Nuclear Disaster Averted By Laundry

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."

Comments

Re:Nuclear Sanity

[meringuoid]

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.