A new failure, which occurred during the night of Friday to Saturday on the secondary circuit of reactor 1 of the Flamanville nuclear power plant (Manche), led to decoupling this unit from the network, we learned from site management .
"The random operation of a steam valve on the secondary circuit" led to deactivate the latter and reduce the power of the reactor to 6%, which was not shut down, Eric Trelet told AFP, on-call manager.
"This is the same problem as that of last Saturday, which had not been fully settled," said this source. The reactor was then decoupled for a few hours from the network on November 25.
Repair work could start this Sunday morning, after the elements have cooled down, and finish in the evening, said Trelet.
This new failure is part of a series of hazards that have affected the operation of this reactor since its shutdown for maintenance on July 21, one of which occurred at the end of October.
Scheduled initially on September 24, its restart had been postponed for a month but was compromised, as of October 24, by a radioactive leak of nearly six hours, with a flow rate of 7.000 liters per hour, on the primary circuit.
Cold shutdown, the reactor had restarted on November 15 but had to be temporarily decoupled ten days later because of the faulty valve again involved Saturday.
The Nuclear Safety Authority asked the plant to provide by the end of the year a precise analysis of the incident of October 24 and 25, which was classified as level 1 on the Ines scale which will from 0 to 7. The leak had remained confined inside the reactor building and had made no casualties.
The Flamanville plant has two 1.300 MW units each commissioned in 1985 and 1986 and a third under construction, the new generation EPR reactor, denounced by environmentalists and whose completion has been postponed several times due to setbacks. techniques.
http://fr-ca.actualites.yahoo.com/nucl% ... 05538.html
Surprising that I got the news before your media presented it !!!
