yankee’s operators and the NRC to make improvements during the 1990s.

“After September 11, Governor Dean decided the buck stops here in terms of security and personally ran this effort, creating a Cabinet-level agency,” spokesman Jay Carson said.

Carson acknowledged there were weaknesses before 2002 in Vermont’s nuclear preparedness, and Dean moved quickly afterward to place state troopers and National Guardsman at the plant, distribute radiation pills to civilians, demand a federal no-fly zone over the plant to prevent an aerial attack and increase emergency preparedness funding.

“As many have said before, hindsight is 20-20 and no one could have predicted what could have happened on a terrible day in September 2001,” Carson said.

“In retrospect, every state in the entire country could have been safer. The important thing is after Governor Dean recognized these vulnerabilities, he took swift, bold steps to make things better,” Carson said.

State Auditor Ready, a Democrat and Dean backer, agreed things improved after her critical 2002 report and that security tests this year showed Vermont Yankee was safer. “Once Governor Dean got that report, there was swift and thorough action,” she said.

Repeated warnings

But even after Ready’s report recommended the state’s nuclear preparedness spending triple from $400,000 to $1.2 million, Dean budgeted only half the increase.

That led Dean’s state emergency management director, Ed von Turkovich, to tell the Legislature in 2002 that the increase to $800,000 “does not cover the expenses related to the program” and that Vermont’s nuclear preparedness was “in trouble, grossly underfunded, under-resourced and has been for years.”

The lack of preparedness was blamed in the 2002 audit on inadequate funds.

The audit was not the first warning to Dean, documents show.

On Feb. 14, 2000, von Turkovich wrote Dean’s top deputy, Administration Secretary Kathleen Hoyt, expressing concern the state was not forcing Vermont Yankee, which was up for sale, to set aside more money for preparedness.

“We are sympathetic to the utility’s concern for controlling costs with respect to the pending sale of the plant and have committed to expend additional state and federal resources to subsidize this program in the coming year,” von Turkovich wrote.

“However, I believe in the near future, the present or new owners will need to broaden their level of support for preparedness activities that need to be accomplished on behalf of the communities that reside in the Emergency Planning Zone.”

The documents contrast with Dean’s position as a presidential candidate who has portrayed himself as more concerned about nuclear security than Bush.

“Our most important challenge will be to address the most dangerous threat of all: catastrophic terrorism using weapons of mass destruction,” Dean said in a speech last month in Los Angeles. “Here, where the stakes are highest, the current administration has, remarkably, done the least.”

Dean also has suggested Bush was unprepared before and after Sept. 11 to fight terrorism. “We are in danger of losing the war on terror, because we are fighting it with the strategies of the past,” Dean said.