Risky business

Convincing the public of the safety of reactors and the safe storage of waste remains among the biggest challenges for supporters of nuclear power.

The attraction of nuclear energy has increased because of concern for climate change: compared to hydrocarbon fuel, nuclear energy boasts low carbon emissions.

But the drawbacks of nuclear energy have not disappeared. There have long been safety concerns about operating with radioactive fuel, and the safe disposal of decommissioned plants and spent fuel is still a headache.

The Fukushima disaster has increased attention to the downside risks, even though the nuclear industry in Europe has been keen to stress that Fukushima was not an accident caused by human or mechanical error, but rather by a natural disaster. Most areas of Europe are not at risk of an earthquake or a tsunami.

The stress tests conducted by national regulators in the wake of the Fukushima disaster delivered an all-clear verdict on the safety of Europe’s nuclear plants.

Nevertheless, the possibility of an accident cannot be excluded. If something did go wrong, with some nuclear energy plants as close as ten kilometres from European cities, the consequences would be profound. Any nuclear meltdown would pose serious risks to public health.

That said, the industry has made improvements in the past two decades. The Fukushima disaster was rated a maximum level seven on the International Nuclear Events Scale – the same as that for Chernobyl in 1986. However, in February the French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety estimated that the radiological equivalent of radiation released by the Fukushima accident is “about 10% of the corresponding equivalent of Chernobyl”. The total area that has been contaminated by Fukushima is about 5% of the area contaminated by Chernobyl.

Although the EU does not have competence over member states’ choice of energy mix, the European Commission does have the power to regulate nuclear safety through the Euratom treaty.

The treaty gives the EU the responsibility to protect citizens from the dangers arising from ionizing radiations, and to monitor radioactivity levels. It does this through the Basic Safety Standards directive (due for a simplification and revision), the nuclear safety directive, and the radioactive waste directive passed last year. But legislation in this area can be difficult to pass because it requires unanimity among the member states. The European Parliament has no say in Euratom matters.

Nuclear waste

The safe disposal of nuclear waste is a continuing challenge. The EU creates about 40,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste per year, 80% of which is short-lived low-level radioactive waste. France and the UK are the only countries that reprocess their nuclear waste. This reprocessed material is used as fuel domestically and also exported to Belgium, Germany and Switzerland.

Permanent solutions for disposing of the toxic material have not yet been implemented. Today, member states store radioactive waste and spent fuel in above-ground storage that needs continuous maintenance and oversight, and remains at risk of accidents. Bulgaria and Hungary export their waste to Russia.

Safe storage

The European Commission proposed rules on the storage of radioactive waste that would ban the export to non-EU countries, but member states rejected the idea. The final directive, adopted last July, would allow exports to countries with “similar safety standards”.

The environmental campaign group Greenpeace has complained that this vague provision essentially maintains the status quo. But Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for energy, said last year that because no third country could meet the standards, he expects exporting to end within five years.

The directive lays down specifics for temporary storage and recommends that nuclear waste should be permanently stored in deep geological repositories. But campaigners say such repositories are vulnerable to long-term shifts in the earth’s crust. So far, no permanent storage facility has been built. Sweden , Finland and France are planning to build repositories between 2020 and 2025.

Research is still going on into how nuclear waste, which will survive for thousands of years, could be permanently stored without posing a risk to human beings. Some possible solutions have been found already but have yet to be put into practice. Jean-Pol Poncelet, director general of nuclear industry association Foratom, says there is just a lack of political will to implement them.

“The scientific community has already introduced some solutions. What we are still missing are decisions from governments,” he said. “Decisions have been made in Finland and Sweden. They have chosen a location for long-term storage. It’s really significant to see that in both countries they have strong support for nuclear energy, because the public feels safer when these decisions are taken.”

With its decision to phase out nuclear energy, Germany will have a huge amount of waste to deal with. The country is searching for a site for this waste, having abandoned plans to expand a temporary storage site in the town of Gorleben last year. Investigations for a suitable long-term site will begin this year and last until 2020.

Germany is also considering setting up a public fund to manage the disposal of the waste, after environmentalists raised concerns that the owners could declare bankruptcy in order to get out of decommissioning costs.

But controversies about where to locate such waste storage sites indicate the not-in-my-backyard attitude the public tends to have about nuclear power. Even in the UK and Scandinavia, where there is public support for nuclear energy, people are still uncomfortable with the idea of having either a nuclear plant or a waste storage site near their town. Despite reforms and improvements, nuclear safety is still a toxic topic for politicians.