Units, 1,5,6,7 & 8 at the Pickering Nuclear Generating were shut down in an orderly manner on April 20 & 21, to allow repairs to an emergency coolant injection system (ECIS) check valve (units 2,3 &4 were already shut down for maintenance). During testing the position of one of two parallel redundant check valves between the ECIS storage tank and the ECIS pump suction header could not be verified. The check valves are required to reseat to prevent loss of inventory and flow of contaminated water to the storage tank during the ECIS recovery phase. The back up motorized valve to prevent this is tested once every 10 years, during a planned 8-unit outage as its closure results in a total impairment of the ECIS function. The MV tested satisfactorily on shutdown. The check valves cannot be isolated, so a station outage for 8 - 10 days was taken for their repair. The failure constitutes a loss of redundancy of ECIS function. Continued operation is allowed but station policy is to suspend reactor fuelling for impairments where no safety function redundancy remains for response to a fuelling-induced (small) LOCA. Lack of fuelling would have forced shutdown in the near future anyway. When the NV opened the position indicating rod was found bent, causing the NV to be stuck in the partially open position. The position indicating mechanisms have been removed from both NVs to eliminate this failure mechanism and a new testing procedure developed. This event is rated at level 1 on "degradation of defence in depth" without an initiator for a "possible" initiator (small LOCA) with "adequate" safety function.
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, […]
