Unit 3 was operated at full power. At 11:35 during routine visual inspection of the reactor cover the steaming of the upper part of the fuel channel tract 41-13 was discovered. At 11:43 the unit was shut down by the operator. The refuelling machine was placed on the channel 41-13. On October 20, while the reactor was being cooled the defect was tested. The butt crack was found 70 mm lower of the weld seam of the joint of the holder and the standpipe (assembly 25). The defects of the weld seams were primarily detected in 1980 when consignment of standpipes was detected to have manufacturing defects. The annual ultrasonic testing of these standpipes was performed but during this checking only seam and 50 mm strip of metal adjoined to seam are being tested. The cause of this defect will be investigated. The rating of this event is classified at level 1 due to defence in depth criteria. Basis for the rating: This event is rated due to the degradation of the defence in depth criteria according to the procedure based on initiators and using the guidance for structural defects. In fact, the surveillance programme aiming at the identifying of the standpipe defects in the wall could not discover this defect because it was not located in the testing zone. This defect did not challenge the safety systems. (It was not the real initiator.) The basic rating according to the Table 1 of the INES users manual is 0. The potential consequences of this event could be more serious so this event was uprated to 1.
Everywhere you look, the nuclear industry’s hype machine is in overdrive. Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and the UK government all tout small modular reactors as the silver bullet for climate change and energy security. Tech billionaires are hiring nuclear veterans. Wall Street is whispering about “round-the-clock power” for artificial intelligence data centers. For those old enough […]
Kernenergie en veiligheid: A wargame sought to test if a major radiological release that would prompt the evacuation of millions of civilians in South Korea could distract key US allies from assisting and rebuffing an all-out military invasion of Taiwan. The short answer was yes. The game originally presumed that China, wanting to keep the […]
Big batteries and EVs to the rescue again as faults with new nuclear plant cause chaos on Nordic grids The Finnish nuclear power plant Olkiluoto was finally connected to the grid last year, at an estimated cost of €11 billion compared to the original budget of €3 billion. That cost blowout forced its developer, the […]
A vast subsea nuclear graveyard planned to hold Britain’s burgeoning piles of radioactive waste is set to become the biggest, longest-lasting and most expensive infrastructure project ever undertaken in the UK. The project [UK's nuclear waste dump] is now predicted to take more than 150yrs to complete with lifetime costs of £66bn in today’s money...The […]
Last year, the Dutch Province of Limburg started an alliance in which, besides the local government, research institutes, small nuclear reactor (SMR) developers, utilities, industrial customers and funders cooperated. With this "Limburg SMR alliance" Limburg tried to lead the way towards an SMR in Limburg. The preferred site for a first SMR would be Chemelot, […]
