Leo Tubbax, spokesperson for Nucléaire Stop Kernenergie (Stop Nuclear Kernenergie) announced on Thursday that a network of citizens who is opposed to the restart of reactor Tihange 2 and Doel 3 has recently mobilized and has collected more than 100,000 signatures in the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion. More than 100,000 citizens of the Euregio have signed the petition against restarting the two reactors. The signatories of the petition - which is available in print and on the Internet - consider that the reactors cannot be reconnected to the network as long as "the cause of the cracks in the reactor vessels hasn’t been precisely determined and made unambiguous and a change in the size of the cracks during their utilization cannot definitively be excluded".
According to the text of the petition, "the irradiation experiments raise the concerns about the fact that the friability of cracked steel from the high-pressure vessels has already exceeded the allowed limits after 30 years of operation. Finally, "there is no evidence that the reactors with cracks have the same level of security than the reactors without cracks."
According to Leo Tubbax, "it is unthinkable that the government would take such actions after the Paris attacks and not be concerned about the safety of millions of people, who could be affected by a nuclear disaster in our own country."
(Source: Belga)
