Brussels, 10/05/2007 (Agence Europe) - Thursday will see the plenary session vote on the report by Eugenijus Maldeikis (UEN, Lithuania), assessing 50 years of the Euratom Treaty. In Brussels on Wednesday, the Greens presented a new study, entitled “Residual Risk”, commissioned by German MEP Rebecca Harms and carried out by seven independent experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists (USA), the Öko-Institut (Germany) and the Institut für Risikoforschung (Austria), on the accidents in nuclear power reactions since Chernobyl in 1986). “For the past 20 years, the world has lived with the illusion that we have mastered nuclear safety. In fact, there are countless events in nuclear power plants every day and a major nuclear accident has been lurking around the corner more than once since Chernobyl,” study coordinator Mycle Schneider told press. “The scale used by the IAEA to measure nuclear incidents (INES) is misleading because it does not assess the consequences in terms of radioactivity, minimises the importance of incidents that could have escalated and only takes into account the danger level when it's already too late,” Schneider, a winner of an “alternative Nobel Prize”, went on. The study records 16 significant events since 1986 in nuclear power plants in nine countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Sweden, Taiwan and United States).
“The dispute over the use of nuclear energy is entering a new phase because the nuclear lobby is praising it as the cure to all our ills on climate change. UN climatology experts, and some in the Commission and European Parliament, agree with them. But our response to the threat of global warming cannot be expansion of the nuclear threat. The nuclear response is a bogus right answer from politicians,” said Ms Harms, adding, “Contrary to what the outgoing French president Jacques Chirac may say, nuclear power is not a sustainable energy source”. Nuclear energy “is still a high risk technology, something we all try to forget,” she went on, stating that just because there had not been a nuclear meltdown since Chernobyl and Three Mile Island “does not mean that there will not be one again”. There are hundreds of incidents in nuclear plants around the world every year, and Ms Harms drew attention specifically to the one in Forsmark in Sweden last summer. “It may only have been a matter of minutes by which an accident of the scale of Chernobyl was prevented from happening in Sweden,” she said, adding that it was that incident which had pushed her to commission Mr Schneider's report “to make people more aware of the dangers of nuclear energy” and “to counter the collective rejection of the risks that has resulted from false or incomplete information”. The study is available on: http: //http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/181/181995.residual_risk @en.pdf (eh)