Near-meltdown incident at Swedish nuclear reactor

international | environment | other press

Tuesday August 08, 2006 00:56

by Terence

Apparently this happened last week

Swedens' regulators have been meeting in emergency session to decide on further nuclear power station shutdowns, after a near meltdown situation developed last week at the Forsmark nuclear power station when one of the backup generators failed.

A former director of the Forsmark plant is quoted as saying: "it was pure luck there wasn't a meltdown".

In the report (link below) it says:

Swedish media reported yesterday that a former director of the Forsmark plant said "It was pure luck that there was not a meltdown. Since the electricity supply from the network didn't work as it should have, it could have been a catastrophe." Without power, the temperature would have been too high after 30 minutes and within two hours there could have been a meltdown.

AND

The Forsmark incident was caused by the failure of back-up generators following a problem with the main power supply. If the backup system fails after a grid cut-off or a whole blackout, the operator loses instrumentation and control over the reactor leading to an inability to cool the core, which can lead to a meltdown (1). In a report published last year, Greenpeace highlighted the widespread and frequent problems of failing power backup systems of nuclear reactors, which have also been reported in the US and Germany.

This will come across as quite surprising for a country like Sweden where most people believe and expect from experience that they have very high standards particulary for safety in that country and of the fact that it was Swedish Nuclear Power stations radiation monitoring equipment that alerted the world to the Chernobyl accident back in 1985.

We know a number of years ago that there was also serious accidents in Japan's nuclear programme, but so far none that would be considered a disaster. Also France a good many years ago also had a problem during wintertime when two diseal backup generators failed to start, but eventually did.

Like all accidents for each category separate in severity by a factor of 10 say, the number of accidents is proportional. Thus there will be 100s if not 1000s of times more minor accidents than serious ones, than fatal ones than catastrohpic ones. However we do not have the empirical data of Chernobyl and other less disasters and less well known to show that they do occur. This latest incident in Sweden is a clear sign that the potential for something awful to happen is still alive and well.