Showing posts with label Zaporozhia. Show all posts

Sunday, 17 May 2015

New problems at Zaporozhia NPP

Safety system at Ukraine’s largest Zaporozhye nuclear plant triggers shutdown

16 May, 2015

One of the power units of Ukraine’s largest Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant was automatically shut down on Saturday due to sudden activation of the facility’s safety system.

“On May 16, 2015 at 10:46 local time Unit Four of the Zaporozhye NPP was disconnected from the network due to the activation of protection against mismatch of the turbine’s pressure control valves of over 30 percent,” the plant’s press service said in a statement.

The radiation background at the site and in the 2.5-kilometer sanitary protection zone around the plant has been at 8-12 micro-roentgen per hour, matching the natural readings for the area where the Zaporozhye NPP is located, it added.

The reasons for the activation of the safety system at the plant are being investigated, the statement said.

Earlier, it was reported that Unit Three of the Zaporozhye NPP was disconnected from the network for routine maintenance, with only three units at the plant being operational since mid-April.

This isn’t the first time the power units have been switched off at the Zaporozhye NPP. Two similar incidents occurred at the end of 2014.

Just before New Year, the plant’s Unit Six was automatically shut down after a glitch, which was later fixed.

In late-November, a short circuit led to another shutdown and Unit Three going through a week of maintenance.

Zaporozhye is the largest nuclear power plant not only in Ukraine, but also in Europe – and the fifth largest NPP in the world.

The plant, which produces 22 percent of the country’s energy, is on the banks of the Kakhovka water reservoir on the Dnepr River, some 200 kilometers from the restive Donetsk region.

Thursday, 14 May 2015

Ukrainian nuclear waste stored in open air

This is the Zaporozhia NPP where there was a nuclear accident last December that was hushed up by the Ukrainian Junta and international media

Ukrainian nuclear waste stored in open air 200km from warzone

Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant. (Image from Wikipedia)

RT,

14 May, 2015

Serious concerns have been raised by experts and environmentalists over the ‘shocking’ way spent nuclear fuel is being stored at Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, just 200km away from the front line in Donbass.

More than 3,000 spent nuclear fuel rods are being stored in the open air in mental casks close to the perimeter fence at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in conditions that have shocked environmentalists, The Guardian reports.

Nuclear experts say the waste should have another secondary containment structure, such as a building with a roof.

“With a war around the corner, it is shocking that the spent fuel rod containers are standing under the open sky, with just a metal gate and some security guards waltzing up and down for protection. It is unheard of when, in Germany, interim storage operators have been ordered by the court to terror-proof their casks with roofs and reinforced walls,” Patricia Lorenz, a Friends of the Earth nuclear spokeswoman who visited the plant on a fact-finding mission, told the paper.

Although the front line is for now too far away from the nuclear plant to be at any risk, the potential consequences of the conflict engulfing the power station is major worry to locals.

The memory of the Chernobyl explosion in the north of Ukraine 30 years ago, which poisoned vast tracts of land, is still fresh in many people’s minds.

“Given the current state of warfare, I cannot say what could be done to completely protect installations from attack, except to build them on Mars,” said Sergiy Bozhko , the chairman of the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine (SNRIU).

The current Zaporizhia nuclear fuel storage unit was built to a US design and did involve testing to withstand a terrorist attack.

However a dry storage container with a bomb resilient roof and contained ventilation system would offer much greater protection.

‘No one tells us the truth’: Locals near Chernobyl fear radiation, Kiev says fire put out

However this would be impossible to build on the current site and it would have to be constructed somewhere else nearby and then all the nuclear casks would have to be moved inside at even greater expense.

“It is obvious that if you do not have an array of dry cast [interim] stores with secondary containment around it, then that will have a greater risk of release of radioactive material,” said Antony Froggatt, a senior research fellow and European nuclear specialist at Chatham House, London.

Although sources at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) told The Guardian that any request for funding for such a structure would be seriously considered. The bank has already made 300 million euros available to extend the lifespan of Ukraine’s ageing nuclear plants.

Emergency shutdown at Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant

Since the conflict in Donbass has severely limited the supply of Russian gas, Ukraine’s reliance on its 15 Soviet-era reactors has increased by 10 percent; the country now gets 60 percent of its energy from nuclear power.

Nuclear energy is one area where Ukraine and Russia still cooperate, and Ukraine still depends almost entirely on Russia’s Rosatom for enriched uranium.

But in the long term Ukraine aims to diversify its nuclear fuel contract between the US company Westinghouse and European companies as well as Rosatom.

But deals with Westinghouse and the French company Areva are still sketchy and market diversification will be slow.

Saturday, 17 January 2015

Radiation from Zaporozhia NPP

Update on radiation from Zaporozhia NPP accident

Earlier in January I covered a series of accidents at the Zaporozhia nuclear power plant.

Go HERE and HERE

Since then there has been ZERO follow-up on this anywhere in the media (including RT, which last reported on this at the end of 2014)

Indications from the stirling work of the anonymous author at https://allegedlyapparent.wordpress.com - indicates that radiation is being released that is comparible with Chernolbyl in 1986.

