Uranium One Inc SXRZF

Modern plants are much safer than Japan's 40-year-

[Xcal911]

Sharesof Canadian uranium mining firms fell on Monday amid reports of adeepening nuclear crisis in Japan and even as the industry tried to showthat modern plants are much safer than Japan's 40-year-old Fukushimacomplex.

Reports that highly radioactive iodine wasseeping from the Japanese facility and might be making its way intoseawater farther north of the plant than previously thought added toconcerns.

Shares of Cameco Corp. were down four per cent to $29.33, while the stock of Uranium One Inc. lost 10 per cent to $3.90.

Denison Mines fell 6.7 per cent to $2.49 and Paladin Energy lost three per cent to $3.67.

Atthe same time, engineers building a cutting-edge nuclear reactor inFinland were insisting the same crisis could never happen there.

The French state-controlled company Areva isbuilding a 1,600-megawatt European Pressurized Reactor facility 315kilometres northwest of Helsinki.

Projected to come online in 2013at Olkiluoto, it will be the first of its kind expected to beginoperating after the Japanese disaster.

It has walls thick enoughto withstand an airplane crash, components designed to tolerate theextreme cold of the Nordic winter and decades worth of new safetysystems.

"(We have) so many backup systems that the kind ofaccident like in Japan could not happen," said project manager JouniSilvennoinen. Areva is building similar units in France and China.

Withthe renaissance of nuclear power at stake, the atomic industry facesthe challenge of persuading an increasingly skeptical public that newreactors like the EPR units are not just safer than the old ones but arevirtually disaster-proof.

The state-controlled company hasmarketed its expensive new-generation reactor technology to the UnitedStates and developing countries from India to Saudi Arabia and Brazil.