Cuba Pressing Its Nuclear Power Program Despite Outsiders : Energy: The island’s first plant is now under construction. It’s an eyesore for some. But others see it as guaranteeing cheaper future fuel bills.

For admirers of Cuba’s attractive Caribbean coastline of lush tropical vegetation and sparkling blue sea, the emerging steel and concrete frame of the island’s first nuclear power plant is an eyesore.

For Cuban energy experts, however, the plant being built at Juragua on the island’s southern central coast is a guarantee of cheaper fuel bills in the future and a solid basis for industrial development.

The Cuban government is pushing ahead with an ambitious nuclear power program despite world concern about the risks of nuclear energy and worries about future economic links with the Soviet Union, which is supplying the nuclear technology.

“It’s the most feasible option for us in the immediate future,” chief nuclear technician Pedro Abigantus told reporters who visited the plant, which dominates the skyline seven miles from the port city of Cienfuegos.

The nuclear power station, which will have four Soviet-designed pressurized water reactors, is the Communist island’s biggest development project, costing more than $2.5 billion and financed under existing Cuban-Soviet cooperation accords.

Construction began seven years ago, and 10,000 workers now toil daily on the plant site and surrounding infrastructure.

All of the plant’s parts, except for construction materials and a few minor items, have to be shipped thousands of miles from the Soviet Union.

Abigantus said the first of Juragua’s four reactors, each producing 417 megawatts of electric power, is due to start up in 1993, three years behind the original schedule. The remaining reactors will come on line at two-year intervals after the first, with all four expected to be in operation by the year 2000.

The first consignment of nuclear fuel, slightly enriched Uranium 235, will arrive by sea from the Soviet Union shortly before the start-up of the first reactor, he said.

Cuba plans to build two more nuclear plants, one in eastern Holguin province and the other in the west of the island.

Nuclear officials insist there has been no sign so far that disruptions in economic links with socialist Eastern Europe--the result of sweeping political and economic reforms there--will affect Cuba’s nuclear energy program, which depends on the Soviet Union and its allies for know-how and technology.

President Fidel Castro expects difficulties in future trade with these socialist states--trade in which Cuba currently enjoys favorable terms--as they increasingly embrace market-oriented economic policies.

“Up to now, the undertakings made at the level of state-to-state by the Soviet Union, with regard to assuring the construction of the plant, have not been affected in any way,” Abigantus said.

He said the supply of Soviet equipment, Soviet technical assistance and Soviet-backed training courses for Cuban nuclear experts were continuing as scheduled. A group of 450 Soviet advisers and scientists are working at the Juragua plant.

Plans to build the other two nuclear plants are also still on course. “Nothing has changed,” said another senior nuclear expert, Jose Blanco.

Asked about the strong anti-nuclear movement spreading in the Western world over the last two decades and its arguments about the cost and safety of nuclear power, Abigantus and Blanco said there was no such opposition in Cuba.

A tiny ecologist-pacifist group called Senderoverde does exist and opposes the nuclear program, but is not legally recognized by the government. Its leader, Orlando Polo, says he has been frequently arrested by police as a “counterrevolutionary.”

Blanco stressed that Cuba had few practical alternatives to nuclear energy. The island has no coal, and its narrowness and lack of high mountains give it little potential for hydroelectric power. Solar and wind-energy research is still at an early stage.

Cuba currently depends on imports, mainly oil from the Soviet Union, to meet nearly 70% of its energy needs.

The completed plant’s total output of more than 1,600 megawatts will meet about 20% of the country’s energy requirements and will save about 2.4 million tons of estimated domestic oil consumption of 10 million tons, nearly all of it imported.

Both Abigantus and Blanco stressed the safety aspects of Cuba’s nuclear program. Cuba is a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the officials said that the country strictly follows IAEA guidelines on safety and on the non-use of nuclear fuel for military purposes.

They said that Cuba had closely studied the lessons learned from previous nuclear accidents, notably at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the more serious Soviet disaster at Chernobyl in 1986.

Abigantus said the Juragua plant uses different technology from Chernobyl. He said the pressurized-water type reactor has a proven safety record and is used in about 60% of the nuclear reactors currently operating in the world.

Each of the Cuban plant’s four reactors will be encased in a separate concrete and steel dome five feet thick. Juragua was designed to withstand shock from an earthquake, a crashing airliner or a tidal wave. Additional safety will be provided by hermetically sealed doors and a complex monitoring and alarm system.

“In our plant, all the security systems are triplicated,” Abigantus said.

Waste from the plant will be reduced to dry solids through evaporation, mixed with asphalt material and stored in a semi-underground concrete bunker inside the plant complex.

Juragua is surrounded by a 1.5-mile radius security cordon, although three miles away stands an emerging “nuclear city,” where the families of the plant’s more than 2,000 technicians and scientists will live.

The officials said that worries expressed in the United States about the safety of Cuba’s nuclear program are unfounded.

“Obviously, (the Americans) can have some worries about our plant just as we can have some worries about theirs . . . and all the more so . . . because in the U.S. there are 109 plants and we’ve only got one, and the distance away is the same,” Abigantus said.

He recalled a visit to Juragua in October by American nuclear expert William Lee, president of the World Assn. of Nuclear Operators, who publicly praised the Cuban nuclear program.