Norrænar kjarnöryggisrannsķknir
Pohjoismainen ydinturvallisuustutkimus
Nordisk kjernesikkerhetsforskning
Nordisk kärnsäkerhetsforskning
Nordic nuclear safety research
| Nordisk
kernesikkerhedsforskning Norrænar kjarnöryggisrannsķknir Pohjoismainen ydinturvallisuustutkimus Nordisk kjernesikkerhetsforskning Nordisk kärnsäkerhetsforskning Nordic nuclear safety research |
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| A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW |
By Franz R. Marcus, NKS |
This overview is a summary of "Half a Century of Nordic Nuclear Co-operation. An Insider's Recollections" by Franz R. Marcus.
The Nordic cooperation in nuclear safety is a 40
year history of our five small countries, with a total of just over 23 million
people, working together, sometimes amicably, sometimes less so. That they
should work together is hardly surprising given their common historical and
cultural background, and their similar organization of democracy, the first
example of which is found here in Iceland where the Alūingi met for the first
time in the year 1000. Although the individual Scandinavian languages have moved
away from the old Icelandic tongue, one extremely strong advantage for our
cooperation is that with a little training most of us can communicate directly,
each using our own languages without having to try to express nuances with
idioms that are not our own.
Being a small group of closely related countries has not isolated us from what
was happening in the rest of world, on the contrary, external factors have had a
strong impact on the shape of this cooperation, and on its contents.
What may be surprising to the outside world is that these five countries often
work as one single unit, which is demonstrated by this meeting of the NSFS where
our countries appear as one single unit in the world assembly of radiation
protection societies who together form the IRPA. Nordic work, and persons from
our countries, have also had a significant impact on the development in the
wider international development and on organizations shaping events - an impact
much larger than their size would suggest.
It is this inter-relationship between the Nordic work, the external factors
influencing it, and our input to international development which we shall be
examining in this brief historical overview.
So how did it all start over 40 years ago?
Following the second world war, the prospects for collaboration did not seem
quite so clear. There were large differences between the Nordic countries.
Iceland had just taken the step to be independent from Denmark, which together
with Norway had been held by Germany and soon after the war joined NATO. Finland
depended heavily on the Soviet Union, while neutral Sweden was maneuvering in
between the blocks. Atomic questions in that period were necessarily a mixture
of defense and peaceful applications. Some of the first issues were taken up by
foresighted personalities, who typically had played outstanding roles during
wartime, some even in the resistance against the occupation.
These individuals saw both the promising peaceful uses of this new energy source,
and its risks. Despite the fact that it was difficult to obtain not only
relevant information but also the nuclear material which was necessary for
experiments, e.g. uranium and heavy water, until after the Atoms for Peace
program was initiated in 1953, there was a quite early start in Sweden and
Norway, already in the forties, with the start of reactor development and
related research. There would seem to be a good basis for cooperation here.
Under the prevailing circumstances most of the early work was done nationally
with only few Nordic contacts about such questions as heavy water, uranium,
analysis, and calculations. The JEEP rector in Norway, the first one outside the
big powers, was in operation as early as 1951 thanks to the foresighted Gunnar
Randers. The next Nordic country to join the club was Sweden with its R1 reactor
in 1954.
The second main outside incentive for cooperation was a consequence of the arms
race "atoms for war": the fallout in the fifties over the Northern
parts of Scandinavia where the Lapps lived and ate reindeer-meat. Concern for
the consequences gave rise to consultations between Nordic authorities. Again it
was influential personalities such as Rolf Sievert who actually started contacts
with persons such as Jorma Miettinen in Finland and Thorleif Hvinden in Norway.
At the same time scientific and technical developments within the Nordic
countries had an impact on the coming cooperation. On the theoretical side Niels
Bohr and his institute in Copenhagen had gathered enthusiastic young physicists
from all over the Nordic countries. On the practical side, from 1959 the Halden
Project became a similar pole of attraction for young engineers from all the
Nordic countries, who later returned to work on their national programs.
When collaboration about peaceful nuclear questions became the subject of
international consideration in the mid-fifties with plans for the IAEA, for ENEA
(today's NEA), for Euratom, and for UNSCEAR, the Nordic countries became eager
participants and players. In fact people from the Nordic countries had a strong
influence on their coming into being. Here are some examples: The second
director general of the IAEA was Sigvard Eklund from Sweden, and the second
director of the ENEA was Einar Sæland from Norway. Sweden played an important
role in giving birth to UNSCEAR.
3. Need for mutual support and joint action
We who live in the jet-age with its fax and
e-mail, should remind ourselves of the practical difficulties with traveling and
telephoning in the fifties. Leading persons - both on the administrative and on
the technical side - felt isolated at home in their Nordic country when they had
to face the multiple questions coming up in the atomic field. Personal contacts
were essential, and these were being established in the Nordic situation.
