The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has mandated new vent filters for the thirty five Mark I and Mark II reactors in the United States because of what happened at Fukushima involving the Mark reactors there. Other rule changes have been suggested to the safety protocols for nuclear reactors in the U.S. Other nations and groups of nations have also been updating their rules for nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
In the European Union, the central agency for nuclear power regulation, the European Commission for Energy has proposed new tougher rules for the one hundred and thirty five nuclear reactors in the EU with an emphasis on increasing the safety of nuclear power generation. A battery of stress tests was run on all the reactors in the twenty seven nations of the European Union following the Fukushima disaster. The report the resulted from those tests found that almost all of the reactors in the EU needed to have improvements in their safety measures. There was also a call for standardizations so that there would be greater consistency across all the reactors in all the countries in the Union.
E.U. reactors already have regular tests but under the new rules there would more frequent and stringent tests. The new rules call for a safety review across the EU every six years. Inspectors from the Commission would be sent into any member state that was not doing enough to insure the safety of their reactors. There was also a call for peer review which in this context would mean that countries in the Union could send their own inspectors into neighboring member countries to review their neighbors’ adherence to safety rules and procedures. One additional provision of the new rules would be to have an emergency response center on each reactor site that would be protected against radioactivity, earthquake and flooding.
The rules would not go into effect unless and until approved by each of the member states in the E.U. As might be expected, some critics are saying that the new rules don’t go far enough while other critics are saying that they do not go far enough. It is not surprising that France which gets eighty percent of its electricity has been resisting some of the new rules, claiming that the rules that it has in place are good enough. Greenpeace, on the other hand, criticizes the new rules because there is no increased protection against the threat of terrorism. They are also concerned about regulatory capture and the lack of any increase in the power and authority of the regulators. The Commission views the new rules as “realistic.” The estimated cost spread of the coming years of all the proposed changes is in the neighborhood of thirty two billion U.S. dollars. Some of the countries in the E.U. such as Germany are turning their back on nuclear power entirely while some Eastern European countries have old Soviet era reactors that will have to be shut down because they cannot even be brought up to the current standards for reactors in the E.U.
Nuclear European Union:
