Traian Băsescu asked SRI to check purchases from Cernavodă

Given the nuclear crisis of Japan, President Traian Băsescu said that he asked for the safety features of the Cernavodă nuclear power plant to be checked.

"I have asked the competent institutions and the management of the plant to start a process of checking the security features of the plant, and I warned the SRI to heed the risks of possible breaches of the nuclear security conditions. The SRI could gather information about the risks", Traian Băsescu said on Realitatea TV.

Referring to the public debate on the purchases from Cernavodă, Băsescu said that it was the job of the specialized services to have this information checked.

"You have a debate about some purchases for reactor two or one. Surely it is of interest for an information service to check it, just for the record, not in terms of the Prosecutor, if there are any risks or not through the purchases that there have been made. I should receive a report. Can you imagine that a nuclear plant in Romania may be out of the SRI focus?", the head of state said.

Given this context, he gave assurances that Romania is to check

"Romania is not a nuclear threat. I asked that all the safety features of the two reactors to be checked , and I warned them on the project of the third reactor, because we might need to have higher standards", President Băsescu concluded.

Controversies on purchases from Cernavodă

The Minister of Economy, Ion Ariton, decided to set up a commission to examine the responsiveness capacity of the plant in Cernavodă in case of major unpredictable events.

The commission will submit, within 30 days from the date of the order issuing, a report on the noted conclusions, it was said in a press release.

After the earthquake in Japan that has seriously damaged the nuclear plant in Fukushima, Nuclearelectrica, the nuclear plant operator in Cernavodă, announced that the unit has been designed to withstand earthquakes of eight degrees magnitude on the Richter scale, and the earthquakes that can occur in Romania may have a maximum intensity in the range of 7 to 7.5 degrees.

Subsequently, the representatives of the plant said that the unit in Cernavodă operated in secure conditions for the environment and population, while the purchases of spare parts have complied with the legislation, thus invalidating some of the information conveyed in the media.

In the past days the journalists released the information on the 2007 purchases of the components for the nuclear units from a Romanian company, which the financial adviser Ion Blănculescu accused of no expertise, to the detriment of the German firms, qualified in this area.

In response, the Cernavodă plant manager said that the auction complied with the law, and security components met the security standards.

In his turn, the plant's technical director said that the German company has been disqualified from bidding for the purchases of the parts because it has claimed that it could not fully meet the technical requirements and it requested exemptions.

Translated by: Iulia Florescu

MA student, MTTLC, Bucharest University