Soviet Union Is Dead but Nuclear Program Has Dangerous Half-Life : Reactors: Potential threat posed by power plants in the region is so great the West is ready to spend $1 billion to ease it.

The most recent Soviet nuclear power incident stemmed from nothing more sinister than raindrops. At the Khmelnitsky power plant in western Ukraine, moisture from a spring downpour somehow worked its way through the insulation of a generator’s grounding wire and triggered a major short-circuit late last month.

Alarm lights flashed in the plant, and the big pressurized-water reactor, which produces 950 megawatts--enough electricity to light a city the size of Paris--automatically shut itself down to 38% of normal output.

Five hours later, after trouble-shooters fixed the cable and kicked over the rotors of the halted steam turbine, Khmelnitsky was up and running again. On the seven-point accident scale used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the incident rated a “zero,” nothing more.

But once again, a Soviet-built nuclear power station had given its personnel and the world a shiver. Although the Soviet Union has been dead for months now, its nuclear legacy throbs on--in spots as far afield as Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and even the island of Cuba, where construction continues on a Soviet-designed nuclear power station.

So great is the perceived danger posed by the offspring of the Kremlin’s nuclear engineering program that the West is now ready to spend $1 billion and possibly much more to blunt it.

More than 60 commercial reactors of Soviet design and manufacture are in operation or various stages of construction worldwide, according to the U.S. Council for Energy Awareness, a lobby for U.S. nuclear power. None of the working reactors meets safety standards of the IAEA or even the old Soviet Union’s own 1989-90 rules, according to Dr. Vladimir G. Asmolov, head of energy safety at the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow.

The 28 commercial power units now operating on Russian territory are nothing better than “bombs temporarily generating electricity,” in the scathing words of Alexei V. Yablokov, President Boris N. Yeltsin’s counselor for ecological affairs.

“Russia,” Yablokov declares, “has no business having these reactors at all.”

The reasons cited by the biologist are many--chronic, potentially volatile instability spawned by the Soviet collapse, the lack of a “safety culture” in the nuclear establishment, aging reactors, the growing difficulty of finding and keeping qualified personnel.

What is more, Yeltsin’s adviser says, the bureaucrats who still run the former Soviet nuclear power complex are dyed-in-the-wool “liars” who simply cannot be trusted to take the public’s well-being or health into consideration.

John Large, a British physicist, is also sobered by what he has seen firsthand. He recently toured the Sosnovy Bor power plant 60 miles west of St. Petersburg, where a leak of radioactive gas last March from a graphite-moderated RBMK reactor--the same type that exploded and burned six years ago at Chernobyl--prompted calls throughout Europe for Russia to close down its risky atomic plants.

“You can possibly run an unstable nuclear power plant in a stable society, but I doubt very much that you can run an unstable plant in an unstable society,” says Large, who is no knee-jerk foe of nuclear energy. “What’s now lacking are the resources and the infrastructure to keep these systems going.”

As for the Soviet-built plants in Eastern Europe, “all the installations need to be revamped, re-examined,” says Jean-Claude Leny, head of Framatome, France’s nuclear power plant builder. “The plants are built anywhere, anyhow. It’s complete madness.”

Further, with the demise of the “socialist camp,” countries once embedded in the web of the Moscow-led Comecon trading bloc and the Warsaw Pact alliance now find themselves saddled with the problems of running large, often aging nuclear facilities by themselves.

Russians working at Bulgaria’s Kozloduy plant, which has four first-generation VVER pressurized-water reactors that are considered highly dangerous by Western experts, one day simply packed up and left for home--taking the reactors’ operating manuals with them, Large says.

Even in Russia, replacement parts for reactors are running short, energy officials complain. Wages and working conditions in the once-pampered nuclear sector are now so bad that a typical physicist at the Kurchatov Institute earns only $20 worth of rubles per month, and the disgruntled staff at the Kola power plant near Murmansk has threatened to strike.

What may be the worst scenario of all is now unfolding in the Baltic country of Lithuania, home to two Chernobyl-type reactors. Oleg Savchuk, an ethnic Russian employed at the Ignalina plant as a computer programmer, has been arrested on accusations he intentionally fouled up the computers that operated the reactors as an act of “premeditated sabotage.”

The U.S. government has shown itself very conscious of the menace posed by post-Soviet nuclear plants. Last month in Lisbon, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, warning that the “dangers of another Chernobyl are real,” announced a $25-million U.S. program to establish training centers in Ukraine and Russia for plant personnel.

But fixing the gamut of existing problems will take “really big money,” Frans Andriessen, the European external affairs commissioner, has cautioned.

The exact price should be known next month, when President Bush and leaders of the other Group of Seven major industrialized nations decide in Munich, Germany, how much their countries should plow into improving nuclear safety in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Figures now being bandied about at the IAEA’s Vienna headquarters range from $1 billion to $10 billion and more, sources there say. The sum finally settled on will depend on what the West decides it can afford, how long the Russians must operate their most questionable plants before finding alternative energy sources and how influential the most worried of G-7 members, like Germany, turn out to be.

