On 19 February the Barents Observer released the news: “Iodine detected in Europe was first measured in Finland and was made public by France, but the Norwegian authorities claim that the finding is not large enough to be news.” Spreading radioactive contamination and silencing the authorities? The echo spread through social media. The main media in silence.

The first trace was found in Finland on 30 January, in the Basque Country on 17 February, but the public did not know anything until in France, on 18, they realized it. There is also a map drawn up by the French Nuclear Safety Organization showing that the remains of 131-iodine were also found in the Basque Country. It is documented that the United States has sent, at the request of the European authorities, a WC-135 aircraft specialising in the aerial detection of traces of nuclear accidents. In early March, a number of media outlets devoted a short space to the mysterious fog.

ARGIA reported on its internet service on 10 March: “With iodine 131-, experts are convinced that it is an accident that is taking place at this time, or a very recent accident. But which and where? The discovery of the first signs in Finland, of a Russian nuclear power plant or of some leakage of nuclear weapons submerged by its army in the Arctic Sea, raised suspicions. For his part, the director of the antinuclear association Belona, the Norwegian physicist Nils Bøhmer, has been in charge of tying the accident suffered by the Norwegian power plant Halden. On 24 October and the days after, Halden’s employees had to pour radioactive iodine through the ventilation system, due to the problems caused by the reactor’s nuclear fuel management.”

The Belona association has a reputation for nuclear issues, and one of its founders was precisely Alexei Yablokov, one of the greatest experts in the Chernobyl nuclear accident who passed away in February. Belona stated: “It follows from the explanations of the Norwegian authorities that there have been temperature variations in the reactor core vessel and that the radiation has increased in the core, with the consequent risk of hydrogen accumulation. Belona wishes to recall that precisely that was the accumulation of hydrogen in the reactor core, which caused the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011.”

It is one thing that the plant is standing, but the fuels it has in the oven must be kept refrigerated under control. The employees of the Halden plant, at least in February, had difficulty controlling the situation: if they opened ventilation windows to alleviate reactor problems, the radiation would spread through the air, creating an alarm among the population about contamination, but if they closed the windows, stored the hydrogen and increased the risk of the reactor exploding.

Pulling the thread from Belona, Norwegian expert Pierre Fetet has published a detailed analysis of the report of the Norwegian authorities on his French blog Fukushima: “Halden nuclear reactor in Norway: risk to Europe”. We summarize it below.

Thorium and plutonium fuels

Built in 1959 in Norway, near the border with Sweden, it is one of the oldest reactors in the world. It is nestled inside a small mountain, between 30 and 50 meters under the rocks. The entrance, the boiler room, the used fuel warehouse, the cooling system -- it's all buried. In the buildings seen from the outside there are offices, laboratories and workshops.

This small reactor of 25 MegaWat, of 460 MW in Garoña, has the particularity that the codes, standards and advice established internationally for nuclear power plants are no longer mandatory, as they were created for experiments in Halde.

As one of the most important projects of the International Agency for Nuclear Energy, Halden has partners with public institutions from the richest countries in the world, such as the United States to Russia... EDF France and CIEMAT Spain are also involved.

On 24 October 2016, the company IFE, Halden's manager, reported that at 13:45 hours a quantity of radioactive iodine had been "released" during tests of a fuel in the reactor room, but that the leak had not posed a risk to employees. However, the Norwegian Nuclear Safety Agency (NPRA) decided to make an unexpected visit to the plant and to discover in it serious irregularities: that the company concealed for several hours the incident without notifying the authorities, that radioactive vapour, whether small or not, reached the reception hall and the workers had to be evicted. But the most serious thing was that the "event" of the reactor was not yet controlled.

What happened? When a reactor stops, the reaction of internal fuels stops completely. In Halden, on the contrary, all symptoms showed that the nuclear reaction was still alive, so it continued to produce iodine. However, the fact that the reaction in the nucleus is not completely stopped at the same time as cooling is disrupted is dangerous: the rise in temperature can damage the materials adjacent to the fuels, as they, by contact with the water, produce hydrogen and explosions occur. This is how the explosions took place in Fukushima.Las authorities have immediately suspended the IFE's license to use the Halden reactor and the plant is standing.

The point is that since 2013, a new Halden fuel, thorium, which is used in atomic reactors to replace uranium has been experimented. The effectiveness of a mixture of thorium and plutonium was being tested in the last year. Pierre Fetet warns that such experiments are particularly dangerous: “We must not forget that the Chernobyl disaster was caused by the loss of control of workers in a similar experiment.”

Halde's, compared to the big accidents, has been a small -- but bigger than what had been confessed at the beginning. Over time, the NPRA has had to admit that much more than the 184 million becquerels mentioned at the beginning were issued: 8,7 trillion ions of rare and tritium gas [in point b] becquerel. It is not very credible for a public institution to recognize more than 0.002% of the problem.

And how do we know so little about this accident? 130 organizations and companies from 21 countries are involved in the Halden experiments. They want to experiment calmly, without worrying about international nuclear safety standards, with the permission to hide in case of contagion.