The environmental pressure group, Greenpeace International, is raising concerns about the Y2K readiness of the nuclear power industry and warning that the assurances of some national watchdog bodies are virtually meaningless in the absence of any real disclosure of testing results.
Greenpeace’s charges are based on evidence contained in a report commissioned from the London, UK engineering consultant Large Associates. The Millennium Bug: Y2K: Its Potential Threat To Nuclear Facilities: A Review, cites the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as warning that there will be one or two plant closures in the US with and more than a dozen other breaches of the regulatory safety regime.
Nuclear plants are extremely difficult to test, as replicating emergency conditions would require shutting the reactor down. This is fundamentally inadvisable, says report author John Large, who describes the first law of nuclear power as: ‘There shall be no experimentation.
Part of the problem, Large argues, lies not in the nuclear power plants themselves, but their dependency on other utilities, such as electricity and telecommunications. Although the US has investigated these relationships, many other countries, including the UK, have hardly touched on how failures in one industry will affect others.
The nuclear millennium threat is greater elsewhere, says Large. Korea and Taiwan, haven’t got a hope in hell of checking their systems, he says, because the origin of their nuclear plants’ embedded chips is so difficult to analyze. The US will monitor plants in the Far East as they change dates in the hope of gaining a few hours forewarning on how to deal with millennium glitches.
Until then, Large counsels vigilance and openness. He damns as misleading reports such as that of UK millennium watchdog Action 2000, which insisted the UK’s nuclear industry would be unaffected. Nothing’s being disclosed, he says, I don’t think we can do anything about curing it, we’re not as clever as we think we are.