And yet this is being covered up not only by Ukrainian authorities but also by western governments and media.

My call would be to RT to follow this up. Their coverage has been fantastic.

This incident, in the midst of a civil war and its cover-up shows how utterly fucked-up this world is.

Not is there no information but there seems to be little interest in this either.

Are things so bad that exposure to ionising radiation just elicits a yawn?

I think the word is cognitive dissonance.

There is someone else who is onto this. He has written an article which he prefaces this way:

I’m going to keep hammering this nail into the proverbial radioactive waste barrel until the Ukrainian government admits they lied about “all being just fine – no radiation released” at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and they, with their accomplices, are arrested.

He follows this with an analysis of radiation measured from monitors in Latvia and compares this with measured radiation from the accident at Chrnobyl in 1987

There is someone else who is onto this. He has written an article analyzing radiation measured by monitors in Latvia after the Zaporozhia accidents and compared this with radiation measured from Chernobyl in 1986 and concludes that there was a major accident at the Zaparozhia NPP in December

"In order to gauge the significance of a +0.4 µSv/hr spike on several ground-level monitors in Latvia, some 1500 km precisely downwind from the ZNPP in Eastern Ukraine, I searched for similar aerial dose data from right after Chernobyl. Finally I found some:

"Gamma dose rates from shortly after the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the most contaminated air layer of the Chernobyl plume 1000 to 2000 meters above Finland on April 29th revealed: the dose rate in that highest-contaminated air layer was no more than 0.8 µSv/hr ! (Source & details below).

"This, and other information from 1986, suggests that the Latvian ground-level spikes, if they were valid data (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be), plus the dozens of quite extreme upticks all across Europe in the past few months, may indeed be hinting of a nuclear disaster at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) of a scale no major media outlet or oversight organization has lent credence to yet."

http://www.tucradio.org/Yablokov_Chernobylbook.pdf

The entire article can be read HERE

Just to remind ourselves - from RT

Report: Radioactive leak detected at Ukraine’s major Nuclear Power Plant

And from Kevin Blanch

Monday, 5 January 2015

A timeline for the Zaporozhia nuclear accident

Especially for those who are not familiar with the events of the last year in Ukraine - it is not possible to understand the nuclear accident at the Zaporozhia nuclear power plant outside the context of the brutal civil war being waged in the Ukraine as the result of a coup that was largely engineered by the State Department and Victoria Nuland.

It is hardly possible to imagine anything worse than a nuclear accident in a highly unstable government that is in economic, social and financial meltdown and ruled by a Junta that has unleashed nazi thugs to look after its nuclear installations - and where truth is the first victim.

NOTHING that comes from the Ukrainian government, or from its western backers can be belived.

The following is a timeline that I have hurriedly put together to bring some context.

Ukraine civil war and Zaporozhia nuclear accident – a timeline

Seemorerocks

The present crisis in Ukraine began late last year but arose out of the history of Ukraine and the imbalances connected with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Ukraine has always been an integral part of Russia and the two nations have been inseperable until after the Russian revolution of 1917 when Lenin gave Ukraine seperate status as a republic of the USSR.

The Soviet entity consisted of parts of the Ukraine that were Ukrainian-speaking and the industrial East which was the centre of the USSR's coal mining and metallurgical industries.

After World War 11 parts of what had been parts of Poland were integrated into the USSR. This was the birthplace of radical Ukrainian nationalism that looked back to nazis sympathisers, such as Stepan Bandura.

The main part of Ukraine, but in particular the east, actively took part in the Great Patriotic War against Nazism.

This has always remained a major point of difference. When the Soviet Union collapsed the new Ukraine inherited a nation with two parts that were incompatible.

Obama and the White House have become implacably opposed to Vladimir Putin, especially since the onset of the crisis in Syria and especially since Putin reached agreement with Bashar Assad to destroy Syria's chemical weapons, so removing a pretext for America to wage war on Syria.

American rhetoric against Putin increased through 2013 and reached a crescendo with the onset of the Euromaidan in Kiev and the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The crisis started when the government of Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign a EU association agreement which did not provide the same the same economic benefits as joining a Eurasia Customs Union

Yanukovych tells West to stay out of Ukraine crisis

21 November 2013
- Public protests started on Maidan Nezalezhnosti ("Independence Square") in Kiev to oppose joining the Customs Union and in favour of the EU

These protests became more violent as there was more and more interference from the EU and from the United States.

The following is a pretty good background to the events of the Maidan and the role of the West in engineering a coup in Kiev

The following is a retrospective of events from both sides - made by RT

Events exploded again in February, right at the end of the Winter Games in Sochi

21 February

The coup which overthrows President Yanukovych, who signed a compromise deal with opposition leaders which would implement constitutional changes to hand powers back to parliament and early elections, to be held by December. He is forced by the actions of the crowd on the Maidan to flee.