This did not mean that all the Nordic countries would follow the same road. Each
of the countries had its own objective in view of the coming nuclear age. In
Denmark the goal was its multiple use for the benefit of society. Here in
Iceland there seemed to be economic potential in the production of heavy water
by using geothermal heat. In Finland a long course towards the use of nuclear
power started. Norway hoped for nuclear propulsion of its merchant fleet. And
Sweden had ambitions to create its own nuclear industry.
It was the general political development that paved the way. With the founding
of the joint parliamentary Nordic Council in 1952, a new promoter for Nordic
ventures appeared. Nuclear energy was identified as one possible issue of common
interest.
The Nordic Council, still in existence to-day, consists of parliamentarians and
ministers. It takes initiatives and makes recommendations to the governments. It
was this political body who in 1957 initiated the establishment of two
committees, one to cover technical aspects, the so called kontaktorgan,
the liaison committee for nuclear energy. The other dealt with nuclear physics
research.
Two years later, in 1959, the Nordic Council recommended the government
institutes responsible for radiation protection to work together. This led their
directors to form their Nordic "chiefs" group which still exists
to-day. It organizes working groups with members of their institutes and
consultations in matters of current interest.
The kontaktorgan was composed by top executives from ministries and other
authorities. It provided a framework that permitted all types of questions to be
taken up jointly. During the 33 years of its existence, the kontaktorgan
laid the grand lines of the Nordic cooperation in its field, and also worked in
some details, to discuss international ventures, and to further practical Nordic
cooperation whenever warranted.
Its approach is characteristic of Nordic pragmatism. In some aspects it went
quite far: thus its members arranged that the Nordic countries for many years
shared one seat on the IAEA board.
4. External factors that influenced the Nordic cooperation
National ambitions evolved over time, and in some
cases continued to differ. This resulted in positive and negative inputs to the
various cooperation schemes which developed. Nordic cooperation has always been
an "ā la carte" process. Furthermore, Nordic cooperation was never
seen as an end in itself, but as a means to strengthen the countries' positions
internationally, to gain a stronger voice.
By the sixties, the economic growth was both raising demand for
electricity and providing the funds for reactor development work at the nuclear
research centers. Public opinion was in favour of the new energy source. This
belief in nuclear power as a cheap and clean energy source led to cooperation in
questions related to reactor design and performance. The research institutes
worked together on heavy water reactors that could use natural uranium - thereby
coming in a certain opposition to the utilities who were expecting the
breakthrough of light water reactors using enriched uranium that had to be
imported. At the end of the sixties, and after investigation by the kontaktorgan,
the research institutes established a Nordic coordination committee to
strengthen their positions and make use of their complementary knowledge. The coordination
committee was active from 1968 until the time, in 1981, at which the
research institutes had moved away from nuclear research and to-days NKS
had taken over safety research.
The coordination committee organized several large joint projects at a
total cost of the order of USD 1-2 million annually. Although much of the work
headed towards reactor construction, it indirectly dealt with safety questions.
At this time most questions of technical safety and waste management belonged to
the tasks of the research institutes and were taken up by the coordination
committee. Collaboration in radiation protection was dealt with by the
national authorities.
Concern about issues of safety and the capacity to evaluate the safety of
nuclear reactors came up in connection with the planned visit of the US nuclear
vessel N/S Savannah in 1964 to several harbours in the Nordic countries. This
visibly put a strong burden on the authorities who were responsible for issuing
the permits. The question of nuclear safety came up in the kontaktorgan
in 1968. At its recommendation the competent authorities established the Nordic
group on Reactor Safety, NARS. Its main purpose was to provide
recommendations for the documentation to be used in license applications in the
Nordic countries. Other fields of action were safety criteria and emergency
provisions within nuclear sites.
In the seventies it was still believed that urban siting of nuclear power
plants would be a realistic possibility. Experts from the other Nordic countries
participated in the Swedish Urban siting study of a city-close location. The
study was initiated when plans came up in 1968 for a combined heat-electricity
nuclear power plant in central Stockholm. The outcome was that nuclear power
reactors might well be located close to cities: the risk could be related to a
loss-of-coolant accident, the risk of which was estimated to be of the order of
1-10 in a million, something which seemed acceptable. For the first time
probabilistic methods were used.
This order of magnitude coincided with the finding of the NRC report WASH-1400
by Norman Rasmussen. A Nordic working group in 1975 undertook a systematic
review of his report and confronted its results with the Swedish Urban study.
Certain inconsistencies were actually found in Rasmussens study and notified to
him.
However, in the seventies the opposition against nuclear power was already
developing. An important person in this respect was the Swedish Nobel prize
winner Hannes Alfvén who helped the anti-nuclear movement to gain political
force. Serious protests arose in conjunction with Norwegian plans for a reactor
site in the Oslo fjord in 1973.
