Chernobyl ‘Replay’ Seen as Likely : Reactors: Experts fear another Soviet accident could undercut U.S. promotion of nuclear energy, Watkins says.

WASHINGTON —  U.S. experts are concerned that a nuclear accident similar to the Chernobyl catastrophe will occur in the Soviet Union in the next five years and will undermine efforts to promote nuclear power in the United States, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins said Wednesday.

The Soviet Union still has 16 nuclear reactors of the type involved in the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, and their operations are “frightening,” Watkins told Times reporters and editors at a breakfast session. In addition to worrying about the destruction of lives and property in the Soviet Union, U.S. nuclear experts are concerned that another incident could be a death knell for nuclear power.

The industry “can’t have another Chernobyl,” Watkins said, adding that the next three to four years may determine whether there is to be a nuclear component in the United States’ long-term energy strategy.

The industry’s future, he said, will be determined not only by the American public’s reaction to nuclear-waste disposal strategies and to the attempt to develop a new generation of safer atomic power plants but by efforts to avert another tragedy in the Soviet Union.

“We’re sitting here hanging on for dear life,” he said, working with Soviet engineers to improve safety procedures at older, suspect plants that are not closed because their power output is deemed vital to the Soviet economy.

Under an agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Soviet government last year, U.S. nuclear experts are working with the Soviets to revamp reactor operations. By the end of this year, Watkins said, the American team hopes to see solid improvement over the kind of lax operations that led to history’s worst nuclear mishap at Chernobyl.

In their efforts to help avoid another such disaster, Watkins said the U.S. team has found working-level Soviet officials open, cooperative and willing to make changes. But, he said, “they don’t have any procedures. They don’t have any casualty control procedures. They don’t have any maintenance practices. It’s all in the man’s head that operates the plant. It’s frightening to us.”

The lack of discipline, he said, is compounded by a reactor design “which couldn’t be worse.”

U.S. reactors are designed to shut down when the flow of coolant to their core is interrupted. But the Soviets’ RBMK reactors do not. It is a design that causes an accident to get worse and worse once a plant goes out of control, as the Chernobyl reactor did, Watkins said. The catastrophe was attributed to a series of operator mistakes.

When the chain of events led to disintegration of the reactor core and an enormous fire, the lack of a solid containment building made an environmental debacle inevitable. The toll is still mounting, with current estimates putting more than 4 million people in the high-risk category for serious threats to their health.

The Bush Administration has made development of a smaller, safer nuclear reactor and simplified licensing of nuclear plants a part of its national energy strategy.

Earlier this month, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences studying the impact of global warming added its endorsement to a policy of keeping open the country’s nuclear option.

“The jury is still out on whether it can be done or not,” Watkins said, referring to the industry’s battle to overcome political and environmental opposition.

While the secretary was expressing frustration at the difficulty of making his case for nuclear power, an omnibus bill including much of the Bush Administration’s energy strategy cleared an early hurdle.

The Senate Energy Committee agreed to language that would limit opposition groups’ ability to raise safety issues once a new nuclear plant has been completed.