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Nuclear Power Debate

German Government Concedes Lower Safety Standards at Older Plants

Saturday's technical fault at a nuclear plant in northern Germany has sparked a fresh debate about the safety of nuclear power. A media report says the government has for some time held the view that older plants don't match the safety standards of more modern ones.

The German government conceded several years ago that older nuclear power stations such as Krümmel near Hamburg and Biblis in southwestern Germany lag behind modern reactors in terms of safety standards, a Berlin newspaper reported on Wednesday.

"The new boiling water reactors and pressurized water reactors of the third or fourth generation have fundamentally better safety characteristics," says a written government statement issued in response to a question submitted in parliament by the opposition Green Party, Berliner Zeitung newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Krümmel, which has been beset by technical problems and was shut down on Saturday after a short circuit in one of its two transformers, came online in 1984 and is an older generation boiling water reactor.

In a response to another question, the government went further and said the older nuclear reactors fall short of current standards of science and technology. They don't belong "to the world's most modern and safest nuclear power stations," the government said. The two answers date back to 2007 and 2006.

The technical problems at Krümmel, which was only restarted last month after a two-year outage following a fire, have reignited a debate ahead of September's federal election about nuclear safety and the timetable for the phaseout of Germany's 17 nuclear power stations.

Splitting Atoms in Parliament

Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats want to relax the time schedules, but the center-left Social Democrats want to stick to the plans and the opposition Greens are calling for a quicker withdrawal.

The head of the German power company RWE, Jürgen Grossmann, insisted that all nuclear reactors in Germany, old and new, were safe. "The nuclear power stations in Germany operate at the highest international standards. There isn't a single power station in operation that isn't safe," Grossmann told mass-circulation Bild newspaper in an interview published on Wednesday.

"The older nuclear power stations in our country are at the top level as well. Without qualification. By international comparison our 'old plants' are still young. In other countries they run twice as long," Grossmann said. German reactors were monitored more strictly than anywhere else in the world, he added.

Grossmann rejected a comment made by Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel on Monday that technical problems had become the norm at German nuclear reactors. "This claim is completely untrue. That kind of statement isn't very becoming of the environment minister, not even during election campaigns."

Swedish-German utility Vattenfall, the operator of Krümmel, said on Tuesday the plant would stay offline "at least" for several months because it has to replace its two transformers.

cro -- with wire reports