Brussels, 22/11/2011 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 22 November, the Greens/EFA Group at the European Parliament presented an “independent” study which concludes that stress tests carried out on nuclear power plants fail to assess the real risks faced by nuclear reactors and do not heed lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster. The study was published the day before the European Commission's presentation, on Wednesday 23 November, of the preliminary results of the tests carried out on European nuclear power plants.
Speaking during a press conference at the European Parliament, Brussels, Wolfgang Renneberg (from Renneberg Consult UG), who drafted the study, said the stress tests fail to meet the requirements of the EU Council of Ministers' mandate and do not give any true indication as to the safety of nuclear plants in Europe.
The scenarios under review are “incomplete”, he said. Internal scenarios such as fire-scenarios, electrical surges, leakage of pipes, malfunction of valves, human failures and a combination of such events are not included in the scope of the test, he said. “External scenarios like airplane crashes are also excluded”, Renneberg added. Only risks such as flooding and earthquake are taken into account. Furthermore, he said, the safety management of nuclear power plants is not included although this “is of utmost importance”.
Furthermore, the quality of safety-related systems and components of the plants like the material of pipes, of the reactor vessel, of valves and pumps, of control and instrumentation equipment material is not under investigation, the same expert bemoaned, taking the view that degradation effects, in particular those caused by the ageing of plants/material fatigue, are not considered. No criteria are defined to determine the so-called “robustness” of the plant, and the stress tests do not comply with normally applied qualified and comprehensive methods of technical studies and review practices, but on the operators themselves.
Finally, Renneberg considers that experts involved in the stress tests are the same as those who have been responsible for nuclear safety in the past. He says: “The European Commission is not able to make up for this lack of independence because it has no technical expertise itself”. As a result, the whole process is biased.
The main conclusions set out in the report are that: - the currently limited approach to stress testing must be completed by an assessment of the risk caused by aviation accidents/terrorism; - the criteria of acceptance allowing for classification of the various qualities of robustness should be defined; - and stress tests on a power plant must be completed by a second testing phase that assesses measures to protect nuclear plants against nuclear accidents. “We have not learned anything from Fukushima”, said Wolfgang Renneberg, adding that, in his view, it is necessary to verify the plant by applying modern nuclear safety criteria.
Yannick Jadot, MEP (Greens/EFA, France), asserted that the “independent study clearly shows that European stress tests are far from being sufficiently stringent to correctly assess the safety of our reactors and reduce the risk of accident to a maximum. These tests do not manage to assess risks from internal factors - such as fire, human failure, degradation and dysfunction of infrastructure - or the combination of these factors, and they do not correctly assess external risks, such as an aircraft crash”. He pointed out that, in France, for example, aviation-related risks do not come under stress testing, but under the secret of defence.
Yannick Jadot believes that the French case confirms the conclusions reached by the study carried out by Wolfgang Renneberg. The French report from the IRSN (Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire), published on Thursday 17 November, shows that “nine nuclear plants in France have anomalies when it comes to protection against earthquakes, flooding and even chemical risks”.
Also, Jadot went on to say: “We do not have any satisfactory answers from operators (EDF, and partially AREVA and CEA), for example on the question of fire, explosion caused by earthquakes”.
Rebecca Harms (Greens/EFA, Germany) was of the opinion that the stress tests carried out by the EU are “nothing more than a charade” in order to allow the nuclear industry to continue with business as usual. She explained that their fear was that bad quality stress tests in Europe could give a sort of ecolabel to the current installations within the EU and a go-ahead for exporting such products to Asia, Japan and South America. The promise made by Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger - namely that of revising the directive on nuclear safety - “must be kept”, Harms said. She also called on the German and Austrian governments, that have chosen to give up the nuclear option in due course, to put pressure on the commissioner to ensure that he presents a revised casting of the nuclear safety directive. (LC/transl.jl)