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Nuclear Physicist: They Want To Hide Information About Incident At Belarusian NPP

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Nuclear Physicist: They Want To Hide Information About Incident At Belarusian NPP

A failure of secondary equipment could not have led to the shutdown of the entire power unit.

Both power units of the Belarusian nuclear power plant have not been generating electricity for two weeks. And if the first is undergoing scheduled maintenance, the second was shut down unscheduled. The Zerkalo website claims that the power unit was shut down due to a “malfunction in the circuit that is the carrier of the radioactive environment.”

The Ministry of Energy confirmed the information about the shutdown of the second power unit of the Belarusian NPP and stated that the cause was “the activation of one of the sensors.”

The Charter97.org website asked Andrei Ozharovsky, an engineer-physicist and expert of the Radioactive Waste Safety program, to comment on the Ministry of Energy's response:

— The message is clearly aimed not at informing about what happened, but at concealing information. It is not said which sensor of the NPP subsystem was triggered. The sensor of the power system — the generator, the turbine sensor or the sensor of the reactor itself. Depending on the answer to this question, we can draw a conclusion about how serious the incident is.

If the sensor that informs the operator or the automatic control system about the reactor state fails, this is a big problem. If this is secondary equipment, its failure would not have led to the shutdown of the entire power unit. An unscheduled shutdown (it should be called that) is a serious incident that affects the economy of the NPP and is also related to safety.

The second is “the power unit is temporarily disconnected from the grid”. They don’t specify for how long — several hours, several days, several weeks. We already know of precedents when the repair of a power unit for an unspecified reason lasted for months. What to expect from the repair of the second power unit — we do not yet know. Perhaps, indeed, it is necessary to replace an insignificant part, perhaps — to sort out a rather serious set of equipment.

We can not say anything more from this short message.

We are just accumulating cases of unscheduled downtime of the power unit. As far as I understand, this information is important for Rosatom's foreign clients. The installations are unreliable. We remember very well that it was at the Belarusian NPP that the measuring transformer did not work. Now it's some sensor. Given the refusal of Belarusian nuclear scientists to engage in dialogue with society, given that environmental organizations (in particular, Ecodom) have been included in the list of “extremist groups”, civil society has no reasonable attempts to obtain the truth. The only hope is the press.

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