Germany asked Belgium on Wednesday to take offline two nuclear reactors because of safety concerns, setting up a clash between neighbors that are pursuing widely different energy strategies.
German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said an examination by the independent Reactor Safety Commission showed that there was uncertainty that Tihange 2 and Doel 3, which are close to the German border, had the necessary backup security systems to react to an accident.
“That’s why believe it is right to temporarily take the plants off the grid, at least until the examinations have been concluded,” Ms. Hendricks said. “It would be a strong precautionary signal. It would show that Belgium takes the concerns of its neighbors seriously.”
Jan Bens, director-general of Belgium’s nuclear control agency FANC, rejected the German safety concerns as unfounded. “We are still convinced that there is no need to shut down these units from a nuclear safety point of view,” Mr. Bens said in a statement. “Our conclusions remain unchanged, despite what Minister Hendricks says.”
In the statement, FANC also said it was surprised by the request, pointing to continued cooperation and information exchange with German authorities. “Our German colleagues asked lots of questions, but they didn't raise any new issues that we had not taken into account during our review of the Doel 3 and Tihange 2 safety cases,” Mr. Bens said.
A spokeswoman for Belgium’s interior ministry, which oversees safety at the country’s nuclear reactors, declined to comment.
Other neighboring countries, including the Netherlands, have also complained about general safety standards at Belgium’s nuclear plants and questioned the government’s decision late last year to extend the lifetime of the country’s oldest reactors in Doel to 2025. In 2013, the previous Belgian government did the same with another reactor, Tihange 1.
Concerns have centered on the 2012 discovery of thousands of tiny cracks in the steel walls of pressure vessels in some of the reactors at Doel and Tihange, which led to the affected reactors being taken offline for some time. Following an examination, FANC decided to reopen the reactors, saying the cracks had been there from the beginning and didn’t affect reactor safety.
Germany, which is preparing to shut down all of its nuclear power plants in the coming years, has challenged other neighboring countries over their continued reliance on nuclear power for electricity generation. In March, Ms. Henricks asked France to take Fessenheim, another nuclear power plant close to the German border off the grid.
Neele Scheerlinck, a spokeswoman for FANC, suggested that Ms. Hendrick’s demand to close down the Belgian reactors may be part of a broader political strategy to get its neighbors to also abandon nuclear energy. “A case like this is a grateful point of entry” for Germany, she said.
By: Gabriele Steinhauser (WSJ).
Contributing: Monica Houston-Waesch (Frankfurt).
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