Questions were being asked in continental Europe's mainstream media after the shutdown of four of Sweden's ten nuclear power reactors on 25 July. The decision to stop the reactors was made after an electrical failure prevented power being supplied to the Forsmark 1 plant.
In the event of a power failure, four diesel generators are supposed to kick in and enable the safe withdrawal of fuel rods and the shutdown of the reactor. In July two of the generators failed for more than 20 minutes and, as meltdown starts after 90 minutes without power, workers were - according to the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) - obliged to activate safety systems, including emergency water cooling and spraying, after they were unable to discern how far the rods had been withdrawn.
Opinions divided
A few days after the event, Greenpeace reported one former director of Forsmark as saying “It was pure luck that there wasn't a meltdown”. As usual within the nuclear industry, opinion on this seems to be divided, with Forsmark's communications director saying the risk of meltdown had been “nonexistent”.
Peace News contacted Britain's Health and Safety Executive - whose Nuclear Safety Directorate (NSD) is the UK's nuclear power regulator - and asked whether there were implications for Britain's power plants. NSD press officer Mark Wheeler confirmed that, after the Forsmark shutdown the HSE had asked operators of nuclear power stations to confirm their continuing safe operation. He added, “the power stations in Sweden are of different design - boiling water reactors - which we do not have. The failure occurred in electrical power supply equipment, rather than the diesel generators themselves. I do not believe that British nuclear power stations use this type of equipment, so the precise failure mechanism could not occur here.”
Greenpeace, however, suggested that “in the UK a generator failure like Sweden's could easily happen,” likening the potential consequences to those at Three Mile Island.
While several European countries are viewing nuclear power as the solution to their carbon ills, Sweden plans to phase out its nuclear plants.