Chernobyl Post-Mortem

Since its creation 30 years ago the International Atomic Energy Agency has concentrated on encouraging the development of nuclear-power generation and, within limits, trying to see that nuclear materials are not diverted from nuclear-power plants to the production of atomic weapons.

The business of trying to head off the spread of nuclear weapons is a worthwhile endeavor. But, as the Soviet nuclear accident at Chernobyl amply demonstrated, there is also a crying need for greater IAEA attention to nuclear-reactor safety.

The IAEA meeting now under way in Vienna is encouraging evidence that the agency recognizes that responsibility. It remains to be seen whether the international body is ready or able to undertake the sticky job of clamping down on nations whose nuclear programs fail to meet strict safety standards.

The purpose of the Vienna gathering is to receive a Soviet report on the Chernobyl disaster. The Kremlin originally indulged in an outrageous cover-up of the accident, which turned out to be even worse than Western experts thought at the time. In the Soviet Union itself many thousands of acres of farmland were contaminated. Food supplies may be affected for 70 years. Cancer deaths attributable to the accident could reach 45,000. In Norway it turns out that grass and other vegetation has been irradiated in large areas of the country--necessitating, among other things, a large-scale slaughter of reindeer.

The Soviet technical report to the IAEA turned out to be straightforward by usual Soviet standards. But while the Russians admitted to design problems with the Chernobyl reactor, they tried to put the blame almost entirely on human errors by the reactor operators.

Western experts at the meeting are not buying that. The British, for example, recall that they investigated the Chernobyl-type Soviet reactors in the mid-1970s and decided against using the technology because of a built-in tendency to generate sudden and hard-to-control bursts of power. Making the reactors safe, they decided, requires an excessive dependence on control mechanisms and human operators.

The Soviet nuclear-power program is heavily dependent on graphite-moderated reactors of the Chernobyl type. What the Soviets seemed to be saying at Vienna about their next step was that they would beef up the control mechanisms at those plants. But that will be enormously expensive, and Western experts question whether they will be safe even then.

Ideally, the IAEA should develop design and operating standards that all new reactors everywhere would have to meet. Unfortunately, an international consensus does not exist for such strong medicine. But at least the agency should lean on the Soviets to move to safer reactor designs--and, meanwhile, to do their utmost to make the Chernobyl-type reactors safe. The fact that the Soviets felt it necessary to explain themselves to the IAEA member nations demonstrates that the agency has considerable moral authority. It should use that authority as leverage to nudge the Russians and everybody else into making reactors as safe as they can be.

There seems to be no question that commercial nuclear reactors in the United States and other Western countries are safer than their Soviet counterparts. But that isn’t good enough. Congress should make sure that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes a suitably skeptical review of nuclear-reactor safety in this country. Nuclear-regulatory agencies in Western Europe and Japan should do the same.

Any thorough review of reactor safety must ultimately include military reactors--both the onshore facilities that produce the makings for nuclear weapons, and the submarines and other warships that use nuclear propulsion.

The Soviet Union isn’t ready to go that far. For that matter, neither are the United States, France and Great Britain. But the IAEA meeting is at least a step in the right direction.