Any Step for Nuclear Safety Is a Big Step : G-7 meeting yields $100-million pledge for East Europe’s most hazardous power plants

The Group of Seven major industrialized nations are bringing something home from Munich after all. At least the European four--Britain, France, Germany and Italy--are.

The G-7, mainly because of the French, failed to attain the major goal of their meeting, a breakthrough in stalled world trade talks. But they did agree on a small pledge of $100 million to make emergency repairs to the most hazardous nuclear power plants in Eastern Europe.

Opposition by Japan and the United States had stymied an earlier $700-million plan. Its principal backers, Germany and France, had conceded failure, promising to proceed with a smaller plan of their own. “It will take place even if not everyone takes part,” German Finance Minister Theo Waigel said. “A second Chernobyl is possible. It must not come to that.”

Japan has been reluctant to assist Russia until that country surrenders four small Japanese-claimed islands in the Kurile chain, north of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. The United States has reportedly been reluctant to pay into a fund administered by the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Neither the Japanese nor the Americans, however, are nearly as vulnerable as the Western Europeans to the man-made catastrophe of a nuclear meltdown in Eastern Europe, though German Chancellor Helmut Kohl observed, correctly: “Japan is pretty close to Vladivostok. There are nuclear power stations in Vladivostok, of the same (Chernobyl) design.” In the end, Western Europe won at least a minor victory for nuclear safety.

The $100-million G-7 pledge follows an earlier $270-million European Community pledge as well as a pledge of roughly equal size from the Scandinavian countries. This money will buy only the shortest-term emergency relief for the 60 nuclear power plants in Eastern Europe (including the former Soviet republics) that now operate without what the West regards as basic safeguards. A lasting security upgrade for those reactors, 15 of which are of the type that melted down at Chernobyl in 1986, will cost billions of dollars.

Even the quarter-loaf of emergency measures is welcome news, however. A series of Chernobyl-style meltdowns--and such a horror is indeed imaginable--would harm the world economy at least as much as a successful General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade would improve it. As one senior U.S. official commented, “Sometimes preventing things from happening is just as important as taking new initiatives.”

We agree. Among the several forms of Soviet bailout, this one--which, by the way, bails out Eastern Europe and most especially Ukraine just as much as Russia--deserves the top priority.