A small steam leakage was discovered nearby a former bearing stand of a high pressure turbine at about 7:30 am on 18 October 1992 when Fugen was going on full power operation. It was found out by a field investigation that the steam leakage occurred near an instrument pipe for a pressure detector of an outlet pipe of the high pressure turbine. The reactor was shut down by normal operating procedure and a generator was cut off from the grid system at 2:10 to investigate causes of the leakage and to repair the affected part. After the shutdown, the investigation of the affected pipe was carried out and a small penetrating hole (about 8 x 4mm) was confirmed at a gamma-plug welded at the outlet pipe to stop a hole from which a radioactive source was inserted to examine the welding part of the pipe during the construction period of Fugen (1976). However the integrity of the outlet pipe was kept. The causes for the penetrating hole are suspected to be erosion-corrosion due to factors such as relatively high wetness in the steam, material and of the gamma-plug.
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, […]
