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East Asian Security

July 10, 1998
By Mark Hibbs

Canada: Campaign to end nuclear exports after South Asian tests

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Germany: Chain of Human Errors Causes Most Serious German Reactor Mishap in Ten Years

 

When inspectors walked through Germany's Unterweser nuclear plant on June 6 after it had shut down, they were shocked to find that workers had disconnected and disabled an entire key safety system, according to internal documents obtained by Nucleonics Week. In an emergency, they would not have been able to prevent a major radioactive leak and contamination inside the plant.

 

Soon after the reactor shut down, the utility Preussenelektra AG issued a press release noting that there had been a suspected oil leak in the non-nuclear turbine part of the plant, leading operators to shut the unit. The company then announced curtly, without any details, that the safety significance had been uprated by regulators after they found that one of four safety systems on the steam generator circuit of the plant had been found to be not operable.

German industry and government authorities declined to provide explanations for what happened at the reactor on June 6 throughout the rest of the month. The company would only add that "ergonomic problems" in the control room would be attended to and that the operators' handbook would be updated.

 

But an investigation of the event by Nucleonics Week has now turned up confidential event reports which showed that the incident was the most serious safety-related event at a German reactor since 1987, when another German reactor, Biblis-A, suffered a loss-of-coolant accident precursor, posing the threat of a sequence leading to core meltdown. That event was hidden from the German public for a whole year, until Nucleonics Week exposed it in December, 1988, triggering the sacking of the plant director, two parliamentary investigations, and orders by German nuclear regulators to retrofit the reactor with safety systems priced at about $700-million.

 

The new internal documents show that the significance of the event at Unterweser last month was totally unrelated to the turbine oil incident which coincidentally shut down the reactor and which was reported by the utility. Instead, reports detail a series of facts that neither industry nor the government wanted to become public:

 

- all the redundant pilot lines controlling power to the main steam line safety valves of one of four steam generators had been locked off by maintenance personnel, who failed to restore function to the system before the reactor was started up the last time;

 

- reactor operators had no clue as to how to recover the system after maintenance, as they should have done before the plant was restarted;

 

- the safety key for opening and closing the system was missing from the control room the entire time, from when the plant was started up to after it scrammed shut;

 

- the design of the system meant that locking out the pilot valve also locked out all 14 safety-redundant lines in the valve station; and

 

- operators never checked to make sure the reactor was fit to operate before it was restarted with the valves shut off. One expert described this error as the equivalent to a flight crew failing to go down the safety check list in the cockpit prior to takeoff.

 

Behind closed doors, experts are now analyzing the consequences of this event. They are expected to be substantial, both for existing reactors and for a new reactor design on the drawing boards in France and Germany slated to replace up to 75 operating nuclear stations in both countries.

 

Thus far, it appears that if a tube in the affected steam generator had ruptured, the result would not likely have led to a meltdown. But with the valves locked closed, there would have been a significant contamination of the reactor itself.

 

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Canada: New Campaign to End Nuclear Exports after the South Asian Tests

 

Non-governmental organizations (NGO) and opposition parties in Canada are now attacking the Canadian government's major nuclear reactor export campaign in the wake of Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons blasts.

 

Critics, including the leader of Canada's New Democracy Party, the Sierra Club, and the Energy Probe organization, claim that previous Canadian exports to Pakistan and India directly aided these country's nuclear weapon programs.

 

While the effort has been getting major play in the Canadian press, most experts queried by Nucleonics Week in early July said that the claims of Canadian aid to the bomb programs were not credible or justified.

 

There is no doubt that Canada's sale of the Cirus research reactor in the late 1960s aided India, since that unit was used for production of plutonium for its bombs. But Canada cut off nuclear trade with India in 1974, after India tested a bomb using plutonium made at Cirus, despite a pledge it would dedicate the reactor to peaceful use.

 

New criticism, however, stems from reports that India, and Pakistan, can produce tritium, a thermonuclear material. Critics claim that both countries produce tritium from heavy water, which is used as a moderator and coolant in power reactors which India has built and operated on the basis of a Canadian reactor design sold to India during the 1960s. But nuclear weapons experts denied that the claim was relevant. None of Pakistan's bombs exploded last week used thermonuclear material, regardless of Pakistan's theoretical capability to produce it using a Canadian reactor sold to Pakistan in 1968. And it is believed that India produced pure thermonuclear material using indigenous technology and, likely, lithium deuteride, a different thermonuclear substance, unrelated to detritiation of heavy water.

 

Critics charged as well that Canadian safety aid to both Pakistan and India in recent years aided their nuclear weapons programs. This, too, has been steadfastly denied by Canadian industry the the government in Ottawa, which said that all input was screened for sensitivity since 1974.

Nuclear Watch is written exclusively for Global Beat. Mark Hibbs is European Editor of Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel, leading specialist newsletters on international nuclear affairs, published by McGraw-Hill, Inc. Hibbs, based in Bonn, Germany, covers nuclear energy and proliferation problems in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Asia.

Mark Hibbs' coordinates:
Tel: x49-228-215051
Fax: x49-228-218849
E-mail: mhibb@mh.com

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