Unit was operating at 175 MWe and spent fuel discharge was in progress. First pair of spent fuel bundles were received at the Inspection bay in an open tray called the Insert (meant for receiving spent fuel bundles) attached to a Transfer Arm (T/A). The T/A was rotated and aligned to the spent fuel storage bay port in order to discharge the bundles to storage bay. When the T/A Ram was advanced to push the bundles, the front end bundle got stuck at the storage bay port entry and due to the Ram force, the rear end bundle got lifted and toppled out of the insert. The event was caused by the partial detachment of three pencils in the circumference at the storage bay port entry causing the above incident. Even though one bundle had fallen down and pencils were detached, there was no damage to the pencils and the fuel cladding was intact and there was no radioactivity release. Dropping of a spent fuel assembly can be classified as a real, possible initiator. Safty function was fully available. Hence the event can be rated as Level-1 under A-2R category of Table-1 of user's manual.
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 […]
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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, […]
