Nuclear power plants in the EU should be tested every six years for safety shortfalls, the bloc’s executive proposed on Thursday in order to draw lessons from the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011.

“The fact remains that there are 132 nuclear reactors in operation in Europe today,” EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said.

“Our task is to make sure that safety is given the utmost priority in every one of them.”

However, his proposals failed to win over Green parliamentary leader Rebecca Harms who called them “seriously underwhelming”.

Green politicians traditionally oppose nuclear power.

“The proposals have been tailored to the demands of the nuclear industry and should be seen as little more than a further attempt to legitimise nuclear power,”said Harms, a EU lawmaker from Germany.

The measures were welcome, however, by conservative politicians in the European Parliament, with Slovenian lawmaker Romana Jordan calling it “an important step toward achieving the highest nuclear safety standards”.

The commission wants the mandatory tests every six years not to cover the entire reactor, but only a specific safety aspect that would be agreed between member states – for instance – protection against floods or precautions for a possible plane crash.

There will be a multi-national peer review process in place as part of a bid to bring “nuclear safety into the European domain,” Oettinger said.

However, the environmental group Greenpeace predicted that the new rules did not go far enough “to rule out a European Fukushima”,arguing that the testing foreseen would “leave some parts of a plant untouched for decades”.

A round of voluntary tests carried out on European nuclear power plants after the Fukushima scare revealed that almost all were in need of safety improvements.

EU member states will now have to approve the commission’s proposal which requires an emergency response centre at every plant, and seeks higher design standards.

Fourteen EU countries produce nuclear power, with France most dependent on atomic energy. Lithuania and Poland are in line to also join the club, with plans in place for their first reactors.

In Germany, where the government plans to shut down all nuclear reactors by 2022 and replace them with more environmentally friendly power sources.