Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-11-18-Speech-4-198"
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"en.19991118.9.4-198"2
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"Mr President, I shall answer your questions and contributions on those matters which fall within the jurisdiction of the Commission.
The way we see the situation in the Member States, the nuclear candidate countries with nuclear facilities and in the newly independent states is as follows. Let me first point out that very few nuclear power plants do in fact use a computer-based system for the essential part of their safety system.
The Member States which have nuclear power plants have been working on this question for at least two years, and the information in our possession indicates that the necessary corrective measures have by now been practically completed, as have all works to do with emergency planning. In this matter, the Commission has promoted exchanges of know-how and of good practice, but we did not consider it useful to intervene further with our activities in the actions of Member States.
The case is rather different for some countries of Central and Eastern Europe and some new Independent States, whose response to the problem has been less prompt. Some of them, in fact, did not start to concern themselves with this problem until the end of 1998. These countries have been supported in their work by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which reviewed their analyses of the extent of the problem in the cases of a considerable number of power plants. Mrs Plooij-van Gorsel referred to the operations carried out to date, and my answer to her is this: the operations of the Agency and of countries using nuclear power plants did not reveal any “bug” problems in the essential safety systems.
The Commission provided additional assistance to a number of nuclear power plant operators. We financed European Union expert missions to 3 power plants in Russia and to 3 power plants in Ukraine. In addition, we offered our assistance to the nuclear regulation authorities as of the beginning of this year, and we are now supporting projects of this type in Bulgaria, Slovakia and Russia.
Although none of the elements in the crucial safety systems are affected, a number of other systems, particularly the operator display systems, may be affected and failure of these systems may indirectly threaten nuclear safety by increasing the burden on the operators, as has been mentioned. According to the information available to us, we think that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have generally made good progress in correcting these systems. In comparison, the new Independent States of the former Soviet Union are making undeniably slower progress in their corrective operations, but they are all claiming that the work will have been completed by the end of the year. We are supporting these rehabilitation projects by contributing to the activities of two international scientific and technical centres, in Moscow and Kiev, and we are prepared, if necessary, to provide additional assistance to these programmes in consideration of the fact that, as you have said throughout this debate, we are getting extremely close to the transition to the year 2000 and the main thing has been to begin to address the problem in good time.
This is my answer, and this is our contribution to solving this important problem."@en1
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