CHERNOBYL: FIVE YEARS LATER : Accident Scrambled Nuclear Energy Plans Across a Continent : Attitudes are sharply divided in Europe. Some nations’ programs are in disarray because of safety concerns; others are moving ahead.

When the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded five years ago this week and loosed a radioactive cloud over much of Europe, it also polarized European attitudes toward nuclear power. Nowhere is there a clearer fault line than along the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Here on the Czechoslovak side, an old, Soviet-designed nuclear plant pumps megawatts of electricity to the Slovak countryside. And in this little farming village less than two miles from the plant, Iveta Jablonicka is glad it does.

The struggling Czech economy could not get along without nuclear power, says Jablonicka, the financial manager of the village’s agricultural cooperative. The only alternative, she says, is the soft coal that has poisoned much of the rest of Czechoslovakia’s landscape.

“I have no fear,” she says. “If I did, I’d move far away.”

But on the Austrian side of the border, a scant 40 miles downwind from Bohunice, it’s a different story. There’s plenty of fear--and anger. Austria’s environmental minister has called the Bohunice facility “Chernobyl at the gates of Vienna.”

“All of Austria is angry,” says Ewald Gaberlik, a stocky, no-nonsense hotel operator in Heinburg.

Mountainous Austria, which enjoys an abundance of hydroelectric power, decided more than a decade ago to abandon the country’s only nuclear reactor before it generated a single watt of electricity.

But the authorities in Vienna cannot persuade resource-poor Czechoslovakia to give up its Bohunice plant, even with an offer of free electricity to make up for the power the Czechs would lose. Czechoslovak authorities say the necessary transmission lines are not in place; more than that, they do not want to be held hostage to Austrian electricity.

Divisions over nuclear power, while particularly stark at the Austrian-Czechoslovak border, are evident all across Europe as the Continent tries to come to grips with this alluringly attractive but potentially calamitous source of energy.

France has opened 13 nuclear reactors since Chernobyl and now generates 75% of its electricity from the atom. So abundant is electricity in France that it exports about 10%, and it is laying plans to build plants in Hungary to supply customers in Germany and Italy.

Just across the English Channel, by contrast, Britain’s nuclear program is in total disarray. When the government sought to place the state-owned electric utility in private hands two years ago, no one wanted to buy the 37 nuclear plants, which remain government owned.

Sweden, one of the most heavily nuclear countries in Western Europe, can’t quite make up its mind to take the anti-nuclear plunge. Following the Three Mile Island accident in the United States in 1978, Swedish voters decided by referendum to phase out nuclear power by 2010. The government decided to take the first of Sweden’s 12 reactors off line in 1995.

But Sweden’s labor unions, fearing lost jobs, have mounted a counter-campaign. The government has backed away from the 1995 target date, although it stands by the voter-mandated elimination of nuclear power by 2010.

Equally scrambled is nuclear power’s status in Eastern Europe, where the atom is just one factor in an equation that also includes desperately poor economies and landscapes scarred by pollution from coal-fired, smoke-belching power plants.

Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria are plunging ahead. Meanwhile, the Polish government last year abandoned the country’s only nuclear project, and Yugoslavia plans to close its lone plant by 1995.

Environmentalists say Chernobyl drove a stake through the heart of nuclear power, at least in Western Europe. France, they say, has saturated its market, and voters or governments in at least 10 other countries--Austria, Belgium, Britain, Finland, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland--have brought nuclear power to a standstill or thrown it into reverse.

“A process of gradual attrition during the early ‘80s has mushroomed into a massive rejection of nuclear power since Chernobyl, “ says Christopher Flavin, vice president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. “Not a single West European country is moving forward with a steady expansion of nuclear power.”

Nuclear power’s advocates could not disagree more.

“I think there is a firm consensus on the need to maintain the nuclear option and the viability of the nuclear industry,” says Kunihiko Uematsu, director general of the Nuclear Energy Agency at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Michel Lung, the Brussels representative of Foratom, which comprises Europe’s national nuclear power agencies, is willing to admit that Chernobyl has put nuclear on the defensive. “But we believe that there will be a pinch in two or three years,” he says, when countries realize that other sources of electricity are inadequate.

The diametrically opposed viewpoints reflect the uncertainty that persists over the consequences of the explosion at Chernobyl’s unit No. 4 five years ago this Friday.

Officially, the Soviet government stands by its story that 31 people died at Chernobyl of radiation burns. Hundreds more developed radiation sickness, and thousands were evacuated from their homes. An area 40 miles in diameter around Chernobyl remains depopulated.

Some Soviets contest the official account. Vladimir Chernousenko, the scientific director for the exclusion zone, told a British paper this month that 7,000 to 10,000 died as a result of Chernobyl.

