On April 4, 1996, Palo Verde 2 experienced fires in two separate areas as a result of a single initiating event. Specifically, a fault in an improperly grounded essential lighting system isolation transformer caused fires in the control room and the Train"B" DC equipment room The first fire involved the essential lighting distribution panel and the control room emergency lighting uninterruptible power supply located in the control room on elevation 140-0. This fire created a smoke condition in the main control room behind the main control boards. The smoke layer extended down from the ceiling to a level just above the tops of the control boards. The smoke did not cause a control room evacuation. The licensee used the control room HVAC system in its smoke removal mode to clear the control room. The second fire involved the isolation transformer panel located in the Train "B" DC equipment room on control building elevation 100-0. Both fires were detected by the plant fire detection system and plant personnel in the control room. The site fire department promptly responded and extinguished these fires. Justification: Using the guidance in paragraph III-2.10 this event is rated at level zero/below scale. Paragraph III-2.10 refers to Table II in Part III of the INES user's manual. The rating is obtained by entering the table in the row for Full safety function availability (cooling the radioactive material). This safety function remained "fully" available throughout this event. Since the hazard itself (the fire) is not considered an initiator, a rating of level zero is appropriate. The plant was in a refueling outage at the time of this event and all but one fuel assembly had been removed from the core. This rating is confirmed by the guidance contained in section III-3.1.1 (degradation of reactor core cooling) and section III-3.1.2 (events affecting the spent fuel pool) since neither core cooling nor spent fuel pool cooling was lost.
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, […]
