About Krško power plant
11.06.2008 19:55
Last Wednesday a pump in the primary coolant loop of the Krško nuclear power plant developed a leak. The operators noticed that and stopped the reactor. The leak was fixed in a few days and on Monday the plant resumed normal operations.
This relatively minor event got a disproportionate amount of media attention in Slovenia and neighboring countries, not to mention renewed fears of anything nuclear in general public.
On the other hand, I actually feel safer now.
News like this mean that the processes that are in place to shut down the plant on some abnormal event work properly. This last event is particularly interesting because of two reasons: 1) this was the first malfunction in two years and 2) human operators pushed the stop button, not some automatic fail-safe. To me, this means that we have capable people running the plant that are observant and do not fear to stop the plant when they see something unusual going on, even when the instruments say that everything is safe.
What I do fear now is that this malfunction pushed any serious chances of Slovenia getting the second nuclear power plant even further into the future.
