THIRTY NUCLEAR energy-producing states have called for safety audits on all reactors to ensure lessons are learned from the Fukushima accident in Japan.
With opposition to nuclear power growing in many countries since the Japanese disaster, government ministers and officials representing some of the world’s biggest producers moved to reassure public opinion by agreeing common procedures for crisis management and insisting on regular “stress tests” of reactors.
These tests would determine how well nuclear plants could withstand major disasters such as the tsunami that hit Japan in March.
At a summit in Paris, hosted under France’s G8 presidency, the states called for the global role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be reinforced.
“The Fukushima accident in Japan shook us all and the need arose very quickly to draw lessons, to improve and lift our standards and co-operation on nuclear safety,” French environment minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said after the talks yesterday.
There are no mandatory international nuclear safety regulations only recommendations from the IAEA which national regulators are in charge of enforcing.
The meeting, co-hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, aimed to find common ground among major nuclear-producing countries ahead of an IAEA ministerial meeting later this month in Vienna.
The Fukushima disaster has pushed nuclear energy up the political agenda especially in Europe.
EU states have already agreed to proceed with stress tests on the bloc’s 143 reactors and have called for them to be carried out worldwide.
Opinion is sharply divided over the industry’s future. Germany’s government decided last month to phase out all of the country’s reactors by 2022, reversing a plan pushed through parliament last year to extend the lifespan of the facilities by an average of 12 years.
Public opinion in Germany was cool on atomic power and chancellor Angela Merkel said the Fukushima disaster – the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986 – forced her to reassess her position on the issue.
France, the world’s most nuclear-dependent country, has done little to conceal its annoyance with its neighbour’s decision.
Speaking in public on Berlin’s stance for the first time yesterday, President Nicolas Sarkozy refused to criticise the decision but insisted on the need for “sang froid in running the affairs of a country”.
Germany’s decision has given a fillip to the green movement in France.
A long-standing tacit truce between the Green Party and government over the issue has ended, and the Green Party indicated last week that an anti-nuclear stance would be the price of any electoral pact with the Socialist Party in advance of the presidential election next year.
A key Green demand is the immediate closure of all nuclear plants more than 30 years old and the gradual shutdown of all other reactors over the next 20 years.
Mr Sarkozy suggested yesterday that France could benefit from Germany’s policy shift, however, by selling electricity to its neighbour. “If they stop their reactors, then they will have to be replaced. We’ll be candidates to sell electricity,” he said.
France produces 80 per cent of its power from 58 reactors.