Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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Ukraine, and two in Lithuania. That's the RBMK, the Chernobyltype
reactor.
So improving operating procedures, improving training, et
cetera, improving station management, it is commonly felt by experts,
will have little or no effect in terms of raising RBMKs to
international and western standards, because you still have not
licked these basic design-related safety problems.
For these reasons, most experts both in and out of the Soviet
Union are practically unanimous in calling for the shutdown of
RBMKs as soon as possible. I
use the words "as soon as possible"
because the RBMKs, with the statistics I've just cited to you, Mr.
Chairman, do provide a fairly large fraction of the electrical
demand in the CIS, particularly in Russia. But consider Lithuania.
The two RBMKs in Ignalina, in Lithuania, supply about half of
that country's electrical power, and Lithuania has no economy for
substitution of generating equipment, shutting those reactors down
and bringing other types of technology in. It has no indigenous fuel
resources, so it's got a very tough problem in terms of the management
of those two Chernobyl-type reactors. That's a reality one has
to deal with.
Looking again at the total, one would say, "Well, let's shut them
all down, and let's shut them all down now." We have to look at
what is practical. Can you do that without impacting the electrical
production and, therefore, the economy? Well, it turns out that
electrical demand is decreasing in the former Soviet Union because
industrial activity is down. How far will it decrease? Can you shut
the RBMKs down and slide under the demand curve? I don't know,
and they don't know.
There are other alternatives that should be enumerated and intensively
reviewed by those republics.
Efficiency improvements in
the grid. Grid losses in that region run about 10 percent. That's the
line losses, power lost in transmitting power from the generating
station to its end use. Another alternative is repowering these
RBMKs with fossil-fueled sources, as was done in Midland and
Zimmer in this country. Wheeling power around the grid from
places where you have excess capacity to where you have a shortfall,
and a fourth possibility, longer-term, of course, is completing
the latter day 1000 MWe WER-type reactors, the pressurized
water-type reactors that are approaching western standards. But
the issue must be approached as a systems problem, an economic
problem, supply/demand, look at alternatives for meeting demand,
end-use efficiencies. And finally, how do these remediations get
paid for? We must bring to this region, to the Commonwealth of
Independent States and eastern Europe, means of entering the
world economy to generate value to generate hard currency to pay
for the reactor improvements that we, not they, insist on.
I'd like to turn now very briefly to the non-RBMK-type reactors,
the pressurized water reactors, and there are several genre of pressurized
water reactors. They are called VVER. They are similar in
concept, but not detail, to the reactors that my company constructs,
Westinghouse, and Frammatome. There are three classes of
WERs. Let's simply call them generation one, generation two,
generation three. The IAEA, the USNRC, the U.S. Department of
Energy, and the World Organization of Reactor Operators, a pleth-