Abstract
The last unit at Chernobyl was shut down in December 2000. But Russia has opened three more reactors just like it.
On December 15, the last reactor at Chernobyl—the planet's most notorious nuclear power plant—was finally closed for good. Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma gave the order, pulling the plug on the site of the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986, when Chernobyl Unit 4 exploded in a training exercise gone horribly awry. The accident spewed radioactive contaminants over a significant portion of Europe.
But the “closure deal” troubles safety experts as well as anti-nuclear campaigners: A leading Western-backed development bank, after years of refusing, has finally agreed to help fund the completion of two other Soviet-designed reactors in Ukraine. Critics say that completing Khmelnitsky 2 and Rivne 4 in Western Ukraine (a project known as K2/R4) makes little sense; it merely extends the risk of Soviet-designed reactors.
The two events illustrate the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of Western policy on nuclear safety in the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union. At times, the West works to shut down the most dangerous of Soviet-designed reactors. But at other times, it hands out money for questionable nuclear projects like K2/R4 that will keep Soviet-style reactors in operation. It has also sunk money into extending the life span of existing reactors that would be considered too risky to continue operating in the West.
In fact, little has changed on the nuclear power landscape over the past decade. Apart from Chernobyl, not a single reactor of any type has been taken out of service in Eastern Europe. Four new reactors have gone on line there since 1992. Russia has added three more “rbmk” reactors— the same model found in Chernobyl—to its nuclear stable. Even today, 50 percent of Russia's nuclear power is generated by rbmk reactors. More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, and Lithuania rely as much or more on nuclear power generated by Soviet-style reactors.
Making a plan
The clearest warning about the safety shortcomings of older Soviet reactors came 10 years ago, when “Western nuclear experts were able to look first hand at some of the 66 Soviet-designed reactors then in operation. On the graphite-moderated rbmk reactor, the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) judgment was unequivocal: Its design flaws were so fundamental that all 16 units should be shut down immediately. As for the vver-440/230, another early Soviet design, the IAEA's warning was not as dire, but it was still alarming. In a 1991 report the IAEA described some 100 safety defects, including the fact that the 440/230 had no containment, no emergency cooling system, and inadequate fire protection.
At a 1992 summit in Munich, the G7 (the seven leading industrial countries) agreed to an action program to improve reactor safety in the former Soviet bloc. It would divide Eastern bloc reactors into two types— those that could be safely upgraded to meet “Western” safety standards and those that could not. The latter would be shut down as soon as possible. Two later types of Soviet reactors, the wer-440/213 and the vver-1000, were considered upgradable. The rbmk and first-generation wer-440/230, the “high-risk” reactors, were not.
The following year, an analysis by the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Energy Agency (a European agency linked to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) suggested that it would cost $25 billion to make safety upgrades to the 25 high-risk reactors, or $18 billion to close them down. They also predicted that there would be no energy shortfall should those reactors go off line. At the same time, the World Bank ruled out lending for nuclear projects in the former Soviet bloc.
Many Austrians, among others, believe the VVER-1000 reactors at Temelin in the Czech Republic are too close for comfort. Seen here: July 13, 2000, police arrest a Greenpeace protester outside the National Office for Nuclear Safety in Prague.
According to Antony Froggat, a consultant to several anti-nuclear legislators in the European Parliament and a former Greenpeace campaigner, the report was ignored: “No one was willing to come up with that kind of money.”
The same opinion echoed within the European Union itself. “If the eu or the international community wanted to shut down or make safe all nuclear reactors in Eastern Europe, they would have to come up with Ecu 60 billion [about $57 billion]. And that kind of money is simply not around,” a spokeswoman for Hans Van den Broek, eu commissioner for Eastern Europe, told the Financial Times in 1998.
Instead, the West has spent about $1.5 billion on a hodgepodge of nuclear safety projects, including so-called short-term upgrades, ostensibly meant as a stopgap measure while plans were drawn up for decommissioning the most troublesome reactors. All told, more than 1,800 safety-related projects have been undertaken, about half administered by two European programs for economic restructuring—one aimed at Eastern Europe, the other at the former Soviet republics. In addition, a number of other projects have taken place outside this framework. For example, the United States runs a nuclear safety program through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Energy Department.
A lucky break for Western companies?
Projects in Eastern Europe looked particularly attractive to the West's nuclear industry, which had few contracts at home. Western nuclear outfitters like Siemens, Electricité de France, and Westinghouse hoped the East would be a nuclear El Dorado. By 1990, Westinghouse had already announced that it would “aggressively pursue opportunities in Eastern Europe.” Russia, though, was probably off limits—it didn't seem likely that Moscow would allow Western interference or competition with its own nuclear power industry.