The West’s interest is not purely altruistic. Environmentalists inside and outside of Russia assert that the hidden agenda of the G-7 nations is how to use safety problems of Soviet-built plants to win construction and maintenance contracts for the West’s own largely becalmed nuclear industries.

The U.S. and Russian “departments of energy are now joining forces, and we must do that too,” ecological activist Mariya Cherkasova told a pioneering U.S.-Russian environmentalists’ conference held in in Moscow this spring.

Anti-nuclear groups like Greenpeace want Soviet reactors, especially Chernobyl-type RBMKs, shut off rather than retrofitted with more safety gadgets. Building alternative energy sources to the 16 existing RBMKs would cost the West $7 billion, asserts Inge Lindemann, director of Greenpeace’s nuclear campaign in Germany.

The response by Russia’s government, which depends on nuclear plants for 11% of all electricity produced here, has been to order the resumption of reactor construction and expansion of the capacity of some units already in operation to ease energy shortages that are becoming chronic in the Far East, Siberia and a dozen or so regions of central Russia.

Atomic-power advocates point out that to produce 1,000 megawatts, or the capacity of the Khmelnitsky reactor, a coal-fired plant would have to burn so much fuel that 320,000 tons of ash and 6.5 million tons of carbon dioxide would be generated yearly.

Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar has also calculated the cost of decommissioning Russia’s reactors and replacing them with new ones at $1.2 billion each--money the shellshocked Russian economy simply does not have.

Even in Ukraine, so badly scarred by Chernobyl, officials are considering restarting one of the three undamaged reactors at Chernobyl unless they can get international financing for a new boiler system to serve as an alternative heat source, European Community officials said after talks in Kiev.

In other former Soviet republics, political and economic facts of life also have made nuclear power the lesser evil. Lithuania, which opposed operations at Ignalina when they were in the hands of the Kremlin, now has decided it needs the plant because it cannot afford world-market prices for oil.

Armenia, which shut down two aging reactors after the 1988 earthquake there, is firing up its nuclear power network again after shivering through a winter blockade of oil, gas and coal supplies by neighboring Azerbaijan.

In contrast, the German government closed two identical VVER-440 Model V230s at Greifswald in the former East Germany after German unification, saying design and operating problems in the old Soviet reactors compromised safety to an unacceptable degree.

Not all problems posed by the legacy of Soviet nuclear power lie with hardware. In one six-month period last year, a third of the 59 accidental stoppages at nuclear plants in the former Soviet Union were caused by human error.

Hans-Friedrich Meyer, an IAEA spokesman, said “quick fixes”--such as better operator training, computerization and improvements in electric wiring and fire protection--can be implemented rapidly to decrease the risk of accidents at Soviet-designed reactors.

But with the G-7 summit less than a month away, Meyer said there was no accord yet among the Western countries on what to do. “Everybody has his own plan,” he said earlier this month.

For an industry gadfly like British physicist Large, how effective the West’s assistance will be, no matter what the final price tag, is also an open question. Witness, he says, the accident at the Sosnovy Bor plant. A vertical rod of 440 pounds of uranium fuel sagged and came close enough to the wall of the four-inch pipe in which it hangs that the surrounding pipe overheated and burst, spewing irradiated steam.

But why did the rod sag in the first place? Large’s suspicion is that the culprit may be the richer uranium blend mandated for the RBMKs after the Chernobyl accident, which may make the metal brace that holds the fuel become brittle from constant neutron bombardment earlier than planned.

In other words, a supposed solution to a Soviet nuclear defect brought entirely new problems of its own, Large says.

“The Western safety culture will not fit onto this system,” he says. “You cannot take something made by Westinghouse and just sit it on top of a Soviet-made reactor and fix it. What really concerns me is the lack of centralized organization, of technical discipline. I’ve come away with the distinct impression that these plants have now been left to run by themselves.”

Lack of a Lid Makes Reactors High Risks

U.S. plants use a series of physical barriers, right, to contain radioactive material in the event of a problem. Though protected on the sides, the Soviet-manufactured reactors, bottom, lack this helmet-like lid. This makes them high risks when a reactor goes out of control. The tops of the reactors were left open because of the need to access fuel rods while they were in operation and because of Soviet confidence in the design. U.S. reactor 1. Steel-reinforced concrete containment structure, about 4 feet thick 2. Steel containment 3. Steel pressure vessel, 8-inch thick walls 4. Concrete floor, 11 feet thick

Soviet RBMK 1. Open top. Chernobyl tragedy occurred when reactor blew through roof. 2. Reactor core and fuel rods 3. Tubes feeding water through reactor 4. Containment on sides and bottom.

Source: U.S. Council for Energy Awareness