Brussels, 06/03/2012 (Agence Europe) - With the approach of the first anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan, on 11 March 2011 following an earthquake and tsunami, the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament is holding a conference on Wednesday 7 March on the impact and consequences of the nuclear accident for Europe and the rest of the world, and on the future of atomic energy.
Among the issues up for discussion, the stress tests carried out on European nuclear power plants will be at the heart of the debate, the Greens arguing that these tests fail to assess the real risks in terms of the security and safety of European nuclear power plants. In the stress tests, launched in June 2011, plants must meet a raft of criteria established by the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group (ENSREG) and the European Commission.
MEP Yannick Jadot (France), echoing a report from November 2011 criticising the effectiveness of the stress tests, said on Tuesday 6 March that the tests do not properly assess the risks posed by internal factors, such as fires, human error, infrastructure impairment or malfunction, or a combination of these factors, and they deliver a poor assessment of external risks, such as an aeroplane crash. The Commission said in an interim report that the stress tests, carried out on 143 nuclear reactors in operation in 14 member states, were on the right track.
Despite growing wariness of atomic energy, the Japanese authorities are determined to restart their nuclear power stations. The decision on whether to continue with nuclear power in Japan will depend on their results from European stress tests, said the group's joint leader Rebecca Harms (Germany). The Japanese government made the decision to copy European stress tests, Harms said. She considers the tests to be a European “alibi” to allow Europe to keep the nuclear option open, she added.
The Greens argue that neither the EU nor Japan have learned the lessons of the Fukushima disaster. Although the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had opened an investigation into the nuclear incident, Masashi Goto of the NISA (the Japanese nuclear safety agency) stress test consultative committee has been critical that there is no specific analysis of the accident at Fukushima. “We have no clear evaluation of what happened in the reactors”, he said, “and still today, we are not conducting the stress tests even though we are looking to re-open the reactors”. Goto protested against a first battery of tests conducted in Japan, seeking not so much to ensure nuclear safety as to find specific responses in the event of incidents, and would seem no more convinced by the import of European stress tests to Japan, given that “these stress tests do not cover all problems”.
Jadot set out the issue of the nuclear risk in Europe very clearly: “Take a map of Europe and draw a circle extending 80 kilometres around the 143 reactors, as that is the extent of the evacuation zone in the event of an accident, and you have some idea of the scale of the problem”. He suggested, too, that the events in Japan had changed attitudes in Europe, with more and more citizens “increasingly questioning the risks being imposed on them”. “While this is a time for commemoration, the Fukushima disaster necessary questions our energy choices … and demolished the final nuclear myth that there is no risk”, he stated.
Harms pointed out that there are still no EU-wide, legally binding, strict safety norms. She intends to call on the Commission that new Community legislation on nuclear safety be put in place. (SD/transl.rt)