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Nuclear Disaster Averted By Laundry

Posted by samzenpus on from the that's-one-tough-pair-of-pants dept.

Socguy writes "More than 40,000 gallons of radioactive water leaked into the open when a 15ft crack appeared in a pipe leading to a cooling pond in the Sizewell A reactor in January 2007. This was only noticed by chance as a worker was sorting laundry in the area when it happened. Supposedly, a leak of this type should have set off alarms, however, the alarm in question appeared to be defective. Should this leak have gone unnoticed, there was a real likelihood of a full-scale meltdown."

5 comments

  1. Nuclear Sanity by AvitarX · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Has been set back 3 decades.

    Guess we'll keep burning stuff up for power.

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    1. Re:Nuclear Sanity by meringuoid · · Score: 3, Informative
      Nuclear sanity is not to be found in the summary, anyway. Nothing in the article mentions anything about a meltdown, full-scale or otherwise.

      This water, it seems, runs into a pool in which spent fuel rods are kept; the water's purpose being to keep the rods cool - being radioactive, they tend to become hot. Should that pool run dry, the rods could catch fire, and thus a radioactive release is possible.

      Except that the pool wasn't going to run dry anyway, according to the chief of the inspectors who actually investigated the leak. That it might have run dry is apparently speculation by an 'independent nuclear consultant' working for the 'Shutdown Sizewell Campaign'.

      Idle is the best place for this nonsense - and I'd have thought better of the Torygraph, who normally pitch their articles at a fairly intelligent level; this kind of sensationalism is beneath them.

      --
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  2. Why idle? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why does this story fall into the "idle" category?

    The fact that the alert system of a nuclear power plant failed to detect radioactive leaks makes the story a bit more worrying than a joke.

    1. Re:Why idle? by Jartan · · Score: 1

      Article is pretty iffy if you ask me. It doesn't even say how radioactive the water is. Nor does it mention why it's radioactive in the first place. It's supposed to be cooling off spent fuel rods but a crack is causing it to leak before it even gets to the fuel rods so why is it radioactive already?

      Also are we supposed to believe there's no fail-safe for cooling five thousand fuel rods? If there wasn't a fail safe I can't believe the article would of failed to make a dig about it.

  3. New physics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What is a "supercharged radioactive fire"?