On Thursday 11 February, the European Parliament adopted by a very large majority (642 votes in favour, 29 against and 21 abstentions) a resolution calling on the European Commission to work closely with Belarus to suspend the commercial operation of the Ostrovets nuclear power plant until all EU recommendations from the stress tests are fully implemented and all necessary safety improvements are in place.
The project is worrying MEPs, especially those from Member States close to the plant (it is only 50 kilometres from Vilnius), because of the risk of a nuclear accident.
“The Ostrovets nuclear power plant is a clear and present threat to our national security”, said Lithuanian MEP Andrius Kubilius (EPP) in a pre-voting debate with Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson.
Like his colleagues Juozas Olekas (S&D, Lithuania), Ivars Ijabs (Renew Europe, Latvia), and Manuel Bompard (The Left, France), he pointed out that several accidents had occurred during the construction, raising fears of safety flaws.
A “geopolitical project”
Mr Kubilius, Mr Olekas, and Mr Ijabs also described the plant as a “geopolitical project” of the Kremlin (it was built by the Russian state-owned company Rosatom), while expressing serious reservations about the independence of Belarusian regulators and the transparency of the government of Alexander Lukashenko, an “authoritarian regime”.
While he too insisted on the need for the plant to respect all safety criteria, Thierry Mariani (ID, France) considered that Parliament’s resolution is “a political burden for Minsk and Rosatom” and “also disguises a will to question the choice of nuclear energy by this country”. Judging it to be “premature”, he advocated waiting for the conclusions of the Commission’s team of nuclear safety experts and the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group, ENSREG.
Peer review
A team of seven experts from ENSREG and the Commission, which was tasked with conducting a peer review of the plant, carried out the first phase of the review on 9 and 10 February to physically verify the implementation of the safety measures, said Mrs Simson.
These experts will submit a preliminary report which should be approved at the ENSREG plenary meeting in early March before being published.
Recommending against prejudging the report’s conclusions, Mrs Simson recalled that the decision on whether or not to grant the commercial operating licence to the Ostrovets power plant rests with the Belarusian authorities, in accordance with international law.
Nevertheless, she assured that even after the publication of the experts’ preliminary report, the Commission will continue its cooperation with Minsk for the completion of the peer review (the full team of experts will normally travel to Belarus when conditions related to Covid-19 allow).
In addition to maintaining this technical cooperation, the Commission “is using all its diplomatic and policy means”, the Commissioner assured, encouraging in particular Belarus’ early participation in the European Community Radiological Emergency Information Exchange System (ECURIE) and its official participation in the European Union Radiological Data Exchange Platform (EURDEP).
The resolution also calls for a guarantee that electricity produced by the Ostrovets nuclear power plant will not enter the EU market (see EUROPE 12646/8).
See the resolution: https://bit.ly/3acsJNr (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)