Accidents and uncertain rules harm nuclear power's image in Europe

VUI routinely points to "safe" nuclear operations in France.

Well, here's the latest... GV

By Patricia Brett
Published: October 29, 2008

PARIS: Eight nuclear incidents reported since May 24 in Europe, including the inadvertent contamination of 100 workers and an off-site release of radioactive uranium in France, are reminders that the industry is a source of routine and accidental radioactive pollution.

Areva, the world's largest nuclear group, was responsible for three out of six accidents in France, which generates 80 percent of its electricity at nuclear plants. Of the six French events, four were reported at a 600-hectare, or 1,480-acre, complex at Tricastin, in southeastern France. The two other European accidents were reported in Slovenia and Belgium.

Responding to critics of the off-site release, in which 75 kilograms, or 165 pounds, of uranium was spilled on July 7, Areva's chief executive, Anne Lauvergeon, said nuclear installations were subject to "the most draconian international norms" and deplored public "confusion" about the event.

Areva declined requests for an interview with Lauvergeon for this article and no other Areva executive was available for comment.

Critics say public confusion reflects a lack of transparency in the industry and a lack of binding international radiation safety standards.

National regulators follow an ill-defined rule - As Low As Reasonably Achievable, or Alara - to set permitted dose limits for each radioactive element.

The rule is one source of confusion. Many believe that exposure to permitted levels is safe, but that is not the case, said Jean-René Jourdain, head of internal dosimetry at the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, or IRSN, which provides technical support for the French nuclear regulator, the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire.

Low doses of radiation may be less likely to damage health than high doses, but the type of damage they do is the same; and how much less likely is unknown, Jourdain said, because "what we know about low-level radiation was extrapolated from studies on atom bomb victims that were flawed" in methodology and type of exposure studied.

The nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 highlighted the lack of understanding of the effects of cumulative low-dose exposure.

"We expected leukemia in children," Jourdain said. "Instead we found that infants were more prone to thyroid cancer - and much sooner than we'd expected, only 5 years after the accident, rather than 10 to 15 years as we'd thought."

Socatri, a uranium recovery and treatment subsidiary of Areva, which was responsible for the loss of uranium into local waterways at Tricastin, contributed to confusion around that incident by providing conflicting information and failing to inform the safety regulator in a timely manner. The regulatory authority compounded the problem by classifying the leakage as a level-one risk on its eight-level risk scale, although its own Web site ranks unauthorized off-site releases at level three.

The authority then waited two days before sending a team to the site, a delay that Jean-Luc Lachaume, its deputy director, said was "normal procedure based on the information given by the operator." Nuclear authorities worldwide rely almost exclusively on operator-supplied data.
Even if the release had been as high as 360 kilograms of radioactive uranium - the amount initially reported - it would still have been just "one of a hundred such incidents in France each year," he added.

For Roland Desbordes, the president of an independent nuclear analysis laboratory, the Commission de Recherche et d'Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité, that is worrying, because "360 kilograms of uranium is equivalent to at least 9,000 megabequerels, or more than 100 times Socatri's annual limit.

"Brought down to 'only' 75 kilograms the annual limit is overshot by 27 times," Desbordes said.
After the spill, the IRSN monitored radioactivity in neighboring surface and groundwater. On Sept. 4 it reported radiation levels three times higher than the national average in aquatic life and surface water sediments.

Another study that it released on Sept. 15, covering all French nuclear installations, found downstream pollution and groundwater contamination at nearly all sites, with Tricastin again registering some of the highest levels.

The study pointed to old waste storage sites as a source of leakage and pollution. Asked what the regulatory authority would do about a mound of waste buried at Tricastin since the 1970s, Lachaume said it was a military issue, outside the regulator's control.

With 104 reactors, the United States has the most nuclear power plants in the world. The Union of Concerned Scientists and others petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2006 to take action on a similar issue, documenting chronic leaks, some decades-old. The NRC responded that an industry voluntary initiative to report the leaks would suffice, said Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear activist group.

Radiation levels around Tricastin have been above normal for over a decade, a fact that the IRSN, in its Sept. 4 report, highlighted to put the spillage in perspective, taking as reference values measurements it made in 1991 that found radiation levels far higher than at present, at five times above the national average. But it did not mention that the 1991 measurements were made during an investigation of an earlier spill.

All nuclear installations routinely release radioactive liquids or gases, raising nearby background radiation to higher than normal, naturally occurring levels, said Jourdain, the IRSN official. The degree to which local background levels differ from the naturally occurring level depends on how much radioactivity is released and stays in the environment. Such releases are authorized by national regulators on a site-specific basis, which varies from plant to plant and country to country.

In an example of how these limits are set, Socatri, the Areva subsidiary, began a new waste-reconditioning activity in 2006 and requested authorization to release 85 megabequerels a year of Carbon 14, a low-level radioactive gas. In 2006 and 2007, it exceeded its authorized levels by 40 times, at around 3,400 megabequerels, and requested the regulator to raise its authorization to that level. The request was granted, Lachaume said, because "we didn't know how much would be released at first so we set the levels very low." But when it turned out that these were unrealistic," he said, "they were slightly revised."

By June this year, the annual limit had been breached, and in August the reconditioning plant was shut down. Lachaume said the Carbon 14 limit would not be raised again. How the plant should deal with the problem was "their business," he said.

In a 2006 review, the International Atomic Energy Agency, an arm of the United Nations, found that "some states may encounter difficulties in separating the regulatory control from the promotion and operation of facilities and activities."

The review had been requested by the French regulatory agency, which had just been granted a new, nominally independent, status. Until 2006, the regulator was directly controlled by the government, which was also the majority shareholder in Areva and EDF, the main nuclear electricity utility in France.

In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is headed by five presidentially appointed commissioners, a structure designed to ensure a separation of interests; even so, financial arguments from operators have on occasion been allowed to override safety concerns.
In 2002, the Davis-Besse plant, in Ohio, came within three-eighths of an inch, or 9.5 millimeters, of a nuclear disaster, commission records show. In 2001, the commission, suspecting serious corrosion problems at the plant, had ordered a shutdown by the end of the year to allow for visual checks and repair of any damage.

The plant's operator, FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating, requested an extension, citing the economic costs of an early shutdown and, despite opposition from some commission staff, a six-week delay was granted. A later report by the commission's inspector general found that the decision to grant the delay had been taken on the ground that absolute proof of corrosion - available only from the requested checks - was lacking and that the financial burden of the shutdown was therefore unjustified.

When workers finally carried out repairs, they found that boric acid had carved a cavity 7 inches deep and 5 inches wide through the entire outer layer of the reactor lid, leaving only three-eighth of an inch of inner lining to retain the primary coolant inside the vessel. Loss of coolant can lead to reactor meltdown and a huge release of high-level radiation.

Laurent Foucher, IRSN's head of equipment and structural analysis, said that plants were aging faster than expected and that finding replacement parts was becoming difficult. Tony Pietrangelo, vice president for regulatory affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobby group, agreed, saying, "There's a supply chain issue with ultraheavy equipment."
Asked whether deteriorating plants were leading to more near misses, Scott Burnell, a press officer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said no. But, he added, "we're having to deal with more complex situations."