Slovakia is a country that claims some of the highest popularity for its nuclear power plants in Europe. That‘s certainly true among its political leaders, who are such dedicated fans of nuclear reactors that they are ready to break European legislation by providing illegal state subsidies to nuclear sector, ready to violate the EU accession treaty by contemplating restarting high risk reactors, and ready to put pressure on utilities to go ahead with economically non-viable projects in Mochovce and Bohunice.

Sad to say, some of the Slovak media – instead of doing investigative work and allowing open debate – are trying to keep these controversies away from the public, thus helping to maintain an uninformed nuclear consent. Well, we do not have proof of corruption or evidence of a political link there, but two stories that I have just observed on Slovak public television give us a certain indication.

Two weeks ago, when Greenpeace delivered a massively popular petition against uranium mining to the Slovak parliament, national TV was planning to have an evening live debate with us on this hot issue. Surprisingly, its editors did not manage to find anyone in the country to defend those outrageous plans, as its proponents do not dare to speak out at the moment. So, referring to the need to be object and to have a balanced debate, the TV bosses decided rather to cancel the debate.

Last week, when another live debate was organized about nuclear power in the country, the principles of balance and objectivity were suddenly forgotten. This is how I ended up in a studio facing four leading nuclear proponents in a 90 minutes live talk: Lubomir Jahnatek (economy minister), Tibor Mikuš (president of Slovak Nuclear Forum), Vladimír Slugeň (chair of Slovak Nuclear Society), and Miroslav Lipár (Slovak delegate to International Atomic Energy Agency). The debate’s moderator turned out to be an even more passionate proponent – no wonder, he worked as an editor on a book celebrating history of Slovak nuclear programme.

The first issue being discussed was the safety of Mochovce reactors. They are built based on Soviet design from the 1970s and one very visible example of their safety deficiency is a lack of full containment – the concrete bunker above the reactor to protect it from outside and to keep the radioactivity inside. Of course, all five of the other participants in the discussion claimed that those reactors are perfectly safe, and both myself and the TV audience were told that we only need to listen to and trust them, the only real experts.

Even the European Commission made a formal recommendation that the Mochovce project must take 'necessary additional steps', such as modification in order 'to provide equivalent level of protection as full containment ... such as the ones constructed for the EPRs Olkiluoto 3 and Flamanvile'. Here is an illustrative set of reactions:

• Surely I was not quoting that properly. And even if I was, everybody knows that the European Commission is a political and bureaucratic institution that does not understand nuclear safety.

• Russian pressurized water reactors are known to be of superior safety. Even the reactors at Jaslovske Bohunice V-1, that the EU demanded to be closed as “high risk”, were actually very safe and it was a crime to shut them. (At this point the Slovak IAEA man had tears in his eyes when he added that he had operated those reactors for several decades, and how horrible it was that he had to witness their burrial last December.)

• While Mochovce reactors do not have containment like EPR, other European countries have reactors without EPR type of containment, so this is not a problem (and the IAEA guy showed a photo of the Swedish Forsmark third unit claiming this is “what Sweden built ten years ago”. I did not have full database on my head, but checked when I was out of the studio: the fact is that construction of Forsmark-3 started 30 years ago and was finished in 1985).

• Everyone in Slovakia knows those thick iron beams that are used in family houses and other buildings to strengthen their ceilings. And they can guarantee that those thick iron beams are also used in Mochovce.

• A certain - but not named - 'high representative' of French industry visited Mochovce and claimed the same concern about missing containment. After he was shown around and had it explained to him how the safety of Mochovce actually works, he concluded: “very clever”.

• Airplane crashes can be avoided by declaring a no-fly zone around the plant. And nothing, not even EPR containment, can protect a reactor from attack by military rocket, so the talk about containment is useless anyway.

The show later touched upon other issues, but they were covered with the same level of competence and quality of argument. Addressing all those within one fifth of the time I had available was of course impossible, though otherwise I pretty much enjoyed this challenge as an adrenalin trip and mental self-control exercise.

There are three main conclusions that I brought from that bizzare evening:

1. I am more scared than before by Slovak nuclear reactors, after witnessing the way the top authorities address nuclear safety issues

2. The industry and politicians must be really desperate if they need to bring four top nuclear heads and a biased moderator to the studio in order to face one Greenpeace person.

3. The popular support of the nuclear industry in Slovakia is derived from this blatant propaganda. Once open and balanced debate becomes a standard, the case for nuclear energy will be lost - and this is why the nuclear establishment, despite all its nice spin and claims of transparency and openess, tries so hard to prevent it.

(You can watch the debate, in Slovak, here)

(This is a guest post by Jan Beránek, Greenpeace International’s Nuclear Energy Project Leader)