Germany faces shortage of nuclear safety experts

international | environment | news report Wednesday October 31, 2007 23:28 by Diet Simon, summarising Deutsche Welle

Partly due to green movement

A German nuclear safety expert says Germany faces a shortage of nuclear safety experts because it’s due to end nuclear power production by 2020. Christian Küppers, of the Darmstadt-based Öko-Institut and a member of the government's advisory Radiation Protection Committee, says new plants in Germany are designed to withstand an air crash, old ones are not.

“Long before Germany agreed to phase out nuclear power, people realised the old reactors do not meet current standards for new plants.”

He told Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle in an interview that despite 9/11 most other countries have not considered construction to protect against the danger of air crashes, including the United States and France that have a lot of reactors.

“My theory is that if you don't have problems with people opposing atomic energy and you don't face any problems building new plants then it's easier to close the old reactors and build new ones that are more economical to run. It's a rather different story, if you know that everyone will be happy if an older reactor gets closed down, but you will not be allowed to build a new one.”

A future problem could be that there are practically no young scientists very well qualified in reactor safety.

“That means that both the operators and the authorities are competing for qualified staff. At the same time a lot of people are retiring.” Küppers says this is linked to the green movement.

He sees building a permanent storage facility for highly radioactive waste from reprocessing as one of the most important tasks facing the sector in Germany.

“Up to now, we have only explored the suitability of Gorleben. This is a problem that politicians like to postpone because it's not an issue that is likely to win them any friends.”

The full interview is at
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,2857122,00.html?ma...-html