Sentados sobre una bomba

Europe’s Nuclear Reactors Need Repair or Upgrades

By JAMES KANTER

BRUSSELS — “Practically all” of the more than 130 active nuclear reactors in the European Union need safety improvements, repairs or upgrades, at a cost of up to $32 billion, according to a draft copy of a European Commission report that is scheduled to be released Thursday.

The scale of the problems detailed in the draft report, as well as the size of the expected repair bill, may amplify public concerns about the safety of nuclear power on the part of Europeans, who are already deeply divided over the technology and whose governments still zealously guard control over energy policy at the national level.

The European Commission undertook the safety review of its nuclear plants after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Part of the assessment was the performance of so-called stress tests, which are meant to assess how a nuclear facility would fare in various kinds of failures and crises. National experts conducted the stress tests in conjunction with the commission’s advisory group on nuclear safety. The tests identified the need for “hundreds of technical upgrade measures,” the draft report says.

The two biggest previous civilian nuclear accidents — at Three Mile Island outside Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979, and at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 — were both followed by similar scrutiny, and agreements were reached on extensive new safety measures. But the draft report notes that “even today, decades later, the implementation of those measures is still pending” in some of the union’s member countries.

Vulnerabilities found by the commission and identified in the draft report include a situation at four reactors in Finland and Sweden, where if the cooling systems failed or all electric power was lost, the operators would have less than an hour to restore safety functions before catastrophic damage took place. The draft report says that 10 reactors in countries including Spain, France and the Czech Republic lack adequate equipment to detect earthquakes.

Most of the upgrades called for in the draft report involve making European nuclear plants better able to withstand quakes, flooding and the loss of primary cooling — the factors that combined to devastating effect at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The draft report also says that rules ensuring the independence of national nuclear safety regulators “are minimal.” The European Union’s energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, is expected to announce plans on Thursday for unionwide legislation meant to improve reporting and protect the regulators’ independence.

Mark Breddy, a spokesman for Greenpeace European Unit, the environmental advocacy organization, said: “Cozy relationships between nuclear operators, regulators and politicians were pivotal to aggravating the Fukushima disaster. The situation isn’t much better in Europe.” Given those relationships, he said, he questioned whether the European Commission’s stress tests were as thorough and as impartial as they should have been.