10 Aug (NucNet): Belgium has temporarily shut down one of its seven nuclear reactor units after the country’s regulator discovered “several anomalies”, including possible cracks, in the reactor pressure vessel.
The suspected fractures at the Doel-3 reactor, 25km north of Antwerp, which provides a sixth of Belgium’s nuclear-generated power, do not pose any health and safety threat, said the Federal Agency for Nuclear Control (FANC), but the plant will remain shut at least until the end of this month.
As a precaution, Belgium’s six other commercially operational reactors will also be checked for cracks, FANC said.
According to preliminary analysis, the steel tank, produced by Rotterdam Drydocks, a Dutch company that went bankrupt in the mid-1980s, has been damaged by radiation, which created fractures inside it.
Doel-3, operated by Electrabel, a subsidiary of France’s GDF Suez, is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2022 as Belgium plans to close all its nuclear power stations by 2025.
The incident has provisionally been rated as Level 1 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). However, FANC said that this rating may be reassessed when more information and the results of the new analysis are available.
