Fennovoima Ltd. is a Finnish nuclear power company. It was established in 2007 by a consortium of Finnish power and industrial companies. It does not currently own any nuclear power reactors but is preparing to build a twelve hundred megawatt nuclear power plant at Pyhajoki. The Vice Chairman of the Fennovoima Board of Directors is the Deputy Director General for Business Development for Rosatom Energy International, a Russian government owned firm.
The Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) is responsible for the protection of Finnish citizens, their society, the environment and future generations from the dangers of nuclear radiation. STUK has been conducting a safety audit of the plans for the Fennovoima power plant construction project since last fall. The project will need to satisfy the safety requirements being analyzed by the audit in order to qualify for a permit to construct the power plant. Fennovoima hopes to start construction in 2018 and complete construction in 2024.
An initial report was issued by STUK last December. In that report, STUK raised concerns about whether or not Fennovoima was making safety a priority on the project. The report also posed the question of whether or not Fennovoima had the technical expertise required to safely construct and operate a nuclear power plant.
Part of the safety audit included interviews with three quarters of the workers on the project. Some of the workers interviewed said that the project managers were ignoring safety issues. There were reports of retaliation against workers who raised safety concerns. The interviewees included both recent hires and experienced workers. It turned out that some of the most experienced workers interviewed were very critical and reported troublesome observations about Fennovoima and their management practices.
The report said that in some cases, if workers refused to sign safety documents, signatures were forged on those documents so that they would be approved. Multiple interviewees reported this problem. Another problem that was reported suggested that keeping to the schedule was more important to the management than insuring that safety requirements were met. Only one member of the Fennovoima management team has experience in nuclear safety and different members of the management team have different ideas about nuclear safety.
The newspaper that wrote the story about the preliminary audit report has requested that STUK make the report public. STUK has refused to do so and said that the audit was still ongoing and would not be finished until 2017 at which time the full audit report would be issued.
Fennovoima has rejected the charges leveled by the workers who were interviewed. Fennovoima representative have said that they are working on improving communications within the project. They also said that the changed signatures that were reported had to do with the organization of the Rosatom portion of the project team and were not relevant to safety issues. Rosatom is the principle contractor on the project and will be responsible for the actual construction of the reactor.
The concerns raised by the workers who were interviewed reflect my concerns about nuclear power reactor construction projects. Too often, safety takes a back seat to money and time. And whistleblowers are often persecuted. Corporations tightly focused on the bottom line cannot be trusted to build and operate safe nuclear power plants.
