Kozloduy-5 control rod incident rated INES Level 2

Paris (Platts)--9May2006

Kozloduy-5's control rod sticking incident March 2 was rated Level 2 on the
International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), Bulgaria's Nuclear Regulatory Agency
said yesterday. The incident, in which 21 of 61 control rods stuck in the
upper position as operators tried to restart the VVER-1000 after an outage,
was first identified as a basic Level 1 (anomaly) event by an NRA event
analysis commission, NRA Chairman Sergey Tzotchev said. This was because the
reactor protection system had successfully shut down the reactor and the
reactivity-control function was "more than adequate" to cope with any
design-basis accidents that might have occurred, he said. The event was
uprated to Level 2 (incident) in light of additional factors related to
"procedural inadequacies" and "common cause failures," as per the INES Users
Manual, he said. Tzotchev said work to clarify the root cause of the control
rod sticking is under way.

 

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