View from under the
NUCLEAR POWER in their countries. But this sort of statement by the authorities responsible proves nothing about the real safety or lack of it of the reactors.
The Swedish government has been quick to point out that the Swedish reactors are of a different model than the one that broke down in Chemobyl. And a representative of the Swedish industrialists' organization Industriforbundet has argued -that "The Soviet reactors are so unlike the Swedish ones in their basic con-
STOCKHOLM - The accident that was too improbable to be true has actually happened.
"Naturally, it was the Russians that did this, with their contempt for human life." That sums up the official Swedish reaction to the nuclear power plant breakdown in Chernobyl.
The overflowing news pages and editorials of the papers and the
May Day speeches of the social democratic leaders have spread the government's, the industrialists' and the right's common picture of the problem over the country like a great cloud of poisonous fallout.
GORAN EKLOF
But there was absolutely nothing improbable, unbelievable or incredible meltdown in Chernobyl.
Everything could have been expected, except for the exact time and place.
In fact, the probabilities for such a catastrophe were accurately foreseen, were calculated, the effects plotted and countermeasures planned countries that are world's 370 nuclear power plants.
The risk of meltdown is estimated general as one in 10,000
Already 4,000 reactors have operathe world's nuclear power plants. So, the probability that a meltdown would occur now rather than later was almost exactly equal.
"With an extensive nuclear-power such events at reguar intervals," a professor at the Danish nuclear research station in Risoe has said. In the same breath he said that Europe should increase nuclear-power production in order to advance economic
The same nonchalance in the face of the Soviet disaster can be seen in the first comments on the nuclear
Swedish nucleardisaster by the and the business industry power paper Dagens Industri:
"Of an accident such course, a more complicated business creates climate," said the chief of the reactor division at the nuclear-power concern
Asea Atom. The concern may lose two orders worth 20 billion crowns
[roughly 7 to the US dollar].
The paper stressed that Swedish nuclear technology has a good repu-
International Viewpoint 19 May 1986 tation internationally.
At least in the beginning. the Swedish government took a similar attitude. It stressed that the alerts had worked, that no conclusions about the Swedish nuclear-power program should be drawn from the experiences at Chernobyl.
All demands for a reappraisal were dismissed from the outset in an almost provocative way. And instead of discussion there were just denunciations of the Russians and the Moderaterna [the conservative party in the last bourgeois government that were the strongest advocates
What are the facts about the claims that are being repeated over and over
Sweden and other Western power program is the Soviet minister responsible for nuclear power, Vitalii Sklyarov, wrote in the magazine Soviet Life, as late as this February:
"The odds on a meltdown are 1 in 10,000 reactors. The installations have reliable safeguards, which are assured against breakdown by a threetier system. Each system independently of the others...
"Hermetically sealed buildings, a closed system for radiocative material kind of leakage into the environment."
certainly find almost energy minister, Birgitta Dahl, and her colleagues in other Western coun tries about the nuclear power plants struction that a similar accident is impossible in any of the Swedish nuclear power plants."
It is obvious that a "similar accident" is highly unlikely, since the Swedish reactors do not use graphite dampers like the Soviet ones. But that does not exclude another kind of meltdown.
After the accident at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the argument was used that such an accident could not happen here, because the Swedish reactors were different. But the Chernobyl reactors were also different from those in Harrisburg.
Now the Swedish authorities are pointing to a strong concrete casing surrounding the Swedish reactors. There are reports that the Soviet Chernobyl reactor was also enclosed in a protective concrete casing. But in any event the idea that a concrete casing could provide any guarantee against the diabolic forces released by the meltdown is a pipe dream. Sweden's radioactivity safeguards fail the test
The Swedish authorities have also pointed to the existence of protecfilter chambers that can out up to 99 per cent of the radiation released in a serious accident.
The problem is just that the Swedish government did not make 1981, and the time allotted for building them extends to 1988. In fact, only two of the 12 Swedish reactors in operation are equipped with
That is meager assurance and, to say the least, incomplete infrom the Soviets was irresponsible, unacceptable and criminal. But in this respect also, the Swedish authorities have no reason to congratulate them-
At first, it was thought that the increased radioactivity in the atmosphere over Sweden came from the Forsmark reactor north of Stockholm. This was because the instruments
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nuclear cloud
of the monitoring institutions could not be read over the weekend (!), and so the higher radioactivity was only noticed when workers came off work showing higher radioactivity levels that they picked up over the weekend.
