Last summer, when the Belgian government revealed that seventy new cracks had been discovered in the boiler of the country’s Tihange 2 nuclear reactor, towns near the country’s borders reacted with exasperation. The power plant lies just 60km from the triple border where Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands meet, close to the Dutch town of Maastricht and the German town of Aachen. These were not the first cracks to be discovered. Tihange is now more than four decades old, but it was built to only have a lifespan of 30 years. Already in 2014 an inspection found thousands of small ‘microcracks’ in the reactor. The neighboring German state of Northrhine-Westphalia became so alarmed that it ordered iodine tablets for German citizens in case of a Belgian nuclear accident.
Forbes 4th Feb 2018 read more »