EU nuclear safety project for Eastern Europe

["Tsurikov, Nick" <ntsuriko@rgc.com.au>]

Dear Radsafers,

I think you will find the attached interesting.

Kind regards
-----
Nick Tsurikov
Radiation Safety Officer
RGC Mineral Sands Limited
Eneabba, Western Australia
e-mail: ntsuriko@rgc.com.au
World Collection of Radiation Links:
http://www.cynet7.com/Walkabout/
-----

İElectronic Telegraph, London
ISSUE 1272Wednesday 18 November 1998

EU budget scandal hid nuclear safety fiasco
By Toby Helm, EU Correspondent in Strasbourg 

A £600 million European Union project to make dangerous nuclear reactors
in central and eastern Europe safe was branded a dismal failure
yesterday by the community's financial watchdog.

The European Court of Auditors said the nuclear safety programme had
been so badly run that it was impossible to judge whether it had
achieved any positive results.

Its highly critical report left the impression that nuclear reactors in
Russia and other countries remain as dangerous as ever, six years after
the EU made the cash available for bringing them up to Western safety
standards.

Yesterday, Bernhard Friedmann, the court's president, told the European
Parliament: "It is particularly worrying that at the end of 1997 it was
not possible to judge whether there had been any actual progress in
terms of nuclear safety."

The findings added to pressure on a European Commission already bruised
by the auditors' disclosure last weekend of a series of mismanagement
and fraud scandals that had cost the taxpayer £3 billion.

The auditors' separate study into the nuclear safety programme accused
Brussels of management "laxness", repeated failure to put contracts out
to tender, unnecessary delay in getting work under way, allowing too
rapid a turnover of staff and of having a "confused" strategy.

These had meant that by the end of 1997 only about £230 million of the
£600 million allocated for the nuclear programme had been spent. Of
that, much had gone to specialist companies which had won their
contracts without tendering. The court feared that some of these had
grossly inflated their costs by claiming to be employing Western staff
while in fact taking on east Europeans at one fifteenth the cost.

Inspections at Russian nuclear plants showed the full extent of the
chaos. At Chernobyl, the EU programmes had "not allowed perceptible
results to be achieved". At the Kola power station in north-west Russia,
just under £2 million had been spent on studies "which were not followed
up with the investments originally planned". The report said: "Once the
projects had been decided, they then sometimes underwent modifications
over which the commission had little control. Projects were discontinued
after large sums had been expended, while useful projects were cut
back."

Edith Müller, a German member of the parliament's budgetary control
committee, called for the commissioner in charge, Hans van den Broek, to
be bought before members. But his spokesman said the report was based on
an "erroneous" hypothesis.

The commission was merely charged with trying to assist countries of
central and eastern Europe and could not be expected to solve the
problem. If all 65 nuclear installations were to be brought up to EU
standards, this would cost up to £40 billion, far more than the EU had
at its disposal.
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