By JUSTIN HUGGLER
TEMELIN - The people who live near Temelin, in the rolling hills of south Bohemia, have been issued with two small tablets each.
They have been told to keep them in a safe place - and to take them if anything goes wrong at the Soviet-designed nuclear power plant a few kilometres from their homes.
To the fury of its European Union neighbours, the Czech Republic is on the verge of activating the nuclear rector, which German experts say may not be safe. Austria this week threatened to veto Czech membership of the EU if the plant, partly modernised by a subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, is activated as planned around September 10.
And the German government announced that its nuclear watchdog, the GRS, is not convinced Temelin is safe, and demanded urgent meetings with the Czech authorities before the first reactor is activated. The Germans say Temelin could affect the Czech's Republic's application for membership of the EU.
Austria, whose border is only 48km away, has been furiously lobbying against Temelin for months. Greenpeace claims there are serious safety shortcomings at Temelin - claims which are strenuously denied by the Czech nuclear safety authority.
Temelin's two reactors are Russian VVER-1000s - generally regarded as the safest of the Russian designs, and completely different from the reactor involved in the Chernobyl disaster. Work started at Temelin under the old communist authorities, in 1983, and has been going on ever since. Last year, the Czech authorities decided to finish and activate the reactor. Parts of the plant - the instrumentation and control - are being replaced with American designs by the US firm Westinghouse, a subsidiary of BNFL. The Czech Republic is not short of electricity, but Temelin is expected to provide lucrative energy exports.
In the villages around Temelin, opinion is divided. "They should have switched it on months ago," says Frantisek Petrasek. "We should be making money from it. The Germans should mind their own business. They're just trying to ruin our economy."
But not everybody agrees. "Of course I'm scared," says Gerhard Draschko, an Austrian visiting Hluboka castle with his two young children. "I'm scared for the children."
"Czech people don't realise we have a democracy now," says Horst Lampert, an anti-nuclear campaigner who lives near Temelin. "They think we have to accept what the politicians decide, like in the old days. They don't realise we can object, so they don't."
Lampert organises holidays in the Czech Republic for the child victims of the Chernobyl disaster. "They've got no hair, they know there is no cure for them and that they're dying."
The GRS, Germany's nuclear watchdog, in a report for the German government, has identified three areas of concern at Temelin - all of them concerned with emergency safety mechanisms.
The most serious appears to be the fear that safety valves which allow steam out of the reactor cannot cope if water comes out instead - a very rare but potentially dangerous occurrence which was first identified in the Three Mile Island disaster. The Czech nuclear licensing authority, the SUJB, is confident it has already resolved the Germans' other two worries. One is a fear cooling pipes may break; the SUJB says that is prevented by an American design the Germans are not familiar with. The other is that emergency batteries do not have enough capacity; the Czechs say it has already been increased.
But the German Environment Ministry says it is concerned with Temelin in general. The plant is surrounded with unsubstantiated allegations of safety lapses and incompetence.
The environmental organisation Greenpeace has filed a criminal complaint, claiming safety documents had been falsified to cover up an incompetent repair on the main cooling pipes to the reactor, which the group says could lead to the pipes breaking, a disaster that has never occurred in a nuclear power plant. The SUJB insists the pipes were correctly repaired and thoroughly tested.
Greenpeace claims there are cracks in the reactor vessel larger than the safety limit, but offers no documentary evidence. The SUJB says the cracks are well within the safety limit. A Czech engineer who worked on the project says pipes were not properly cleaned, which could allow dirt to get into the reactor. The SUJB says they were thoroughly cleaned. There are claims nuclear fuel was moved without precautions and radioactivity escaped. The SUJB denies this. There is no conclusive evidence for any of these allegations.
The Czech authorities say the German and Austrian interventionas are politically motivated and have nothing to do with safety fears. Germany's concerns come only from the Environment Ministry, they say and that ministry is controlled by the Green Party, which is ideologically opposed to nuclear power. Germany recently decided to phase all ist nuclear power stations out of use. The Austrian Government, too is opposed to nuclear power: Austria has no nuclear power stations and vows never to build any.
The SUJB's own annual reports, though, are damning of safety procedures at Temelin - particularly of those of Skoda, the Czech contractor responsible for most for the hardware. But Dana Drabova, chairman of the SUJB, says those concerns do not affect the safety of the finished reactor, which is being thoroughly tested.
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