OLKILUOTO, Finland: Halfway around the globe from Japan's atomic emergency, engineers building a cutting-edge nuclear reactor along Finland's icy shores insist the same crisis could never happen here. And that's not only because Finland is seismically stable. The 1,600-megawatt European Pressurized Reactor projected to come online in 2013 in Olkiluoto, 195 miles (315 kilometers) northwest of Helsinki, is the first of its kind expected to begin operating after the Japanese disaster. It has walls thick enough to withstand an airplane crash, components designed to tolerate the extreme cold of the Nordic winter, and decades worth of new safety systems. "(We have) so many backup systems that the kind of accident like in Japan could not happen," said project manager Jouni Silvennoinen. With the renaissance of nuclear power at stake, the atomic industry faces the challenge of persuading an increasingly skeptical public that new reactors like the EPR units being built by French company Areva in Finland, France and China are not just safer than the old ones but are virtually disaster-proof. The state-controlled company has marketed its expensive new-generation reactor technology to the US and developing countries from India to Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon has said an EPR plant would have survived the earthquake and tsunami without radiation leaks. And French Energy Minister Eric Besson, whose country gets up to 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, insisted last week it was his "profound conviction that nuclear energy will stay in Europe and the world and be one of the core energies in the 21st century." But that's a tough message to sell, with explosions and radiation leaks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan eroding confidence in nuclear power. New EPR plants have backup systems like diesel generators that are housed in separate buildings to protect them from any accident that might occur in the main reactor building. The plant must also have access to other sources of electricity, like gas turbines or the national grid, if the diesel generators fail to work. Shocked by the Japanese crisis, the European Union has called for "stress tests" for its 143 reactors. Germany - the EU's biggest economy - has temporarily suspended plans to prolong the life of its aging nuclear plants and had already planned to abandon nuclear power altogether over the next 25 years. President Barack Obama, while expressing support for nuclear power, requested a comprehensive review of the safety of US plants. Even China, which plans a massive expansion of nuclear energy, has said it will hold off on approving new nuclear plants to allow for a revision in safety standards. Suggesting that third-generation reactors like the EPR would have withstood the shock that crippled the Japanese plant is "sheer arrogance," said Mycle Schneider, an independent researcher on France's nuclear industry. "There's no way we can say today that any plant in the world would have survived what happened in Japan," he said. At the Fukushima plant, which began operating in 1971, the massive earthquake and tsunami damaged the critical cooling system, which overheated and began spewing radiation into the environment.
