REAL ID law won’t affect Catawba Nuclear Station workers in York County

YORK Workers at the Catawba Nuclear Station in York will be largely unaffected by a federal law restricting people’s access to certain buildings if they don’t have an acceptable form of identification.

Starting Jan. 30, 2017, South Carolina IDs and driver’s licenses will no longer be accepted for entry into federal buildings, nuclear power plants and military bases.

Instead, visitors must provide additional proof of identification, including passports and military IDs.

But Catawba Nuclear Station employees will be able to access their site without problems, according to Chris Rimel, South Carolina Communications Manager for Duke Energy.

“We know them,” Rimel said. “In some cases, we’ve known them for years. Our workforce understands all of the very stringent requirements to gain access into a nuclear plant.”

The issue is the REAL ID federal mandate, which restricts certain circumstances in which federal agencies can accept state-issued ID cards for official purposes.

REAL ID was established by Congress in 2005 based on recommendations following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Members of the 9/11 Commission spoke out about the need to develop a single, uniform identification system. By having a consistent level of identity verification at the state and federal level, terrorists would be less likely to replicate them, they argued.

The terrorists who attacked on 9/11 used driver’s licenses issued in Florida and Virginia as identification to board airplanes that they hijacked and crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

While nuclear station employees won’t have to change their routine, any visitor to the station will have to present an alternate and valid form of ID. The Catawba power plant is between S.C. 274 and the Catawba River, within miles of York County residents.

State-issued IDs are never the sole data point to admit someone to the nuclear plant, Rimel said. Nuclear power plant workers have employee badges issued after an extensive background check and psychological testing.

“There’s a vast difference in checking between visitors and employees,” Rimel said. “There’s a process we go by in which people would go into a nuclear station, as compared to those who would enter the World of Energy (in Seneca).”

South Carolina is one of nine states that have refused to make their identification cards and driver’s licenses compliant with the law. Pennsylvania and South Carolina legislatures have passed laws prohibiting the state from participating in the act.

So far, 24 states, as well as Washington, D.C., have made their licenses compliant. Fifteen other states have received extensions through 2018. However, noncompliant states will soon need either a passport or a permanent residence card to be allowed access to enter certain buildings.

The act also affects air travel. Residents in Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Washington will need another form of identification to present to the Transportation Security Administration at airports effective Jan. 22, 2018.

While the law does not compel states to change their process or standards for ID cards, it does require that federal organizations reject any IDs from non-compliant states, including domestic air travel.

Opponents of the act fear a “national database” of personal information. S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley, then a member of the state House of Representatives, and then-state Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-Indian Land) voted for the law prohibiting the state from entering the REAL ID statute.

Rimel said visitors are generally known and screened prior to their arrival on a site. They’ll typically be approved by a nuclear plant employee who has undergone required screening, and escorted while inside the protected area of the facility.

The REAL ID act, which was passed with bipartisan support, requires broadened basic information included on ID cards, a “common machine-readable technology,” and anti-fraud measures for the people issuing IDs.

South Carolina military commanders recently told Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster that the state’s non-compliance would cause them headaches.

Unless the federal government grants an extension to the state, like it has done for the past five years, delivery people and workers without U.S. Department of Defense identification will have to show a second form of acceptable identification to gain entry into Columbia’s Fort Jackson or Sumter’s Shaw Air Force Base.

So far, the state has been able to secure extensions by convincing homeland security officials that it has instituted comparable security features on driver’s licenses, including holograms and bar codes.

Since October 2010, South Carolina has issued driver’s licenses that meet or exceed the new federal standard. The problem is the new licenses aren’t hooked into a digital database that also meets the standards.

Now, however, federal officials are laying down the rule of law on South Carolina and eight other states.

This story was originally published January 1, 2017 at 10:26 PM with the headline "REAL ID law won’t affect Catawba Nuclear Station workers in York County."