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what level of radioactive contamination pasture land, drinking water, milk, meat, eggs, vegetables, and fish, are
to be banned for consumption by livestock or humans.
49. Different countries - even different local government authorities within a country - have different criteria.
Some have none at all, ICRP and NUSS notwithstanding. States with more rigorous standards may destroy
large amounts of food or may ban food imports from a neighbour states with more permissive criteria. This
causes great hardship to farmers who may not receive any compensation for their losses. It may also cause
trade problems and political tension between states. Both of these difficulties occurred following the Chernobyl
disaster, when the need to develop at least regionally conformable contamination criteria and compensation
arrangements was overwhelmingly demonstrated.
2.3 Nuclear Accidents Risks
50. Nuclear safety returned to the newspaper headlines following the Three Mile Island (Harrisburg, United
States) and the Chernobyl (USSR) accidents. Probabilistic estimates of the risks of component failure, leading
to a radioactive release in Western style light water reactors wore made in 1975 by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission./48 The most serious category of release through containment failure was placed at around 1 in
1,000,000 years of reactor operation. Post-accident analysis of both Harrisburg and Chernobyl - a completely
different type of reactor - have shown that in both cases, human operator error was the main cause. They
occurred after about 2,000 and 4,000 reactor-years respectively./49 The frequencies of such occurrences are
well nigh impossible to estimate probabilistically. However, available analyses indicate that although the risk of
a radioactive release accident is small, it is by no means negligible for reactor operations at the present time.
51. The regional health and environment effects of an accident are largely predictable from radioactive fall-out
studies following early atomic weapons testing in the atmosphere and have been confirmed in practice
following the Chernobyl accident. What could not be confidently predicted before Chernobyl were the local
effects of such an accident. A much clearer picture is now emerging as a result of the experiences there when
a reactor exploded, following a series of infringements of the official safety regulations, on 26 April 1986,
causing the worst reactor accident ever experienced. As a result, the whole district had to be managed on
something like a 'war footing' and efforts resembling a large military operation were needed to contain the
2.4 Radioactive Waste Disposal
52. Civil nuclear energy programmes worldwide have already generated many thousands of tons of spent fuel
and high-level waste. Many governments have embarked on large-scale programmes to develop ways of
isolating these from the biosphere for the many hundreds of thousands of years that they will remain
hazardously radioactive.
53. But the problem of nuclear waste disposal remains unsolved. Nuclear waste technology has reached an
advanced level of sophistication./50 This technology has not however been fully tested or utilized and problems
remain about disposal. There is particular concern about future recourse to ocean dumping and the disposal of
contaminated waste in the territories of small or poor states that lack the capacity to impose strict safeguards.
There should be a clear presumption that all countries that generate nuclear waste dispose of it within their own
territories or under strictly monitored agreements between states.
3. The Current International Situation
54. During the last 25 years, a growing awareness of the difficulties outlined above has resulted in a wide range
of reactions from technical experts, the public, and governments. Many experts still feel that so much can be
learned from the problems experienced up to now. They argue that if the public climate allows then to solve the
nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning issues and the cost of borrowing money remains reasonably
below its 1980-82 peak, in the absence of viable new supply alternatives there is no reason why nuclear energy
should not emerge as a strong runner in the 1990s. At the other extreme, many experts take the view that there
are so many unsolved problems and too many risks for society to continue with a nuclear future. Public
reactions also vary. Some countries have exhibited little public reaction, in others there appears to be a high

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