Brussels, 25/05/2011 (Agence Europe) - Two months after the earthquake and tsunami which hit the north-east coast of Japan on 11 March, causing a large-scale incident at the nuclear power station of Fukushima Daiichi, the EU has finally agreed, after painstaking discussions, on the criteria for the stress tests to which the nuclear member states must subject their reactors by the end of the year. The Commission and the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group (ENSREG) agreed on a text which does not include dangers stemming from terrorism, as called for by Commissioner Oettinger.
The text approved on Tuesday 24 May has ended up quite close to the compromise sketched out in Brussels on 13 May in the absence of Oettinger, then discussed again last week in Prague, and which is based on a separation of the assessment of the reactors' safety in the event of natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, floods) or accidents, technical breakdowns (a power station losing its safety systems) or accidents (damage to fuel in the reactor, difficulties cooling spent fuel storage pools) from the security issues of the power stations against risks of sabotage or terrorist attack, an area in which the regulators admit they have no competence.
Commissioner Oettinger wanted to impose exacting requirements in the stress test criteria, to include all possible risks, including terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, aeroplane crashes and human error in general. The text approved, which is deliberately vague, provides for tests to be arranged on the safety of the reactors not only against the risks of earthquakes and flooding, but also against the “consequences of any type of accident, of human or natural origin”. A working group made up of experts from the Commission and the member states, the format, mandate and working methods of which have still to be agreed upon, will lay down the procedures to examine the risks to security, particularly with regard to terrorist attacks. This means that the demands of certain member states, such as France and the United Kingdom, which had concerns of infringing confidentiality requirements, have been respected, as the transparency promised to the general public cannot, they argue, apply to terrorism.
According to the Commission, the power stations on EU soil will be reassessed as of 1st June, as part of a three-stage process. First of all, they will be subjected to a pre-assessment by their operators, who will be asked to fill in questionnaires and submit supporting documentation, studies and plans. The national security regulators will then draw up national reports assessing the credibility of the responses provided by the operators. In the final stage, the national reports will be subjected to a peer examination by multinational expert teams, made up of seven people - a representative of the Commission and six national regulators of a different nationality from the country of origin of the power station being tested - who may decide to inspect the power stations in person.
Oettinger also raised doubts on certain outstanding issues, such as the voluntary nature of the tests, and what will happen to sites which fail the tests. The tests will be carried out on a voluntary basis in the 14 member states which use nuclear power, he explained to the press on Wednesday, adding that the Commission is not authorised to call for the immediate interruption of the operation of a power station which is felt to be too vulnerable.
Lastly, Oettinger confirmed that talks would continue in June and July with the neighbour countries which use nuclear, to which he would like to extend the stress tests. These are Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine and Armenia.
A battle royal for Austria. Germany, which is behind the stalemate, at ENSREG on 18 May, of the compromise sketched out by the United Kingdom, France, Finland and the Czech Republic, and which has pledged to close down its nuclear power stations over the next 20 years, and Austria, which is fiercely opposed to nuclear power, which has been banned under the country's constitution since 1974, spoke in favour of very strict specifications for the stress tests, which they feel should include a test of the reactors' resistance to terrorist attacks (a criterion which would have made the final bill for the power station operators much bigger), and of experts independent of the nuclear industry being responsible for carrying out the tests. They ended up signing the compromise. “It really was a battle royal. I welcome the setting in place, for the first time, of a nuclear security system at European level. The nuclear lobby tried to oppose it, of course”, said Austrian Environment Minister Nikolaus Berlakovich.
Stress tests which are not very stressful to the nuclear industry, lament Greens. “These tests are far from strict enough to assess correctly the safety of our reactors and to reduce the risk of accident as far as possible. Oettinger lost the battle against the British and French authorities, and was unable to impose completely transparent and independent tests. He is trying to save face by referring the security and terrorism questions to national working groups, but at the end of the day the lowest common security denominator has won”, stated MEPs of the Greens Group at the European Parliament. (E.H./transl.fl)