Ukraine: Emergency Shutdown at Chernobyl generator due to failure

Source: BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union - Political Publication date: Mar 27, 2000

Text of report by Ukrainian news agency UNIAN

Kiev, 27th March: The information centre of the State Nuclear Control Administration reported to UNIAN news agency at 02:59 today [23:59 gmt yesterday] that one of the two turbine generators at the third generating set of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was stopped due to a failure in the automatic emergency protection. The emergency shut-down was caused by a failure in one of the systems of the electric generator, which is designed to prevent hydrogen from leaking from the cooling system of the electric generator. As a result of the shut-down of the turbine generator, energy generation was reduced from 800 MWh to 500 MWh (to 50 per cent of the normal level). The event did not lead to changes in the radiation level at the nuclear power plant or in the vicinity and did not create any danger to workers. It is expected that the turbine generator will be restarted by 30th March.

The fifth generating set at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant was returned to full capacity after unscheduled repairs of faulty equipment in the turbine section were completed. The set's capacity was reduced by half on 25th March.

Repairs on the first generating set at the South-Ukrainian nuclear power plant were prolonged until 20th May due to a lack of fresh nuclear fuel. At present, repairs on this generating set are 102 days behind schedule.

Publication date: Mar 27, 2000 ) 2000, NewsReal, Inc.

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-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), March 28, 2000

Answers

One of the more interesting areas of Y2K is that many embedded systems do not use dates EXCEPT when they are due for maintenance and/or calibration. Several such systems and equipment have several modes of operation: operational, calibration, high stress, maintenance (test), etc. Several were found to use dates only in one or two of their modes. Following the number of problems plants have over the next six months ought to be interesting.

-- Dave Hall (dhall@enteract.com), March 29, 2000.