UNITED NATIONS secretary general Ban Ki-moon has called for a global review of nuclear safety standards during a visit to Chernobyl in Ukraine, site of the world’s worst atomic disaster.
“The standards of nuclear safety should be fully reviewed. The International Atomic Energy Agency must work carefully in this direction. The world community must consider the advantages and disadvantages that nuclear energy brings and to protect nuclear facilities from terrorism,” Mr Ban said after seeing the power station where a reactor exploded on April 26th, 1986.
“We will have a high-level meeting in June with this aim. And in September, we expect to hold a world leaders summit, devoted to strengthening world nuclear security.” Mr Ban said it was “an extremely moving experience” to visit the crippled reactor, which sits inside a 30km-radius exclusion zone where radioactivity is still extremely high, and a town and several villages and farms lie abandoned after a mass evacuation following the accident.
“It was one thing to hear and to read about the Chernobyl disaster. It is another totally different experience to see it,” Mr Ban added.
He visited Chernobyl the day after international donors pledged €550 million to create a new high-tech shelter for reactor number four, which suffered a catastrophic meltdown during a failed test on its cooling systems. It is currently protected by an ailing concrete and steel structure built after the disaster.
Ukraine had hoped to receive pledges for €740 million to build the new shell by 2015, but several countries – including Ireland – said economic difficulties prevented them from giving funds.
“The bulk of the sum has been raised. The rest of it, I believe, will be raised in the near future. In other words, this makes it possible for us to build the confinement facility and to complete the construction by 2015,” Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich said yesterday.
The 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which spewed radioactive fallout across a swathe of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus and affected several countries in northern Europe, has been given additional poignancy by the plight of the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan, crippled by last month’s earthquake and tsunami.
“We have seen in Japan the effects of natural disasters particularly in areas vulnerable to seismic activities,” Mr Ban said.
“Climate change means more incidents of freak and increasingly severe weather, and with the number of nuclear energy facilities scheduled to increase substantially in the coming decades our vulnerability will only grow.”
Mr Ban said Fukushima and Chernobyl had “given us two strong messages. We have to learn lessons from these tragedies.”
“The unfortunate truth is we are likely to see more such disasters. . . . To many, nuclear energy looks to be a relatively clean and logical choice in an era of increasing resource scarcity. Yet the record requires us to ask painful questions: have we correctly calculated its risks and costs?”
French prime minister Francois Fillon invited Ukraine to attend a meeting of G20 states on nuclear security issues scheduled for May in Paris. “We need to review the security technologies that are being used today with nuclear power equipment,” Mr Fillon said. “We believe it is appropriate to discuss the issue of introduction of a new, common system of quick response to emergencies, so that we are able to join our efforts to address these issues.”