“That does not correspond to the facts,” Leonid Ilyin, director of the Soviet Institute of Biophysics, told a recent Paris conference on Chernobyl’s impact.

The atom remains an important source of energy in the Soviet Union. Forty-five nuclear plants generate 12% of that country’s electrical power, and 25 plants--one less than the total for all the rest of Europe--are under construction.

“Without nuclear energy we cannot develop our economy,” says Nikolai Ponomarev-Stepnoy of the Kurchatov Institute of Nuclear Energy in Moscow.

The Soviets, who have the world’s only Chernobyl-type reactors, have not abandoned them, although only 16 of the 48 are operating. They are adding safety features, including more control rods and more effective shutdown systems.

But other models of Soviet-designed reactors are common in Eastern Europe. The most notorious are the older-model VVER-440s.

One of Bulgaria’s four VVER-440s experienced a serious accident in 1983. The German government peremptorily closed the four such reactors in East Germany, plus a newer-model VVER-440, shortly after reunification.

Here in Bohunice, the oldest two of the four reactors still in operation are also of this type. A still older reactor, put into operation in 1972, has been closed since a 1977 accident that Czechoslovak authorities describe as serious but not fatal.

Juraj Kmosena, the plant’s director for the past three months, calls the reactors “perfectly safe. . . . If some day the operation isn’t safe by our standards, we will shut them immediately.”

By many other accounts, however, the two old reactors operating here are of the most dangerous kind outside the Soviet Union.

Greenpeace, the environmental organization, says all the VVER-440 reactors “have a particularly inadequate safety containment.” In the early VVER-440s such as those at Bohunice, it says, “only the most rudimentary emergency coolant systems and systems to reduce pressure within the safety containment are present.”

Even at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, a promoter of nuclear power, press officer Hans-Friedrich Meyer, says the two oldest units at Bohunice “don’t meet Western safety standards.” A team of IAEA experts now studying the plant will issue a report in the next several months on how to make them safer.

Nowhere is public sentiment against the Bohunice plant stronger than in Heinburg, hard by the Czechoslovak border. It is there that Gaberlik, the hotel keeper, fumes that Czech authorities provide no information on what is happening at Bohunice.

Hannelore Koehrer, who runs a furniture store down Heinburg’s main street, insists, “I will not buy products from that country as long as they operate that plant.”

“It’s too dangerous,” agrees Johann Loos, a wholesale furniture dealer who voted no in 1978 when Austrians were asked whether they wanted their country’s one nuclear plant to operate.

But here in Bohunice, the townspeople express no such alarm. “There have never been any problems from the plant,” says Jablonicka, whose stylish clothes and long auburn hair set her apart from most other women in the town.

A clerk in Bohunice’s only grocery store states the case more simply. Asked whether she is afraid of the nuclear plant, she says: “Why? There is no other alternative.”

Nuclear Power: Still a Force in Europe Although the Chernobyl accident caused division about nuclear power, it continues to be used and developed as a source of energy. REACTORS IN OPERATION

COUNTRY 1985 1990 Belgium 8 7 Britain 38 37 Bulgaria 4 5 Czechoslovakia 5 8 Finland 4 4 France 43 56 Germany 24 26 Hungary 2 4 Italy 3 0 Netherlands 2 2 Poland 0 0 Romania 0 0 Soviet Union 51 45 Spain 8 9 Sweden 12 12 Switzerland 5 5 Yugoslavia 1 1 TOTAL EUROPE 159 176 United States 93 112

REACTORS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

COUNTRY 1985 1990 Belgium 0 0 Britain 4 1 Bulgaria 2 2 Czechoslovakia 11 6 Finland 0 0 France 20 6 Germany 12 6 Hungary 2 0 Italy 3 0 Netherlands 0 0 Poland 2 0 Romania 3 5 Soviet Union 34 25 Spain 2 0 Sweden 0 0 Switzerland 0 0 Yugoslavia 0 0 TOTAL EUROPE 61 26 United States 26 1

NUCLEAR’S SHARE OF ELECTRICITY*

COUNTRY 1985 1990 Belgium 60% 60% Britain 19 20 Bulgaria 32 36 Czechoslovakia 15 28 Finland 38 35 France 65 75 Germany 27 33 Hungary 24 51 Italy 4 0 Netherlands 6 5 Poland 0 0 Romania 0 0 Soviet Union 10 12 Spain 24 36 Sweden 42 46 Switzerland 40 43 Yugoslavia 5 5 TOTAL EUROPE 30 36 United States 16 21

* Measures only the countries that generated nuclear power in 1985 SOURCE: International Atomic Energy Agency