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Bulgarian regulators increase danger rating of nuclear incident
By Damien Steffan
AFP
SOFIA
Petroleumworld.com 05 09 06
Bulgaria's nuclear regulator increased by a notch Monday its danger rating of an accident at the country's nuclear power plant at Kozloduy on March 1, the regulator's chairman Sergey Tsochev said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Agency initially ranked the incident as level one or "anomaly" on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) of seven levels ranging from zero (no safety significance) to seven (major accident).
But the regulatory body revised its ranking to level two or "incident", BTA state newsagency cited Tsochev as saying Monday.
A relatively new 1,000-megawatt reactor at Kozloduy had to be switched off the grid March 1 after a failure of the electricity circuit support system of its main coolant pump.
During the switch-off some 22 of the 61 control rods of the reactor's protection system -- used to ease the reactor's capacity -- failed to respond and later proved defective, but the bloc was safely switched off.
A "failure of a number of elements to respond for the same reason" was cited by Tsochev as the reason for increasing the incidents's INES scale ranking.
Following the incident, Bulgarian nuclear expert Georgy Kaschiev, who now works at the Institute of Risk Research at the University of Vienna, called it "a massive failure of the protection elements ... corresponding to a level two or three incident on the INES scale," but authorities said he was speculating.
Following checks, the reactor was again put back on the grid March 10 and both Kozloduy director Ivan Ivanov and the nuclear regulatory body have since said it was safe to operate.
After the country joins the European Union in 2007, the reactor will be one of only two to remain operational, as Bulgaria has agreed to shut down its two older but revamped 440-megawatt reactors.
The Balkan state mothballed the two oldest of Kozloduy's six reactors in 2002.
To compensate for the lost capacity, Bulgaria plans to construct two pressurised-water reactors of 1,000 megawatts each at another plant at Belene, in the north of the country.
AFP 05 08 06 1341 GMT
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