STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Swedish police arrested two maintenance workers on suspicion of plotting sabotage after they tried to enter a nuclear power plant Wednesday while carrying traces of a powerful explosive like that used in the 2005 London transit bombings, officials said.
The plant’s operator, OKG, said no bomb was found and the incident did not pose a threat to the Oskarshamn generating station, which provides 10 percent of Sweden’s electricity.
Experts said a bagful of the suspected explosive would not be powerful enough to damage a nuclear reactor but could wreak havoc in a power plant’s control room.
Police with bomb-sniffing dogs searched the plant 150 miles south of Stockholm and were examining a substance detected on a plastic bag carried by one of the workers. It was believed to be triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, which is extremely dangerous even in tiny amounts.
“It’s not something you use at home,” said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for plant operator OKG. “We’re not dealing with toys here.”
The two men were contractors hired to do maintenance work on one of the facility’s three reactors, which was shut down May 11 for an annual check, plant spokesman Roger Bergman said.
Police said one of the men was born in 1955 and the other in 1962 and both were Swedish citizens. The older suspect was “known to police” from prior investigations, police spokesman Sven-Erik Karlsson said.
TATP is highly explosive, and a tiny amount would be enough to blow off a person’s hand, said Svante Karlsson, a weapons expert at the Swedish Defense Research Agency.
He said it had no civilian uses. “It is very unstable, very sensitive to both friction and shocks.”
Security experts said that until about a decade ago, peroxide-based bombs were mostly set off by young pranksters, but then Palestinian militants began using the easy-to-make chemical cocktail for suicide bombings.
John Pike, a defense analyst at Global Security in Alexandria, Va., said TATP is less powerful than TNT but has the advantage of being easy to make.
“It’s considerably less powerful than TNT but it will still do the trick,” he said, adding that the explosive needs to be used in a confined space, such as an airplane cabin, to be effective.
Pike said a small amount of TATP was not potent enough to damage the thick metal and concrete walls that shield Western-style nuclear reactors. But he said it could easily “knock hell” out of a reactor control room and put a plant out of operation.
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