Demonstrators are shot, in all probability by ultra-nationalist forces, rather than by police

March 16

Crimeans vote in a referendum to rejoin Russia or return to its status under the 1992 constitution

7–23 February 2014,

2 May

Massacre in Odessa at the Trade Union house in which at east 40 people were burned. The western media described this simply as the conflict between two sides, however the truth goes much further than this, as shown by the following video:

11 May
The people of Donbass hold a referendum in which Donetsk and Lugansk confirm the setting up of a People's Republic and express the desire not to live under the Kiev Junta

This is held to be illegal by Kiev and the western powers and the reponse by Kiev is an "anti-Terror operation" which used artillery and bombing against the people of Donbass, singling out civilian targets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donbass_status_referendums,_2014

The Donbass referendum - yet another abject failure of US foreign policy

18 May

Ukrainian police stopped a group of armed men (from the nazi Right Sector) from entering Europe's largest nuclear power plant, the Zaporozhia NPP, located in southeastern Ukraine

Reports that armed gunmen from the Right Sector attempted to enter the Zaporozhia NPP

http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/breaking-news-right-sector-attempt.html

2 June

Inna Kukurudza killed in an attack by Ukrainian airforce on Lugansk - with 8 killed and 28 wounded - this becomes an emblem of the outrage against Donbass civilians

Early June

American specialists in military uniform in early June arrived in in the second unit under conditions of increased secrecy entered, and that the plant's employees were sent on "temporary leave". Staff of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant reported that staff of the second unit were not allowed at work for several days, and that the purpose of of the American experts' actions unit 2 was kept hidden from plant personnel

17 July

The Malaysian airline, MH-17 is shot down over Donbass within a short period of time of Putin's plane flying over the same airspace.

The western media immediately rushes in to blame Putin for the incident although subsequently there is enough evidence (suppressed by western governments and media) to indicate that it was not brought down by a rebel BUK, but by a Ukrainian air force plane, shown sunsequently to have returned to base minus its missiles.

Here is an early (July) discussion of the events

Self-proclaimed republics’ forces practically encircle Mariupol — Novorossiya News Agency

14 August

Letter written from the President of the Ukrainian company SE NNEGC "Energoatom" (ГП НАЭК «Энергоатом) to leaders of the American company Westinghouse -

The President Of Westinghouse

in Europe, the Middle East

and Africa

Goodine The Willow Brush

August 14, 2014

Mr. Brush,

This letter in accordance with the requirements of the IAEA Nuclear Safety Standards is to infirm you that the IAEA working International Safety Advisory Group to Ukraine insists strongly that NNGEC Energiatom must immediately replace fuel assemblies in the following reactors

SS Rivne NPP (type of reactor WER-1000 units 3 and 4

SS Rivne Zaporizhye NPP (type of reactor WER-1000 )

SS South Ukraine NPP (WER-1000 )

Sincerely,

Yuriy Nedashkovsky

President

NNEG “Energoatom”

19 August

The government of Ukraine orders the guarding of all nuclear materials and nuclear facilities. This function is given to the National Guard, who are largely made up of nazi Right Sector.

"As surreal as it sounds Poroshenko’s government put the terrorists that tried to take nuclear plants by force in charge." -- George Eliason

31 August

:

Europe’s largest nuclear power plant is vulnerable to ‘direct bombardment’ in Ukraine if caught in the conflict, a Greenpeace nuclear energy expert told a German newspaper, claiming that its nuclear reactors are not protected from armor-piercing weapons.

http://rt.com/news/184004-greenpeace-zaporizhia-npp-danger/

21 September

The Minsk Protocols are signed by the OCSE, the Ukrainian government, Russia and representatives of the Lugansk and Donets People's Republics.

This is supposed to lead to a ceasfire and exchange of prisoners. This is immediately violated and since then there has been a pause in the most intense fighting and the authorities on the LPR and DPR have been able to consolidate their positons in areas they hold.

Here is an analysis of the agreement from the Saker ( a reliable commentator):

Saker report on the Ukrainian situation and the Minsk memorandu

31 October

As Ukraine moves into winter and has yet to settle its outstanding mult-billion dollar bill to Russia and is cut off from its traditional sources of coal in the Donbass there are severe doubts about how Ukraine is going to survivо through the winter.

After a lot of hard bargaining Russia bends over backward and agrees to supply gas to Ukraine which then repays a part of its debt

Russia,Ukraine agree on gas supplies until March 2015

Kiev authorities drive Ukraine into energy crisis as winter is about to set in

The Crisis at Zaporozhya nuclear

power plant

25 November

Local residents in Odessa start to notice problems with electricity

28 November -

Blackouts of electricity in Odessa due to "a minor accident"

28 November - 2 December

Discussions between personnel of the Zaporozhia NPP and Tishchenko of Emergency Services.

These Skype exchange are hacked and reavealed to the public

Locals are concerned by:

- a series of strange explosions on the territory of the power plant;

- the unusual activity by state services in the area of the nuclear power plant, iincluding the distribution to the local population of anti radiation drugs containing iodine ;

- glowing in the sky above the village;

- t he degree of water pollution in the Kakhovka reservoir;

- the strange behaviour of livestock;

- the flight of people from Enerhodar, situated next to the plant