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BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 100-3-222
TITLE:             Nuclear Power Reactor Accidents and Safety Measures
BY:                Dr. H. G. Trend
DATE:              1979-4-6
COUNTRY:           (n/a)
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  RAD Background Report/78

--- Begin ---

RFERL

RADIO FREE EUROPE Research

RAD Background Report/78
6 April 1979

NUCLEAR POWER REACTOR ACCIDENTS AND SAFETY MEASURES

By Dr. H. G. Trend

Summary: The Harrisburg nuclear mishap brings to
mind other nuclear accidents which have occurred in
the West as well as in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
All countries will have to tighten their safety
requirements, and the communist countries have
even further to go than the West. What is lacking
in the communist areas is open public discussion of
the problem and public manifestations of concern
which would add support for even stricter safety
measures.

+ + +

This material was prepared for the use of the staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

[page 2]

RAD BR/78

America's worst nuclear power plant accident to date (located
near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) has provided a tense week of anxiety
for hundreds of thousands of residents within 32 kms. of the plant.

Long before repairs have been made to this crippled and
leaking atomic energy power plant and before it is put back into
operation, detailed reviews of safety standards as well as their
revision will have been made at several levels of government and
in industry. Stricter safety standards will be introduced, even
though those in effect in the United States are among the highest
in the world, simply because the old safety requirements have
proved to be inadequate. The Harrisburg event has seriously shaken
people's confidence and has increased the general public's skepticism.
President Carter's recent visit to the area merely accented official
concern over recent developments and the consequences of America's
worst-ever nuclear power plant failure, even though, to date, no
loss of life directly attributable to failures in nuclear plant
operation has been experienced in the United States.

Other Nuclear Accidents in the West. Britain, relying on
gas-cooled reactors rather than the pressure-water type generally
employed in the US and Eastern Europe, has also experienced
"meltdown" accidents where the nuclear fuel was subjected to such heat
as to cause the release of radioactive vapors into the atmosphere.
The first occurred in 1957, when tons of uranium were subjected to
incendiary forces resulting in atmospheric emissions -- however,
still below the radiation levels permitted by international
regulations. The radioactive vapours were able to escape into the
atmosphere more readily because no enveloping dome surrounding the
nuclear vessels had originally been built. The Harrisburg nuclear
plant has such a safety envelope, because the US national regulations
require its inclusion before a license to build is granted by the
federal authorities. The first and only nuclear plant to be built
in the Soviet Union or for that matter, in Eastern Europe with a
similar steel-reinforced concrete containment dome was the Number
5 plant at the Soviet Union's largest nuclear power complex, being
built in 19 78 in Novovoronezh, some 485 kms. south of Moscow on the
Kinks of the River Don. This was, therefore, the first such safety
provision included in a Soviet nuclear power project built over the
last 24 years. None of the previous 29 reactors had a containment
dome. No doubt future Soviet-designed nuclear power plants will have
this as a regular safety feature. Some 27 Soviet reactors are now
in operation.

When the Soviet Union constructed a nuclear power plant for
Finland the Finns insisted on the building of a protective envelope.

France also experienced damage to its gas-cooled reactor -- which
is much bigger than the one previously built in the UK -- in 1969. As
in the United States and the United Kingdom, no losses of life
attributable to nuclear power accidents were recorded in France.

[page 3]

RAD BR/78

Nuclear Accidents in Comecon Countries? In Czechoslovakia
and the Soviet Union nuclear accidents involving the loss of
lives have occurred, according to unofficial reports from these
countries and various Western sources.

Over the last two years or so, according to a recent report
of the Czechoslovak Charter 77 group, [1] two serious accidents
occurred at the Jaslovska Bohunice reactor in southwestern Slovakia.
During the first accident, on 5 January 1976, two technicians
suffocated from the gases and radioactive gases were emitted into
the atmosphere. On 24 February 1977 the second accident, caused by
a fuel rod installation error, led to contamination of the air, and
an accidental release of radioactive waste water contaminated the
nearby stream. The Prague authorities have asked the International
Atomic Energy Agency "categorically to deny" any reports of
accidents. A spokesman for the agency in Vienna indicated that,
since it had no effective means of checking, the agency was in no
position to comment. Strict Czechoslovak official control of the
local media and visits to the plant has led to a dead end.

