How Safe Are Atomic Plants?

BERLIN, (UPI) -- For modern nuclear power plants, the key question is: How safe is safe? A core meltdown is unlikely to happen in today's plants, but experts say there still is room for technological improvement.

It has been almost exactly 20 years since the accident in the Soviet nuclear power plant in Chernobyl changed the way people think about nuclear energy. On April 26, 1986, an explosion inside the Chernobyl reactor sent a lethal radioactive plume into the night sky, radiating the area for 10 days straight. Estimates of the number of people who died or will die as a result have ranged from 9,000 to 93,000.

Two decades after the Chernobyl disaster, nuclear energy is undergoing somewhat of a revival. In light of an increased unease to trust foreign powers when it comes to providing domestic energy security, several European countries, foremost France and Finland, are building a new type of nuclear power plant, called European Pressurized Reactor, or EPR.

Developed in a joint project between France (the only country that has built atomic plants in Europe since 1986) and Germany (which has agreed to phase out nuclear energy), the industry says the EPRs are so safe they would withstand and contain a Chernobyl-type meltdown.

Their safety is based on four emergency cooling systems, all working independently to keep temperature from a reactor as low as possible after a shutdown. If the molten core still managed to escape the reactor, it is guided into a container for cooling. Around the reactor, a leak-tight container and two-layer concrete walls are designed to withstand inside and outside attacks, be it from overheating material or from a plane crashing into the plant. Finland will be the first country to have an EPR go on-line (in 2009), and France will follow three years later with a plant in the northern French city of Flamanville, despite recent protests from tens of thousands of French anti-nuclear activist.

"We see no open security issues," Ulrich Krugmann, security expert at Areva, the French-German company that developed the EPRs, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, adding that the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown in modern facilities is "one in ten million years."

But a German expert dealing with reactor security said even the new plants couldn't rule out accidents, as most of the safety standards are based on theoretical knowledge.

"You can't test a core meltdown, and all security data is therefore insecure," said Stephan Kurth, nuclear security expert at the Eco Institute in Darmstadt. "A safe atomic plant is one that wouldn't be able to release any radiation. After all, a single nuclear molecule can cause a mutation, so there is no such thing as a threshold."

Kurth added there are other possible threats security experts have to face, such as human failure, deliberate sabotage or even large-scale attacks by terrorists. And while the new reactors might be deemed safe, many of the old ones have far lesser security standards.

Heinz-Peter Butz, a spokesman for the Society for Plant and Reactor Security, a scientific-technical expert and research organization, recently told United Press International that no less than 13 Chernobyl-type reactors are still active in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

"Those plants have to be shut down immediately," he said. "They're so deficient, it's impossible to modernize them."

The Bulgarian government nevertheless wants to finish the construction of a Soviet-era plant, and major German banks, lured by the financial feasibility of the project, may even donate their money.

Construction for the plant in Belene, a city in northwestern Bulgaria, started in 1987 and was stopped four years later after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Experts at the time deemed the project's environmental and economic risks to be too great. German-French Areva now wants to finish the job.

"Every plant is vulnerable, and the old ones are much more vulnerable than the new ones," Kurth said. "The Belene project looks like it's going to include several compromises when it comes to technology and security."

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