Of plants and reliability

Behind the political statements made about the transformer event at the Kruemmel nuclear power station (KKK) in the summer of 2009 there are fundamental issues of atomic law. Pursuant to Articles 20 and 28 of its Basic Law, Germany is a state in which the rule of law applies. Consequently, the aspects of atomic law associated with the incident merit a closer look, all the more so as the items concerned have been known for many years. Important aspects in the debate about the Kruemmel nuclear power plant are the fact that the transformer is considered part of the nuclear power station under atomic law and thus a ''plant'' subject to surveillance by the nuclear regulatory agencies, on the one hand, and the reliability under atomic law of the operator and the executive personnel responsible, on the other hand. Both ''plant'' and ''reliability'' are terms focusing on nuclear safety. Hence the question to what extent safety was affected in the Kruemmel incident. The classification of the event as 0 = no or only a very slight safety impact on the INES scale (INES = International Nuclear Event Scale) should not be used to put aside the safety issue once and for all. Points of fact and their technical significance must be considered prior to any legal assessment. Legal assessments and regulations are associated with facts and circumstances. Any legal examination is based on the facts as determined and elucidated. Any other procedure would be tantamount to an inadmissible legal advance conviction. Now, what is the position of political statements, i.e. political assessments and political responsibility? If everything is done the correct way, they come at the end, after exploration of the facts and evaluation under applicable law. Sometimes things are handled differently, with consequences which are not very helpful. In the light of the provisions about the rule of law as laid down in the Basic Law, the new federal government should be made to observe the proper sequence of steps. The yardsticks to be applied to nuclear technology should be comparable to those used to evaluate other risk-prone technologies. This is required in the constitutional principle of equality. (orig.)