In the Soviet Union three major nuclear accidents have been
reported. [2] An accident in the Ural Mountains in the late 1950s
(late 1957 or early 1958) is said to have spread radioactive
material over about 2,600 sq. kms., but Soviet authorities have
never acknowledged this accident. A Soviet dissident biochemist,
Zhores Medvedev, was the first to report it in 1972 and he claimed
that hundreds of people had been killed by exposure to radiation.
A second accident in Kysht, which is said to have taken place in
1960 or 1961, was reported in US central intelligence documents
released during 1977, as well as another one reported to have occurred
in the early 1970s at the Shevchenko fast-breader reactor, located
on the Mangyshlak Peninsula jutting into the Caspian Sea. Failure
in the cooling system, forcing a shut-down of the reactor in 1973,
was the cause of the accident in the latter case, according to the
same source. In 1974 senior Soviet officials denied the occurrence of
the accident.

Thermal pollution caused by the operation of a nuclear reactor
operating near Rheinsberg, East Germany, has also been reported. [3]

Safety Precautions Adequate in Comecon Countries? Of the
two hazards, radioactive and thermal pollution, the former is by
far the more serious to human life and health and of longer
duration. Western experts have been asserting that the Soviet Union
and the East European countries have been less preoccupied with the
incorporation of various backup safety features than the Western
countries and Japan. They point to the lack of the inclusion of a
protective reinforced concrete shield [4] in Soviet-designed nuclear

--------------------

(1) "Two Accidents in the Jaslovske Nuclear Power Plant,"

Czechoslovak Situation Report/40, Radio Free Europe Research, 4
December 1978, Item 1.

(2) Reviewed in an AP dispatch from Moscow which appeared in the
Baltimore Sun of 1 April 1979.

(3) Per Spiegel, Vol.32 No.42, 16 October 1978, pp. 89 and 91 citing
Helga Stoetzer, an East German journalist writing for the women's
magazine Fuer Dich.

(4) Adding about 30,000,000 US dollars (almost 20,000,000 rubles) to
US construction costs.

[page 4]

RAD BR/78

plants installed in Eastern Europe until 1978, when the
construction of Soviet plant Number 5 located on the River Don was
undertaken; to the inclusion of safety provisions only for a single
break in the pipe carrying the reactor coolant, while those in
the US can handle simultaneous breaks at both ends; as well as
to the choice of locations much closer to population centers
than has been the practice in noncommunist areas; and to the
less strictly regulated handling of nuclear waste. [5] in
rebuttal Soviet experts point to their safety record, claiming
that no accidents have occurred since the nuclear reactor power
program was initiated.

Prior to the Harrisburg failure in the US, as in much of the
West and Japan, the Soviet Union's and Eastern Europe's experts
had been emphasizing the essentially safe character of thermal
nuclear production of electricity. Recently a Hungarian physicist,
Laszlo Jeki, unlike Soviet and other East European commentators,
has said that despite design and operational differences in thermal
nuclear power plants, efforts for maximum safety were being made
everywhere. [6] He went on to claim that no accident in any nuclear
power plant throughout the world, including those operating in
socialist countries, had involved radioactive contamination of plant
personnel or the unit's environment.

After the Harrisburg event East European and Soviet commentators
have continued to stress the essentially safe character of nuclear
power production in their countries. In a Soviet television
commentary, however, Anatoly Osyannikov, claimed that the "capitalists'"
lust for profits compromised safety measures at the Harrisburg
plant, [7] thereby presenting the latest accident to the televsion
public with an ideological twist.

While other Western and Japanese experts are arriving in the
US to see what they can learn from the Harrisburg mishap, no one
from Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union has so far appeared there or
apparently even asked whether such a visit were at all permissable. Comeon
members may fear that the appearance of any of their experts at the
Harrisburg site might be construed as an admission on their part
of a possible lack of adequate safety requirements at Soviet-designed
nuclear power plants.