But predictions that Eastern economic growth would lead to increased energy demands have proved false. As iaea spokesman David Kyd explains, high up-front costs and the time lags in nuclear construction put it at a disadvantage vis-á-vis gas-fired plants.
“You need something on the order of seven years between a decision and the electricity being available, and that's a long time. You also need up front as much as $2 billion per unit and that is very challenging to any country, whereas for a gas plant, within two years you're up and running and it costs a fraction of that.”
But Western companies were eager for whatever work came along. As Steve Thomas of Sussex University, a specialist on Soviet-style nuclear plants, told me: “The likes of Siemens, et cetera, clearly wanted orders for new plants. And if these were not going to happen, they wanted plant completions, and if these were not possible, plant upgrades.”
Competition for contracts has been fierce, and Western governments have enrolled side-by-side with their domestic nuclear outfitters in the struggle. In 1994, the U.S. Export-Import Bank granted Westinghouse $317 million in loan guarantees to upgrade the not-yet-completed Teme-lin nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic. Why? As then-Vice President Al Gore explained: “If we don't do it, the Germans will.” Westinghouse itself was accused in the local press of bribing Czech officials to win two contracts at Temelin. The charges never stuck, but the unusual bidding process that was used was never fully explained.
France and Germany lobbied for the European Union to fund safety work in Eastern Europe. In 1996, they issued a joint memorandum declaring that the modernization of unsafe reactors was a pre-condition for eu membership. They had already worked to amend the Euratom treaty (which oversees the development of nuclear power within the eu) to allow lending for nuclear projects in non-member states. In April 2000, Euratom issued a $200 million loan to Bulgaria for upgrades at Kozloduy 5 and 6—the first Euratom loan ever granted to a non-member, according to Nucleonics Week.
Some have argued that the driving force behind Western Europe's safety programs is the need to safeguard the “West's supply of gas. The argument is that the eu, which gets 25 percent of its gas from Russia and Turkmenistan, wants to discourage Eastern Europe from drawing on the same fuel supply, which would increase demand and raise prices.
Who benefits?
Eastern governments have expressed little desire to decommission reactors, even those labeled unsafe, especially if it means growing dependence on Russian gas, oil, or coal. For instance, Ukraine already owes Russia $1.8 billion for gas deliveries—a good reason for sticking to nuclear power. The Ignalina plant provides resource-poor Lithuania with 80 percent of its energy, making it the world's most nuclear-dependent country.
Promatec, a fire-retardant material, coats cables and seals the floor at the Smolensk power plant (below). Cable congestion at Zaporozhe (right).
Eastern Europe made extensive nuclear plans in the 1970s as energy costs lurched upward. As journalist Colin Woodard noted in Transition magazine in 1995, Bulgaria had planned to have more than a dozen reactors by 1995. Czechoslovakia envisioned 30, Poland more than 20, and Hungary and Romania six each. After the Chernobyl disaster and the collapse of the former totalitarian system, nearly all of those projects died. But as Woodard pointed out, Czech-based Skoda Plzen, Russia's Atomenergoeksport, and the Mecsek uranium mines in Hungary remain powerful players. More than a million jobs in the former Soviet Union are directly or indirectly linked to the nuclear industry. And in tough times, Eastern nuclear power plants, if they are connected to the West European electrical grid, could become cash cows for financially strapped governments. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Slovenia all have nuclear power plants and are all exporters of energy to the West.
Some analysts contend that it is “Western companies peddling technology, not East European countries, that benefit from Western aid programs. In 1998, the spending watchdog for the European Union's executive body, the European Commission, issued a scathing report on efforts to improve nuclear safety in the former Eastern bloc. Prepared by the EC's Court of Auditors, the report portrayed Western safety programs as ineffective, wasteful, and plagued by muddled strategy and staff shortages. Nuala Ahern, an Irish Green parliamentarian, said it showed that “what has happened to really help the East is very little. It's scandalous.” Bern-hard Friedmann, the court's president at the time, said Soviet-designed reactors were still a “ticking time bomb.” So little had been accomplished, said Friedmann, that “it was not possible to judge whether there had been any actual progress in terms of nuclear safety.”
One of the biggest and most controversial funding mechanisms is the “Nuclear Safety Account,” which the G7 established in 1992 to carry out short-term safety measures on Eastern Europe's first-generation vver-440/230s. The fund is managed by the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development (ebrd), which selects the projects, after which the managers of the account decide how to allocate the funds.
Contracts are divvied up according to each country's contribution. In other words, the more a donor country gives, the more project work its nuclear industry gets—critics call the results “boomerang contracts.” Not surprisingly, Germany, France, and the United States—all countries with substantial nuclear industries— are the leading contributors to the account.
