Ukrainian nuclear power: ticking time bomb activated

Just meanwhile in Ukraine… Local nuclear power engineers are sounding all alarm bells that for ‘unknown’ reasons remain to be unheard, as usual. While at the Zaporizhia NPP they have only started loading the Westinghouse fuel, on the Unit 3 of the South Ukraine NPP it has been in use for a year already. And it was a year full of troubles. The Unit was under repair for 119 days in 2015. On February 20, 2016, turbine stop valves automatically closed upon increase in the steam generator feedwater level. In March, immediately after 83 TVS-WR fuel assemblies were loaded, the Unit was shut down for the scheduled preventive-maintenance to be started again only on June 10. According to some mass media outlets, there was also registered loss of pressure in the nuclear fuel cassettes of the Unit 3 reactor in May.

According to the information that can’t be found on the official websites of Energoatom and South Ukraine NPP, after the overhaul there were several attempts actually to reconnect the Unit 3, all of them failed. Amid this background, on June 2 and June 5, radioactive waste releases into the environment were registered once again – Source