A paragliding Greenpeace activist who dropped a smoke bomb over a French nuclear reactor on Wednesday added a new element to the presidential race there — and raised the question of whether the same, or worse, could happen at a U.S. nuclear reactor.

“At no moment was the safety of the installations at risk,” said the plant’s operator, French utility giant EDF, adding that the pilot was arrested by security staff at the Bugey nuclear plant in southeast France.

EDF acknowledged that a second activist was arrested at another nuclear site in southwest France after entering via a truck gate and hiding for an hour in brush within the “surveillance zone,” Reuters reported.

Greenpeace said it was raising awareness of nuclear power issues ahead of France’s presidential elections on Sunday.

It “illustrates the vulnerability of French nuclear to the threat of air attack,” Greenpeace France spokeswoman Sophia Majnoni d’Intignano said in a statement. ”While Germany took into account the aircraft crash in its safety testing, France still refuses to analyze this risk for our plants.”

France, which gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, pledged special safety tests at its 58 reactors after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011.

Those tests include standing up to floods, earthquakes, power outages and cooling system failures — but not terrorist attacks or even a plane crash.

So could a paraglider attack happen in the U.S. — or would it be shot down before even getting to a nuclear site?

“Completely speculative,” Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, told msnbc.com. “Our facilities are extremely well-defended. Let’s leave it at that.”

Over at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that says it’s neither for nor against nuclear power, two nuclear experts said that while a reactor’s containment dome would be hard to penetrate other targets are available.

The intake structure, where water is brought in to cool the reactor fuel, “is an easier target,” Dave Lochbaum told msnbc.com. Without coolant, that fuel could cause a meltdown.

The aerial threat exists, added Edwin Lyman, because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission “decided in 2007 to exclude any kind of aerial attack from the ‘design basis threat’ — that is, the set of attacks that reactor operators must provide protection to defend against.

“So the NRC doesn’t require that nuclear plants have means to detect or defend against intrusions from the air,” he added. “And the federal government also does not require ‘no fly zones’ around nuclear plants that could be enforced by the military.”

Kerekes countered by noting that an independent study in 2002 found that U.S. nuclear containment structures can withstand even a crash from a commercial airliner.

As for paragliders, Lochbaum said a more likely scenario is where one or more are used at night in an attempt to get into a nuclear plant.

“While nuclear plant security perimeter fences are well lit, the lighting is to allow security officers to catch anyone trying to climb over, cut through, or tunnel under the fences,” he said. “The lights and the camera angles might not readily show someone flying in. That someone could be carrying sufficient weapons to cause problems.”

At that point, Lochbaum said, “it becomes a race — can the intruder access area(s) needed to sabotage the plant before the security officers intervene?”

Nuclear plants already test such scenarios, and Lochbaum said “the good guys sometimes lose the race” in testing — even with the six weeks notice given by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“Typically, the force-on-force tests are conducted once every three years at each U.S. nuclear plant,” he said. “A test may consist of four exercises — different entry points and different targets. It would be useful to periodically throw in a glider or parachute entry to make sure the security officers practice handling such threats, too.”

Nuclear power debate in France includes Libya project

Back in France, the stunt certainly got attention — but not all of it flattering for Greenpeace.

“The main consequence of this stupid action will be to prevent any air recreation within more areas of France,” posted one person on Greenpeace’s main blog on the stunt.

An anonymous post on another Greenpeace blog criticized the stunt, saying a paraglider couldn’t carry enough explosives to damage nuclear containment areas. 

“You’ve also missed the point,” the writer added, “that someone could cause far graver damage by carrying out a similar attack on the Olympic Stadium in London later in the year.”

Reuters contributed to this report.

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China Aid

Taking a page from the “million hoodies” campaign in honor of shooting victim Trayvon Martin, China Aid created this show of support for Chen Guangcheng, who is blind, with hundreds of people donning sunglasses.

After the dramatic nighttime escape of Chen Guangcheng from house arrest in his Chinese village, one of the first people to know that the blind lawyer was safe in Beijing was thousands of miles away — a man in Midland, Texas.

Pastor Bob Fu, 44, says he knew of Chen’s escape three days before the security guards surrounding the house discovered it. He says he was among the first to receive and post a 15-minute video of Chen, made in hiding, appealing to Chinese President Wen Jiabao to bring to justice the local officials who illegally imprisoned him and his family for months. Fu says he also had a hand in preparing U.S. officials for Chen’s escape and arrival at the U.S. Embassy, while also helping lay the groundwork for alternatives, the details of which he says he cannot divulge.

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Fu knows China’s security apparatus from personal experience. He made his own escape from China, arriving in the United States as a refugee with his wife and newborn son 16 years ago.

Now, through his Midland-based nonprofit China Aid, Fu is one of the leading voices on behalf of religious freedom in China, connected with activists in his home country and respected on Capitol Hill.

