ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades UK: More nuclear power or.......?

I just got an e-mail claiming that #1 reactor at Fosmark, North of Stockholm, Sweden, went uncontrollable on 25 july 2006 due to loss of electrical supply to the computers. The report claims the reactor was within a few minutes of core meltdown and another Chernobyl event. Any more info C-H?

Alan

What happened at Forsmark is that the sparkies wired an UPS the wrong way. They had no instruction sheet so they wired it they way they assumed it would be. This took out some of the computers in the control room. Fortunately, there are four independent back-up generators and the wiring error only took out two of them. A meltdown of the reactor could have caused significant negative publicity for the nuclear industry as the area south and west of the reactor is densly populated. (Stockholm and Uppsala)

It's the same power plant where some bright spark switched off the outgoing power without informing the control room a few years back. He almost took out the national grid, not to mention caused emergency shutdown of the reactor.

Sweden actually lost the southern part of the grid a year or two ago when a switch failed. The switch broke off and fell on the switch below, shutting down two reactors in the process.

This is in part an effect of government policy: By closing reactors and instead running the remaining ones above 100% of design output, the grid becomes more sensitive to reactor shut downs. Oskarshamn 3 will now be pushed to 1450 MW instead of the 1050 MW which it was built for. The plans are similar for the other reactors, placing the output between 120-140% of that which they were designed for.

We can't run them safely can we?
From Japanese morons mixing liquid uranium in a bucket. Yes, a bucket and so untrained they had never heard of critical mass; unauthorised experiments in Ukraine, [ eventual death toll between 35,000 and 200,000 depending on who you believe]; idiot 'electricians' wiring up critical stuff to wrong polarity by guesswork; to Brits deliberately overheating a reactor to "seal the cracks in the graphite core." [ I kid you not! ]. It caught fire. It was air cooled. And it had a chimney....
Then again, coal stations releasing enough U235 to make 20,000 atom bombs every year.

Still, never mind, eh!?

Alan