Official and Unofficial Pressure for Safety

Experts in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, however, have
indicated concern for improving nuclear safety conditions. Recently
a conference on the safety and reliability of nuclear reactors and

----------------

(5) See Thomas O'Toole in the Washington Post, 8 October 1978.

(6) Radio Budapest, 9 December 1978.

(7) Reuter dispatch from Moscow, 2 April 1979.

[page 5]

RAD BR/78

atomic power stations was attended by 180 experts and scientists
from all 10 Comecon countries. The conference, which opened last
year on November 14 at Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia, was closed
to the public and non-Comecon specialists. Secrecy concerning such
expert discussions of safety requirements and experience in Eastern
Europe adds to the submerged anxieties of the vast majority of its
inhabitants, but official restrictions on any open public
manifestations on this issue prevent free public enquiry or expression. Of
the socialist countries with operating nuclear power plants, only
in Yugoslavia has there been open local -- popular as well as
administrative -- opposition, this time to the building of

Yugoslavia's second thermal nuclear power plant, which is to be located
on an island near the Dalmatian city of Zadar. [8]

While in the West European countries and Japan public
demonstrations and open discussion have served as a source of additional
pressure on public officials and industry for stricter safety
regulations, the citizens of the East European countries and the
Soviet Union will have to rely primarily on officially generated
stimuli for more safety controls. Some help for the inhabitants
of Comecon countries, however, has been provided by Western officials,
who have instituted various inquiries into nuclear facilities located
in Eastern Europe near their border, or by demonstrations arranged
by West European residents objecting to the lack of adequate safety
provisions in nearby East European plants.

Nuclear Units in Operation and their Future

Currently over 150 nuclear reactors are operating in the
world. Of this number, 72 nuclear power plants are located in the
US, producing about 13 per cent of total electrical energy; the
United Kingdom is second with 33, and relying on nuclear sources
to about the same degree as the US; France has 11, and a 8.4 per
cent share of energy; West Germany has 14 plants, producing about 11
per cent of the nations' electrical power; and Italy has only 4
nuclear plants, producing about 2 per cent. The East Germans have
4 such power plants; while Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia each have
2 plants; Hungary, with Soviet aid, is building its Paks nuclear
plant. Romania has signed agreements and received credits for the
construction of Canadian-designed power plants, concluding, as did
Yugoslavia, that Soviet-designed nuclear power plants are less safe.

Growing reluctance has generally been emerging on the nuclear
power construction scene, even before the Harrisburg accident.
This has been reflected in a drying up of new contracts and even
the cancellation of old ones for American, British, and West German
nuclear construction firms. Only France is pushing firmly ahead
with its nuclear power construction program. Further delays in the
near future can be expected in the West and in Japan. This seems to
be the case even though the costs of fuel for petroleum-fired power
plants have increased significantly this year.

----------------------

(8) Zdenko Antic, "Yugoslav Citizens Oppose Nuclear Power Plant
Construction," RAD Background Report/61 (Yugoslavia), RFER,
15 March 1979.

[page 6]

RAD BR/78

In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe current assessments
seem to point to little relaxation in the ambitious program
outlined for the 1980s. The slow-down in the annual growth rate for
Soviet crude petroleum, on which Comecon members rely heavily, as
well as Comecon members' headlong drive to exploit lignite coal
deposits and even much lower energy hard carbonaceous raw material
sources as a stop-gap measure, point to a growing feeling of urgency
among Comecon members in the field of energy.

Expanding long-term world-wide energy requirements should
restimulate programs for the development of nuclear and other
forms of energy in the West and Japan. The further development
of nuclear energy sources will, no doubt, begin to move at a
much faster pace only after some of the public anxieties restimulated
by the recent Harrisburg accident have been dissipated by the
application of stricter safety measures. Pre-Harrisburq estimates
placed West European and Japanese dependence on thermonuclear
generated electric power in the range of 30 to 50 per cent by the
1990s.

- end -

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