"Study finds that almost all nuclear reactors in Europe need repairs" by James Kanter |
New York Times, October 04, 2012
BRUSSELS — Practically all of the more than 130 active nuclear
reactors in the European Union need safety improvements, repairs, or
upgrades, at a cost up to $32 billion, according to a draft copy of a
European Commission report scheduled to be released Thursday.
The scale of the problems detailed in the report, as well as the size
of the expected repair bill, may amplify public concerns about the
safety of nuclear power on the part of Europeans, who are already deeply
divided over the technology and whose governments still zealously guard
control over energy policy at the national level.
The European Commission undertook the safety review of its nuclear
plants after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which led
to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Part of the assessment was the performance of ‘‘stress tests,’’ which
are meant to assess how a nuclear facility would fare in various kinds
of failures and crises. National specialists conducted the stress tests
in conjunction with the commission’s advisory group on nuclear safety.
The tests identified the need for ‘‘hundreds of technical upgrade
measures,’’ the draft says.
The two biggest previous civilian nuclear accidents — at Three Mile
Island outside Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979, and at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in
1986 — were followed by similar scrutiny, and agreements were reached on
extensive new safety measures. But the draft report notes that ‘‘even
today, decades later, the implementation of those measures is still
pending’’ in some EU countries.
Among the vulnerabilities identified in the report, the commission
found that at four reactors in Finland and Sweden, if the cooling
systems failed or all electric power was lost, the operators would have
less than an hour to restore safety functions before catastrophic damage
was done. The report says that 10 reactors in countries including
Spain, France, and the Czech Republic lack adequate equipment to detect
earthquakes.
Most of the upgrades called for in the report involve making European
nuclear plants better able to withstand earthquakes, flooding, and the
loss of primary cooling — the factors that combined to devastating
effect at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
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