Soviet-Built Nuclear Plants ‘Accidents Waiting to Happen’ : Environment: Western experts see Chernobyl-style reactors as a greater threat than Moscow’s weapons.

Early last year, when Lithuania led the Baltic charge for independence from the Soviet Union, Moscow cut off its outside source of electricity, leaving the rebellious republic solely dependent upon two Chernobyl-type nuclear power reactors.

The thought of what could have happened is chilling even now.

Without electricity from Russia, there was no backup power to operate emergency equipment at the aging facility. Since the Lithuanian reactors do not have the massive containment vessels that surround American reactors, there would have been no way to avert catastrophe if an accident had occurred.

The episode reflects a problem that many U.S. and other Western experts consider more immediately threatening than Moscow’s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons: Across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, more than two dozen nuclear power reactors are operating without containment vessels, redundant safety equipment or the kind of detailed plans for handling emergencies that exist at such plants throughout the West.

And while no solution seems to exist for the plants’ glaring safety problems, shutting them down is virtually impossible. In most cases, the facilities represent indispensable sources of electricity for nations and regions already on the brink of economic collapse.

After a recent gathering of technical experts at the World Bank in Washington, Anthony Churchill, director of the bank’s industry and energy department, provided this grim assessment: “The conclusion was that there is simply no way that the old-style plants can be made safe. The only way is to shut them down but, if you shut them down, you shut the country down. Things can be done to improve operational safety, but they remain accidents waiting to happen.

“It is a question of how much can be afforded and how fast, and how long countries are willing to have these bombs ticking away in their neighbors’ yards,” Churchill said.

A similarly gloomy picture was presented to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday by Chairman Ivan Selin, just back from a visit to eight nuclear generating stations in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

Selin told reporters that operations at Chernobyl itself still suffer from flaws that contributed to the tragedy in 1986. And three months after a scathing report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Bulgaria’s nuclear operations remain a cause for deep concern, despite impressive attempts to respond to the IAEA’s criticisms.

“I’d say they have gotten themselves up from being terrible to being mediocre by Eastern European standards, which is quite an improvement,” Selin said.

Yet Austrian officials concerned about four Soviet-built plants near its border with Czechoslovakia have urged the Czechoslovaks to suspend their operation, and the IAEA has recommended that Bulgaria shut down its four oldest units at Kozloduy, near Sofia.

Because of continuing efforts to help both the Soviets and Eastern Europeans with safety improvements, U.S. officials now generally avoid being critical. But in an interview with Times reporters earlier this year, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins bluntly laid out Soviet operational shortcomings.

“They don’t have any plans or procedures,” he said. “They don’t have any maintenance practices. It’s all in the man’s head who operates the plant. It’s frightening to us. They have a plant design that goes out of control. . . . It couldn’t be worse.”

The problems extend beyond the inadequacies of Soviet reactor design and poor workmanship.

In Bulgaria, all of the Soviet operators involved in running five reactors at the huge Kozloduy nuclear complex packed up and went home when the Bulgarian government could no longer pay them in hard currency.

A U.S. nuclear engineer who toured the region said that he found fire protection measures “archaic”--plants without so much as ordinary commercial sprinklers and control rooms in which personal radiation protection equipment consists of nothing but surgical masks.

Western experts are also troubled over the reliability of off-site electrical power throughout Eastern Europe that would be critical in an emergency.

In some parts of eastern Germany, the steel towers supporting electrical transmission lines have become so rusted and deteriorated that crews making repairs dare not climb them. Instead, they do their work while suspended from helicopters. Even so, the former Soviet satellite is more fortunate than its eastern neighbors. Reunification with western Germany allowed it to shut down its four Soviet-built nuclear plants.

The 1986 disaster at Chernobyl illustrates the potential hazard that these plants represent, not only to the area immediately around them but far beyond. In that accident, workers had blocked emergency protection systems to test one reactor when they were surprised by a sudden surge in power. The lack of an automatic shutdown mechanism allowed the reaction to get out of control, producing clouds of steam, an explosion and finally disintegration of the reactor core. Because there was no containment structure, tons of radioactive isotopes spewed into the atmosphere.

More than 30 people died of radiation burns, and world health experts fear that more than 4 million people may be at higher risk of developing serious illness from exposure to the radiation cloud that gradually spread across Europe.

Some safety modifications have been made to the old-style plants since Chernobyl, but far-reaching improvements are impossible. Satisfactory containment vessels cannot be fitted to reactors that already are completed.