In Denmark public debate increased strongly in the mid-seventies. Contacts had
been established in 1968 between Swedish and Danish authorities concerning
safety aspects of the planned Barsebäck plant, on the Swedish side, but close
to Copenhagen. All relevant information was provided from the Swedish
authorities and analyzed in Denmark prior to the issuing of a construction
permit, both in case of the first and the second unit.
Many calculations have been made over the years to estimate possible effects in
Denmark following a hypothetical accident at Barsebäck. In 1978 Danish
calculations were submitted to the Swedish Energy commission to show that
calculations made by consultants for the Swedish authorities, predicting serious
consequences, were unreasonable. Unrealistic assumptions must be made in order
to arrive at the high number of casualties indicated in these reports.
Initially, one fifth of the output of the first Barsebäck reactor was
contracted to a Danish utility. This was frequently noticed at a time of
increasing Danish opposition against nuclear power. It was not very popular,
during a moment of disturbance in the electricity supply in Copenhagen, to
remark "it must be a failure at Barsebäck!"
One of the off-shoots of this public protest was an attempt to improve
information from the research institutes. In 1973 the coordination committee
established a contact group for environmental information. Its members were to
exchange information related to risks and environmental effects related to
nuclear power. The group produced factual information, supposedly not biased in
favour of nuclear.
The need for increased knowledge about accident sequences was strengthened by
the concern in other countries. In the early seventies, voices of caution had
come up, originating from the opposition movement in the USA, about the possible
consequences of a loss-of-coolant accident following a pipe rupture in a reactor.
A Nordic group in 1972 reviewed existing computer codes used in accident
analysis. They recommended a cooperative effort "NORHAV" to produce a
computational system for analysis of severe accidents. The NORHAV work was later
offered as a Nordic in-kind payment when the USA team asked for competent input
to the upcoming LOFT program, the large Loss Of Fluid Test.
In the early seventies it became evident that computer codes simulating accident
sequences became very complicated, and the need for experimental verification
increased. The advanced Swedish heavy water Marviken reactor, once it had been
decided that the original project would not materialize, offered a practically
finished large power reactor where full-scale experiments could be arranged in
its containment. The Marviken experiments got under way with a Nordic group to
assist at their birth, and later they became international ventures with a
strong Swedish leadership, for many years encompassing Nordic participation.
In the meantime, what in the public opinion had seen a unlimited source of
power, was now also seen as a source of dangerous waste. It was the management
of low- and medium level waste which was the immediate task, and here four of
the Nordic countries had comparable situations. The advantages of working
together on this issue were readily apparent. After the first of a long series
of Nordic seminars on waste in 1974, a need for better regulations and methods
for waste disposal appeared.
The kontaktorgan sat up a waste group to formulate proposals accordingly.
Through its composition this group became an example of the constructive
cooperation that could be achieved between research institutes and authorities.
It recommended that a comprehensive Nordic waste program be organized, where the
practical work would be carried out by the coordination committee.
There have been many Nordic projects in the waste field, and some of the
international waste programs managed from the Swedish authorities (with names
such as Hydrocoin, Intraval, Biomovs etc.) were helped in their start by
including them in Nordic programs.
Following the energy crisis in 1973 the concerns about safety were being
balanced by the fear of energy shortage and dependence on vulnerable sources of
energy supplied from abroad. The Nordic ministers for industry expressed their
good-will for increased R&D on nuclear safety in order to open the way for
replacing some of the oil-based generating capacity by new nuclear plants.
After long discussions in the now flourishing bureaucracy under the Nordic
Council of ministers, this finally led to the start of an enlarged cooperation
by the creation of the Nordic committee for nuclear safety research, NKS.
This was the start of a dynamic cooperation which to-day has become the most
successful form of our Nordic schemes. NKS started its first program in
1977 and has in the past 19 years carried out a number of four-year programs,
the emphasis of which have shifted over time.
The three first programs were with Nordic financing from the Council of
ministers, which implied that political goodwill was required at the annual
approval of budgets. After the Brundtland report "Our common future" a
fight between the energy ministers over the use of Nordic energy research funds
started. This resulted in a withdrawal by Sweden from the kontaktorgan -
and without the Swedes it is hardly possible to continue a Nordic cooperation in
this field.
But at the same time NKS was transferred from the political level to the
competent authorities, who together have entered a Consortium agreement. Since
1990 the programs have been free from Nordic bureaucracy, which has been a great
advantage. The Consortium group and a number of co-sponsors provide a basic
finance of approximately USD 1 million annually, while the participating
organizations make up to about an equal level.
