Boy, this sure makes me feel secure:

When two Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials found a security guard asleep at his post at the Indian Point 2 nuclear reactor last year, the agency decided not to issue a notice of violation because there was no terrorist attack on the plant during the half-hour or so that the guard was sleeping, a Congressional audit has found.

Isn't that a great standard? As long as a nuclear power plant (one that, by the way, happens to be about 30 miles north of Ground Zero) isn't actually under terrorist attack, it's OK for the guards to be asleep on the job.

Or allegedly asleep. I love this:

The report described the guard as "inattentive to duty," a term that the agency often uses in its reports. Agency officials say they cannot prove that an individual is asleep, even one who is not moving and whose eyes are closed.

And the safety drills at Indian Point? It turns out that its owners are allowed to bring in ringers -- they can add security guards just for the drills, then dismiss them as soon as the drills are over:

The General Accounting Office also said that auditors who reviewed 80 commission reports of force-on-force exercises found that at 12 plants, the operators added security guards, and at 35, guards got extra training. Most plants also took special precautions before the drills.

"It's virtually cheating when you do that," said Peter Stockton, a senior investigator with the Project on Government Oversight and a former security adviser to the federal energy secretary.

Mr. Zimmerman said the commission expected plants that made such improvements to do so permanently. But the General Accounting Office report said that a regulatory commission official, whom it did not identify, said the agency could require the plants to have on duty only the number of guards specified in their security plans, and that if they added guards before a drill and removed them later, the agency "could not hold a licensee accountable for ramping down" after the exercise.

Unbelievable.