Environment, Europe, Headlines

EUROPE: Swedish Nuclear Incident Sparks Safety Concern

Lisa Monique Söderlindh

STOCKHOLM, Aug 9 2006 (IPS) - While the sudden scram of a Swedish nuclear reactor Jul. 25 is yet to be thoroughly clarified, the incident has fuelled a longstanding rift between opponent voices on Swedish nuclear power safety.

Atomic experts have declared an end to emergency proceedings prompted by the incident at the Forsmark 1 reactor, located some 200 kilometres north of Stockholm. But the revealed deficiencies in the electric system, following a short circuit in a unit that supplies power to the reactor, must be taken seriously, states the initial report launched Friday last week by the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI).

“No more reactors need to be shut down but it is important to realise that the Forsmark incident may occur at other Swedish and international nuclear power reactors with the same safety construction,” director-general of SKI Judith Melin told IPS after the nuclear authority’s primary analyses.

Four of Sweden’s ten nuclear reactors using the same backup power system as the scrammed reactor have been shut down for review and will remain off the grid until their safety is secured and the root causes of the subsequent disturbances have been completely clarified.

While the responsibility for safety is regulated by Swedish law and rests entirely with the holder of the licence to operate a nuclear facility, SKI ensures that each license takes its responsibility and supervises all nuclear activities in Sweden.

“We are awaiting Forsmark’s own report on the incident and it will take at least another week until we are done with our investigation,” said Melin. “Any possibly needed changes at international nuclear plants must be investigated individually.”

While the complete fault analyses and an action plan is yet to be determined by SKI, environmentalists have deemed the Forsmark incident another nail in the coffin of nuclear safety.

“We have long known that security at Swedish nuclear power plants is not as good as the SKI and the industry claim it to be,” Swedish Green Party Speaker Maria Wetterstrand told IPS.

The Forsmark incident has clearly reaffirmed that “nuclear power is not a safe energy resource – neither the operation of the nuclear plants can be trusted, nor the security of nuclear energy supply,” said Wetterstrand.

She further argued that the incident would not have occurred if Swedish nuclear safety control had been better. She welcomed Green Party speaker Peter Eriksson’s call for the Swedish government to appoint an independent commission with international experts to investigate safety at Swedish nuclear power plants.

The leaders of other Swedish political parties, the Left, the Liberal and the Centre Party, have also echoed the need for an independent investigation. The environmental group Greenpeace has made a similar demand.

According to SKI’s initial assessments and Claes-Inge Andersson, head of communications at Forsmark’s Kraftgrupp, which runs the plant, the incident could most probably not have been foreseen through any form of investigation, or avoided by more extensive nuclear safety research.

Unexpected technical issues at nuclear plants are expected – that is why they are equipped with several back-up systems, both parties stressed in interviews with IPS.

“Two of the four back-up diesel generators failed to start automatically following on the short circuit, but the two functioning generators were sufficient to run the cooling system, which proves that the reactor safety functioned successfully,” said Andersson.

He also noted that Forsmark will be receiving a review, supposedly this week, by the German company AEG, which stands behind the design of the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) used at the scrammed reactor. “We are hoping that this will thoroughly clarify the faults,” said Andersson.

“Incidents like this can always occur, and the international nuclear safety system is based on the exchange of experiences and information on what changes needs to be done when incidents happen,” argued Melin, also underlining that there had never been any risk of a meltdown.

SKI ranked the Forsmark incident as a number two on the 0-7 International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), with 7 being the most serious kind of accident.

The INES scale is used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and was launched in 1990 as a tool to communicate the safety significance of nuclear accidents.

“A number two means that the incident was unexpected and entailed a safety significance but that it did not endanger life or health in practice,” Janne Wallenius, associate professor of nuclear and reactor physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm told IPS.

Incidents ranked number two is nothing unique for Sweden, added Wallenius. “It is a regular occurring level of incidents at worldwide nuclear power plants, and happens once every second year, according to IAEA statistics.”

The Swedish nuclear power reactors are built on the same basic design and safety principle as some 300 of the 442 nuclear plants currently in operation worldwide. Wallenius said they are therefore neither more or less safe than the majority of the world’s reactors used for energy production.

But even though no damage was done, the Forsmark incident exposed a serious construction weakness that must be built away.

“The follow-up work is now very important, we must learn from the current investigation and effectively undertake the needed measures for continued safety at Swedish and international nuclear plants,” Carl-Erik Wikdahl, senior consultant at the Swedish Nuclear Safety and Training Centre’s (KSU) analysis group told IPS.

He also pointed to the vital need for maintaining highly competent operational staff at the Swedish nuclear reactors to uphold safety – a challenge that has grown with the politically intensified pressure on phasing out nuclear energy.

“The longstanding discussion about the nuclear phase-out makes it more and more difficult to recruit competent staff,” said Wikdahl, noting that there has been a big drop of newly educated engineers over the last years.

Sweden has been producing nuclear power since the early 1970s, during which decade the Centre Party started its anti-nuclear debate, and demonstrators began roaming the streets.

The Swedish government is today bound to phase out nuclear power following a referendum in 1980. It is empowered to take such a decision after the Law on Nuclear Phase-Out was passed in 1997.

Since then, two of the original 12 reactors have been closed, leaving ten power-producing reactors at three sites: Forsmark, Oskarshamn and Ringhals.

While pressure to speed up the planned phase-out of nuclear power in Sweden has intensified since the law of 1997, Sweden’s electricity consumption has been rising, and Sweden has one of the highest per capita level of consumption in Europe today. Nuclear power accounts for nearly half of the electricity generated in Sweden.