Then, when it was ascertained that the radiation came from Ukraine, emergency measures came one after the other. There were radiation checks on traffic coming from the southeastern part of the Soviet Union. Doctors were assigned to examine tourists, returning students and construction workers. A directive was given that in the worst hit areas cows should be kept in and not let out to graze. And anxious questions were put to the Soviet authorities about why they did not evacuate Kiev.
However, not a word was said about Swedish dealing with a similar accident. Was it by chance that the Swedish Institute for Protection Against Radioactivity [Straalskuddsinstitutet] failed to publish figures about the doses of radioactivity measured in greater Stockholm? Or did that have something to do with not wanting to "alarm" people in a city that in fact cannot be evacuated?
Criticism of the failure to evacuate Kiev, which is within 80 miles of the site of the accident, would boomerang if people realized that the Swedish authorities have only worked out contingency plans for an area 50 kilometers from the Swedish reactors - apparently to avoid having to consider plans for bigger cities such as Goteborg and Uppsala, which are just a bit further away from reactors.
But the worst of all is that the social democratic government has flatly rejected the demand for closing the two nuclear power plants Barse baeck in Skaane, which are only 12 miles from Sweden's third largest city, Malmo, and a like distance from Copenhagen. That the Swedish reactors are only 12 miles from Denmark's capital and major population center, one-sixth of the distance from Chernobyl to Kiev.
In Denmark, the use of nuclear power has been rejected. Now the Danish social democrats have taken the initiative to demand that their comrades in the Swedish government shut down the Barseback plants, and this initiative has just gotten a clear majority in the Danish parliament.
"Here in the West, nuclear power is safer - that's the comforting refrain," wrote the bourgeois Danish evening paper B.T.
"Yes, but if one day it was Barseback that melted down, we would be saying goodby to Copenhagen.
+ RIP +
VICTINA DEL
"PRO RÉS"
### NUCLAR
This risk is small, but it still exists. But after all is such a risk acceptable for the sake of a power plant. Of course not!"
A lot of Danes are thinking that way, now that the threat has become more palpable, with a measurable contamination of the land, the ban on grazing on the Swedish side of the Oeresund, warnings about green vegetables in Eastern and Southern
On May 2, the Danish daily paper Ekstra-bladet started a petition campaign calling for shutting down the Barseback plants. It ran a banner head across its first page saying "Get rid of Barseback now!" And at the same time, it published a list of names "of people supporting the demand.
In a letter to the Swedish premier, Ingvar the paper's editor in chief described Barsebaeck as "a daily threat to 2 million Danes. Only Sweden has had the effrontery to build a nuclear power plant less than 20 kilometers from the capital of another country."
The letter ended:
"We are not going to let ourselves be pacified and sedated by irresponsible experts' talk. Take this menace away from our door! Barseback must go!"
This reaction, along with others since the Chernobyl disaster, fits in with the campaign that the powerful antinuclear movement has waged over the last ten years against Barse baeck and against the subseshelved plans for a Danish
By its persistant work, the Danish social democratic party was brought over to demanding that Barseback be removed without any delay.
"We are going to ask the Swedes to shut down Barseback," the Danish social democratic party chair, Anker Jorgensen repeated on May 1.
The polls now show that 60 per cent of Swedes are against nuclear power. And so the pro-nuclear-power social democratic government has had to take a softer tone.
With time, this pressure should lead to something more concrete. The criticisms made of the Soviets have not always been well enough thought out by those who defend the Swedish nuclear-power program, and a lot of the arguments backfire against almost every aspect of the government's and the nuclear-power industry's own plans.
The official Swedish line, set by the government's proposition in the 1980 referendum, is that nuclear power should be phased out before 2010. But the People's Campaign Against Nuclear Power [Folkkampanjen mot kaernkraft], which has now got a new wind in its sails, is demanding an immediate dismantling.
Other sections of public opinion, which are also reflected in the social democratic party, are not for such a radical line. But stronger and stronger demands are being raised in Swedish society that the dismantling should start now, and not some time in the 1990s, which is the government's position.
Naturally this pressure is being focused on the call for shutting down Barseback, a demand that the government is finding it more and more difficult to oppose, and on the demand that the government go back on its decision to invest billions of crowns to expand the Ringhal nuclearpower plant south of Goteborg.
The Swedish spring has come late but it has finally arrived and it is a hot one. For the government and the nuclear industry, it is going to continue into a hot summer and fall. We can expect powerful mobilizations by antinuclear opinion in Sweden. International Viewpoint 19 May 1986