Swedish Nuclear Scare Reignites German Atomic Questions

A subsidiary of Germany's largest energy company, Eon, shut down two of three reactors it runs in the Swedish city of Oskarshamn Thursday after backup generators failed to start properly at a similar plant last week.

A reactor in Forsmark was taken off the Swedish power grid when two of the four diesel generators intended to provide the plant with emergency power needed to be manually started, reawakening the debate over the safety of nuclear power.

"It was as close as you can get to a nuclear meltdown," former construction manager at the Forsmark plant, Lars-Olov Höglund told the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. "It was sheer luck that this didn't lead to a catastrophe worse than Chernobyl."

Vattenfall, the Swedish power company that operates the Forsmark plant about 46 miles (75 kilometers) from Stockholm, disputed the danger of a meltdown, saying the two diesel generators provided enough power to run the plant's cooling system, according to a company spokesperson.

The Swedish environmental ministry agreed that the situation was not as dangerous as Höglund said.

"This couldn't be compared with something as serious as a meltdown," ministry spokesperson Lena Berglund said. "It was never close to it."

Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) spokesman Anders Bredfell told the BBC News Web site the Forsmark incident ranked as a number two on the International Atomic Energy Agency's scale, which ranks nuclear incidents from zero to seven and rates incidents as four or more as being dangerous to humans and the environment. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was rated a seven.

Preventive closures at other Swedish plants

The Oskarshamn reactors, about 150 miles south of Stockholm, were shut down Thursday after Eon subsidiary OKG said "safety there could not be guaranteed," according to a company spokesperson. Swedish atomic energy officials announced they would be examining the safety of all their nuclear power plants.

Some of Germany's 17 nuclear power plants use a similar cooling system to that of the Swedish plant and their safety should be checked, according to the environmental organization Greenpeace.

"We assume that there was retrofitting here in Germany after the 2004 incident that were not performed in Sweden," Greenpeace's Heinz Smital said in a statement, referring to a short emergency power outage in Germany's Isar 2 nuclear power plant two years ago. "Nevertheless, the German atomic regulatory agency quickly needs to clarify if a similar danger threatens local atomic power plants."

Germany committed to phasing out nuclear power

The German environment ministry said Thursday the malfunctions in the Swedish plants a "serious safety incident" and Friday called on the German states' atomic regulatory agencies to check the operation of their plants' emergency power and cooling systems for the AEG components that are suspected to have led to the break down in Sweden.

German nuclear power critics used the incident in a country with Western safety standards to point out the dangers of atomic power and to call for an end to Germany's dependency on atomic energy, which accounts for about 12 percent of German energy.

"The incident has made it clear that atomic power technology is not actually controllable," Marco Bülow, Germany's Social Democratic Party environmental issues spokesperson told reporters on Friday. "We cannot discuss extending the operating times for atomic power plants."

In the past, members of Germany's conservative Christian parties have argued for prolonging the country's reliance on nuclear power. At the end of July, the grand coalition government, however, said in a statement that it remains committed to phasing out nuclear power.

Similar malfunction unlikely in Germany

A repeat of the Swedish incident is unlikely in Germany, according to preliminary reports from the country's 17 atomic power plants gathered by the German dpa news agency.

"The initial analysis of our six atomic power plants has shown that an incident similar to Forsmark can be ruled out," an Eon spokesperson said Friday, adding that the company's German reactors have a different emergency power supply than the Swedish plant.

Operators of Germany's other nuclear reactors, including Vattenfall, also reported that their reactors are running normally and that there are no plans to shut them down.

Like Germany, Sweden has committed to eliminating its reliance on nuclear power. The country has decommissioned two nuclear power plants. The remaining 10 supply nearly half of the Scandinavian country's power.