In the eighties NKS' work has evidently been influenced by the accidents
at TMI and Chernobyl. Earlier NKS programs on control rooms were turned
first towards human factors and then towards computerized support in the
management of accidents. Reactor safety work, originally on quality assurance
and core calculations, was extended to include probabilistic methods and
accident sequences. Work on emergency, countermeasures, public information, and
radioecology received a new impetus after Chernobyl. All of the five NKS
program have included waste management questions.
5. So what have been the results of this Nordic venture?
What has been achieved over so many years of
sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing? Was it worth it, all these
projects, meetings, conferences, journeys?
Looking back, a number of substantial results can be displayed. We shall first
look at some of those which have made the Nordic label visible to the outside
world and gained for them recognition and respect.
Other achievements are perhaps not known outside of the Nordic area but deserve to be mentioned. Perhaps the most important is that Nordic authorities have acquired a basis for uniform working patterns in fields such as quality assurance, environmental measurements, and emergency procedures. Here are some other achievements:
Not everything can succeed in a cooperation
scheme that is not based on integration but on case by case cooperation, which
is typical for most activities in the Nordic setup.
Thus, in 1968 there was a major political attempt to establish what would have
corresponded to a Nordic common market, the NORDEK plan. As part of this,
attempts were made to create a Nordic reactor vendor and to combine the nuclear
research institutes into one united nuclear development center. On the
industrial side this was unsuccessful because the Swedish ASEA-Atom was already
too far ahead of the other countries, and on the political side the plan
collapsed. Instead, a Nordic Council of ministers was created.
Over the years, three separate attempts have been made to share the production
of radioactive isotopes for medical use between the research reactors in the
four countries, but each time it failed due to lack of sufficient commercial
incentives.
When political viewpoints override technical or scientific initiatives, this may
strike back on the success of cooperation. As the official attitudes to nuclear
power changed in Denmark and Norway in the eighties, the countries' position in
international discussions sometimes differed, for example in the London Dumping
Convention.
We have also seen how authorities in the Nordic countries have taken different
countermeasures in response to the Chernobyl contamination. With to-days
cross-country TV and radio, this has given problems for the public opinion and
harmed the confidence in the authorities.
Following Chernobyl, a "TRANSAM" project was proposed in order to
verify models for long-range atmospheric dispersion. It was impossible to obtain
financing, so it had to be dropped as a Nordic project. Later it was taken up by
the IAEA in conjunction with other international organizations.
7. What did we learn from our specific Nordic way of working?
If we shall try to draw some conclusions from our
cooperation over the last 40 years, some factors can be identified that have
been helpful in obtaining our results.
Some of them are specific for the Nordic character of our cooperation. We
benefit from easy mutual communication, most of us being able to use own
languages. In our countries we have had - and have - personalities with strong
pro-Nordic sentiments, and our cooperation got early political support,
nationally and in the Nordic Council. We were helped by a generally accepted
desire for a certain independence from the great powers, and at the same time a
desire to make our combined voices heard.
We have fairly unbureaucratic working habits which makes life for participants
in our joint ventures easier than, e.g., in the EU. Also, we have learnt that
organizational frames for the cooperation must be under constant review so that
they can be adapted to changing circumstances.
A cooperation between independent institutes and authorities, such as we have
them in our field, should be voluntary - not imposed. That implies that in each
case there must be full national freedom to join a proposed venture or not. The
matters dealt with should be in the pre-competitive stage. It is often easier to
cooperate in producing surveys and drawing joint conclusions than to perform
real research.
Dedicated persons, both in the participating countries and "neutral"
ones are essential to look after upcoming issues and adapt them so that they
will be suitable - or even attractive - for cooperation. Goodwill throughout the
organizations can be encouraged if persons on several levels are engaged in some
manner in the cooperation scheme. In spite of modern communication methods, the
value of meeting activity should not be underestimated. Networks should be used
in normal work so that they will function in emergency situations.
8. What can we contribute to the future?
Our Nordic cooperation is continuing and moving
towards to-morrow's areas of concern. The recent events that will influence
future Nordic programs are, on one hand, our concern for safety in our eastern
neighbouring countries and, on the other, the fact that all of our countries now
join EU project activities and its nuclear safety work, although two of our
countries are not members.
The sixth NKS program, to start after 1997, will certainly be marked by
this development. Can the Nordic countries improve their coordination of
assistance to sources of concern in the east (e.g. Ignalina)? Can we help a
coming EU framework program with preprojects or test cases like our present
project on an European intercalibration exercise that follows a successful
Nordic experience? Can we make a contribution to a rapprochement between
concepts used in nuclear safety and in radiation protection?
Our international contacts are essential for us. We are quite proud that our
cooperation has international links, like the ones in the present conference. We
feel that our regional scheme has much to give in the future, both for our own
countries, and through the potential for impact it gives in a much larger
framework.
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