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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."

1 of 5 comments (clear)

  1. 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.