Written by Matthew Parry,
© alona_s / Fotolia
In the early 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR, the EU began to provide support via its TACIS programme for structural adjustment and reform in 11 post-Soviet and post-communist countries. One form of support was for countries grappling with a Soviet-era nuclear legacy to help them lift their safety and technical standards to Western European levels – a source of particular concern in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. That support ultimately paved the way for a formal EU external policy on nuclear safety cooperation …read more