Eastern firms can apply for contracts, but in practice, Western firms get the lion's share of the work. One report showed that of work related to Bulgaria's Kozloduy and Lithuania's Ignalina, only 2.9 percent went to Eastern companies.
The Nuclear Safety Account was established for the express purpose of upgrading high-risk WER-440/230 reactors, and its rules specified that funds were “not to be used to extend the operating life-times of unsafe reactors.”
But that is not what happens.
Bulgaria signed the first agreement in 1993, mapping out plans to shut down its four WER-440/230 reactors at Kozloduy, which the U.S. Energy Department said were a “high-stakes gamble” to operate. In return, Sofia received $24 million in grants for improving safety standards, ostensibly to allow it enough time to upgrade the plant's more modern WER-1000s and build a thermal power plant. Under terms of the grant, the two oldest units were to close by the spring of 1997, the other two in 1998.
That timetable was thrown out, however, when Bulgarian nuclear authorities (and their Russian consultants) declared that the upgraded reactors were now safe. The Bulgarian government also adopted a resolution opposing Kozloduy's closing date, stating that the two oldest reactors could operate until 2005, the others until 2011.
Account managers didn't even ask for closing dates when doling out $35 million for upgrades at Lithuania's Ignalina, the site of the world's largest rbmk reactors. Instead, they accepted Lithuania's assurances that the plant would be decommissioned when the reactor cores needed “re-channeling.” That was expected for Unit 1 in 1998, and for Unit 2 in 2002, but both units are still in operation. In late January, the Lithuanian government said it planned to shut down Unit 1 by 2005.
The limits of Western pressure were also evident when it came to Slovakia's two vver-440/230 reactors. The EBRD agreed to finance Slovakia's then-unfinished Mochovce plant in 1994. The bank okayed the loan, provided Western safety standards were upheld and that the two vver-440/230s at Bohunice were closed. Soon after, the Slovaks balked, opting instead for a proposal from the Czechs and the Russians. In 1996, Siemens teamed up with Slovak utility Slovenske Elektrarne to upgrade the 440/230s for about $170 million.
Anti-nuclear campaigners were highly critical of Siemens and questioned why any Western country— particularly Germany—would guarantee loans for a project that would effectively extend the life span of high-risk reactors in contravention of Western policy. They pointed out that, once it was reunified in 1990, Germany moved quickly to close its four vver-440/230 reactors at Greifswald.
Armenia's lone nuclear power reactor, Medzamor 2, a wer-440/230 unit, was also given a new lease on life thanks to an injection of Western aid. Critics also worry about Med-zamor's proximity to a seismic fault line. In fact, the massive earthquake that struck Armenia in 1987 led officials to shut the plant down for years. Only one of its two reactors was restarted in 1995.
In all four cases, only pressure from the EU—the exclusive economic club most of the former Soviet bloc wants to join—is causing governments to consider closing their vver-440/230 reactors. Lithuania now says it plans to shut down Ig-nalina's Unit 1 by 2005, and close the plant sometime between 2005 and 2007. The 440/230s at Bohunice are now set for closure in 2006 and 2008. Armenia has told the eu it will close Medzamor by 2004 if alternative sources of energy can be found.
More wheeling and dealing
As mentioned earlier, the West has agreed to finance Ukraine's K2/R4 project. The ebrd—set up in 1991 to aid the East's transition to market-based economies—okayed a $190 million loan to finance work on the unfinished VVER-1000 reactors as part of a $1.8 billion deal between Kiev and the G7 to close down Chernobyl. In 1995, Sussex University's Steve Thomas worked on an ebrd report about the viability of the project that concluded that Ukraine's energy problems stemmed from fuel shortages caused by nonpayment, not from a lack of generating capacity. The Export-Import Bank reached a similar conclusion in 1998. According to Thomas, the ebrd rejected both reports and hired an American consulting firm, Stone & Webster, which worked with Ukrainian officials—and Energo-atom, the Ukrainian company bent on building the reactors—to make the project appear more “viable.”
Critics say the deal is not about replacing Chernobyl, but about making Ukraine less dependent on Russian gas. Ukrainian officials, including President Leonid Kuchma, had proposed building a gas-fired power plant, according to a letter Kuchma wrote to British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998, which was later published in The Guardian. Kuchma contends that the ebrd insisted on the nuclear option.
Despite serious opposition to the project from nuclear-free Austria and other neighbors, Euratom is expected to contribute to the K2/R4 project. Iaea spokesman David Kyd believes the deal could prompt Romania to ask for similar financing for a Canadian-designed candu reactor at its Cernovoda site.
Today, the West's vows to end the nuclear danger in the East have grown fainter and fainter, replaced by the rising din of commercial and political interests. And all the while, the nuclear time bomb posed by unsafe reactors keeps on ticking.