GERMANY must begin contemplating a future without nuclear power, the
federal republic’s environment minister and head of reactor safety insisted
last week. Klaus Popfer made this prophetic comment to journalists during
a press conference at the UN Development Conference in Bergen, Norway.
Popfer’s remarks came after he outlined the problems facing a unified
Germany over its legacy of elderly, Soviet-designed pressurised-water reactors
which cannot at present meet Western safety standards. He suggested that
many of the 60 or so Soviet PWRs – known as VVERs in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary and the USSR – were as unsafe as those in East Germany, where problems
have forced a number of East German reactors to be shut down.
