Brussels, 24/05/2016 (Agence Europe) - European Commission Vice-President with responsibility for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic, meeting Vladimir Makei, Foreign Minister of Belarus, in Brussels on Monday 23 May, called for a stress test to be carried out on the Belarusian nuclear power plant being built at Astraviets to determine how safe it is.
Sefcovic conveyed the message to his Belarusian guest that the construction of nuclear power plants must comply with international standards on nuclear safety, accompanied by the highest possible degree of transparency of the process, a source has informed EUROPE.
“The Commission explicitly encourages a stress test at the Belarus nuclear power plant”, said the source, stating that Sefcovic had underlined that the test should be carried out “without delay” and had proposed a peer review by the EU.
Stress tests, introduced in the wake of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan in March 2011, seek to determine if the nuclear power plants in the EU and its neighbouring countries comply with the security standards put in place. They measure the plants' resilience to different risks (earthquake, tsunami, flooding, terrorist attack, aeroplane crash, etc.). (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)