Ukraine sees no New Year repeat of Chernobyl blast

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Ukraine sees no New Year repeat of Chernobyl blast

By Christina Ling

KIEV, Sep 24 (Reuters) - Ukrainian officials said on Friday the former Soviet republic's nuclear power network had passed tests for the millennium bug and ruled out any New Year Day recurrence of a disaster akin to the 1986 Chernobyl explosion.

"You can write it in block capitals -- in Ukraine there will be no second Chernobyl," First Deputy Energy Minister Serhiy Yermilov told a news conference. "We have checked every last computer and we will keep checking up to the New Year itself."

Ministry officials, clearly smarting from Ukraine's special mention in British and U.S. reports of potential millennium bug trouble spots around the world, said every contingency had been examined at nuclear and conventional power stations.

"We have a plan even for if an F-15 jet falls on the roof of a nuclear reactor, which is a lot more scary than any computer problem or virus," Yermilov said.

Both the British Foreign Office and U.S. State Department suggested electricity, transport, defence and other systems were vulnerable to possible problems. The British report cautioned against travel to Ukraine over the New Year.

Computer experts fear that older computers, which were programmed using just two numbers to designate the year, will read 00 as 1900 instead of 2000 and possibly cause data-sensitive systems to crash or shut down.

Ukrainian officials said tests had produced no unexpected reactions when the figures 00 were entered into computers at the country's 14 nuclear power reactors -- while the reactors themselves were switched off.

"Not a single computer in the management systems or safety systems of a single nuclear power reactor is linked to astronomical time," said Mykola Vlasenko, head of engineering support at national atomic energy authority EnergoAtom.

"That is the most important thing of all that I will say about the safety of the reactors in the period of transfer between 1999 and 2000. And therefore there can be no unexpected halt in the reactors' operation."

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency had already double-checked two nuclear stations and another mission would check the remaining plants in October. A U.S. team had also checked the stations, he said.

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986, sending clouds of radioactive dust over Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Europe.

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Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), September 24, 1999

Answers

How many hundreds of NPP's are there? Will there be at least 1 melt? Me say ya. But, I'm a doomhead.

-- CygnusXI (noburnt@toast.net), September 24, 1999.

Alright, I'll bite before someone else jumps on this....

How, oh how, do you enter "00" into a system that isn't "linked to astronomical time", which I'm hoping is merely a lousy translation on M. Vlasenko's part. Just curious....

Btw, their VVER plants (majority) should be fine. The RBMK's (think Chernobyl) are a different matter. Good news: they can handle a station blackout for up to an hour with no problem, and they generally run at lower operating levels. Bad news: if the coolant starts boiling, it loses moderation (same as any system). General lack of control rods make these much harder to shut down, and easier to lose control of.

See http://www.insc.anl.gov/neisb/neisb5/ for more info.

link

-- Harl (harlanquin@aol.hell), September 24, 1999.


Sorry, short update. What I didn't make clear is that RBMK's use the coolant as a moderator, and that if it overheats the reaction increases. Most NPP's operate the other way; if you lose coolant, the reaction Doesn't automatically speed up. It Will heat up, but the reaction shouldn't go into overdrive.

Also, RBMK's do have control rods, but the original design used just the coolant/moderator as control and shutdown. Most have been retrofitted after Chernobyl.

The darn things are still more difficult to scram if it starts to runaway, though.

-- Harl (harlanquin@aol.hell), September 27, 1999.


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