“Bob Fu is one of the most credible people you’ll ever find about what is going on in China,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who chairs the Human Rights Subcommittee within the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. “He’s very well connected and knows people inside of China who are the agents of reform — people like Chen who (take action) because they want a better China.”

According to tax documents, China Aid has raised several million dollars to fund legal counsel for “house church Christians,” financial support for the families of jailed dissidents and publicity for human rights cases in China. In extreme cases, China Aid has helped fund “logistics” for an underground railway, Fu says.

In China, worship is allowed only in state-sanctioned churches, mosques and synagogues. Evangelizing outside those sites and worshipping in independent churches, often called “house churches,” is prohibited.

Fu’s activism goes back to the Tiananmen protests of 1989, when he led a group of fellow students from Liaocheng University in Shandong province to join the massive rallies in the capital. After the crackdown on demonstrators he was one of many student activists required to attend special political study sessions and write self-criticism day after day. He worried that he would be forced to leave his hard-won position at the university.

During this time, Fu said, he read a book given to him by American missionaries who were teaching English in China. It was the story of a famous Chinese intellectual who was addicted to opium in the early 1900s, but was able to shake the drug after he converted to Christianity.

“I was really, really struck by the story,” Fu said, in an interview with msnbc.com. “I came to the realization if you want to change China, the first thing you need to do is change people’s hearts. And if you want to change other people’s hearts, you first you have to change yourself.”

Jerry Huang / AP

Bob Fu of the Texas-based rights group China Aid in Midland, Texas on Monday.

Fu and his wife, Heidi Cai, began holding underground worship services and Bible studies, he said. At the same time, he was teaching English at the Communist Party School in Beijing.

“I was God’s double-agent,” he said, chuckling.

In 1996, they were arrested and held in jail for two months, and then placed under house arrest, Fu said. Then they received word that they soon would be jailed again, he said, in the “sweep” that preceded China’s Oct. 10 National Day.

By this time, Fu’s wife was pregnant with their first child, he said, but without the necessary permission from the government, which controls when a woman is allowed to have her one child. If she had been found out, she would be forced to have an abortion, Fu said.

So in the dark of night, Fu escaped through a second-story bathroom window and Cai left in disguise, he said. They fled to the countryside, Fu said, where they were protected by “house church brothers and sisters.”

Fu said that with the shelter of this network, the help of a Christian policeman and travel documents obtained by a highly placed businessman, they were able to join a tour that went to Thailand and then Hong Kong, which was still under British control. Just three days before the territory was transferred to Chinese sovereignty, Fu and his wife were give refugee status, and flew to the United States.

Fu and Cai lived in a suburb of Philadelphia, where he started China Aid in his garage while attending Westminster Theological Seminary. They later moved to Midland, Texas, where they are raising their three children.

What prompted Fu to set up China Aid was a 2002 crackdown on a group of Christians in a house church in Hubei province that led to many arrests, among them five people who were sentenced to death, he said.

Fu and a group of contacts in the Christian, dissident and exile communities started publicizing the case and raising money, he said. Ultimately, Fu said, they used the funds to pay for 58 lawyers to defend the accused. They contacted the media, making the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

“That year, all the five death sentences were overturned,” Fu said. “It was a major legal victory, and even the ‘evil cult’ charge was removed.”

A group of activists who came of age as he did during the Tiananmen movement, are now human rights lawyers, many of them Christian, he said. Fu said he taps into this network, and links them to Washington by picking up the phone.

Fu compares himself and fellow human rights activists to “little ants” forcing “one case after another into courts, moving around and mobilizing and going through all the technical procedures” in place under China’s laws, but often not observed or even taken seriously by officials. 

“We want to move the pile of dirt with 1 million ants,” he said.

“I had never envisioned or wanted to establish (a nonprofit) like this,” he said, but now that China Aid is nearly 10 years old, Fu is gratified by some success. “We can help the persecuted, and we did advance rule of law,” he said.

China Aid is doggedly following and publicizing many human rights cases around China, Fu said.

“You can write to imprisoned Christians to encourage them and to let them know that you are praying for them,” through China Aid, the web site says.

Fu’s group also prints and distributes Bibles in China.

For Fu, the escape of Chen was a major triumph, but it also has generated new concerns — for the wife and daughter of Chen, and for those who helped get Chen to safety.

In an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Monday, Fu calls out the bravery of one such supporter, He “Pearl” Peirong, who drove Chen the 300 miles to Beijing after he escaped over a compound wall in Shandong.

“I am awed by the courage of those who helped Chen escape. Pearl told me she is willing to die with Chen because he is such a ‘pure-hearted courageous person’,” Fu wrote. ”I was talking to her last week when she said ‘guobao laile,’— that state security had arrived.”

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