Aren't they on a grid like in the U.S. so they can draw power from other plants in case of total failure of all equipment there?

Oh my god. They started by pure chance?

That is a nuclear facility!! It should have if not the the most advanced, then the most well kept machinery in the country. And yet there were monitors and speakers not working, as well as vital generators?

Not my area of expertise - get Tom Bedlam onto this - but it is clear to me that this situation SHOULD NOT have developed. Even if the facts were played up a bit, anything resembling this event at all should not even happen. What about all the backup systems those places are supposed to have? Are they unable to draw electricity from somewhere else?

This is dire news. The quicker we get fusion working the better, if you ask me.

[edit on 2/8/2006 by watch_the_rocks]

Originally posted by watch_the_rocks
This is dire news. The quicker we get fusion working the better, if you ask me.

We've been working on fusion for years, and have never been able to get it to work in a productive way (other than in bombs).

Not to abandon fusion research, but I think we need to improve the design of fission reactors. I think current U.S. designs have few problems...we had 3 mile island incident but that was more human error than design flaw. The computers were telling the people there the right thing to do, but they thought the computer was in error and did the opposite.

Have you read my article on the Chinese EAST? And it is only a testbed for the European International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which will be completed in about 10 years, so they say. I'm looking forward to the massive leaps we should make with these.

I want to know why the heck this wasn't on the TV news?

Question - who built the plant? I'm pretty sure that the nuclear plants that Bechtel
took care of here in the USA have a one month backup supply of fuel to keep the
plant taken care of in case of power going out. No, I don't have links to that
info. I just heard it somewhere. No, I don't remember where.

Isn't there backup energy at these places to keep them going for a while?

Forsmark is a 3 unit BWR facility.

This article is really nothing but sensationalism - typical media tripe. It seems to me that the author has no understanding of what went on and is trying to cover his/her ignorance with eye-catching words.

Modern facilities have multiple avenues of core protection in the event of a reactor trip. In Westinghouse PWRs in the US, an unplanned reactor trip will cause an autostart of the diesel generators. These provide power to the vital busses (those that deal with the safe shutdown of the plant). This power will run the necessary pumps and associated cooling water injection/circulating systems to cool the core. In the event that the diesels fail to start, other backup sources of power are use (such as battery or unit cross-tying). Even if all onsite power is lost, a steam-driven turbine/pump can be used as well as gravity-fed water or even (as Tom Bedlam mentioned) fire hoses. Even though this is a BWR plant, many of the same or similar safety features are present.

If what I have read is correct, two of the four diesels failed to autostart. About 20 minutes later, the other ones were started manually. So it looks like the first line of defense (of many) was able to bring the plant down safely, albeit with some human assistance.

Höglund looks to be the kind of person that is dredged up to give the kind of information the paper wants (namely, that which will sell more papers), whether it is factual is another matter. Anyone can sound like an expert with the right kind of editing.

I should be getting a proper event-notification from WANO sometime this month and I'll see what the issue really was. I'll take that over random news articles any day. Feel free to get in a tizzy if it makes you feel better, but I will wait until the real information comes out.

[edit on 8/2/2006 by Tanin]

Originally posted by FlyersFan
Question - who built the plant? I'm pretty sure that the nuclear plants that Bechtel
took care of here in the USA have a one month backup supply of fuel to keep the
plant taken care of in case of power going out. No, I don't have links to that
info. I just heard it somewhere. No, I don't remember where.

Isn't there backup energy at these places to keep them going for a while?

At my plant there is enough diesel to run three diesel generators for about a week (~50K gallons). And that can be refueled as needed; so as long as fuel trucks can access the plant, the diesels can run indefinitely.

I can't wait to hear the technical details on this. Sounds like all four started but two shut down for some reason, and this Hogland guy thinks that the reason the two shut down could have kept them all off line. Like maybe there's some sort of oil pressure switch failure or something.

I don't know how the tests go in Sweden, but I do know that here in the US they're required to fire them up and run from them on some regular schedule, just to avoid this sort of thing.

[edit on 2-8-2006 by Tom Bedlam]

a lot of people forget that modern nuclear reactors are only as good as the people running them and maintaining them. It's like a car, if you don't regularly check your car, bring it to the dealer, etc...obviously you are going to get problems.

Most plants in North America have excellent maintenance protocols in place to avoid situations like this. Chernobyl may have been based on poor technology, but the reason the accident happened was because of the operators and their poor training and judgement.... hopefully the swedes fix their problems.

While it's never a good thing for an emergency shutdown, 2 Hours is a good margin with time to correct problems. It's when you have under 1 hour that you have to start worring.

If they are shutting down more, then there surely is a serious problem. It is good that they are taking precautions, obviously the incident caused them to check elsewhere as well.

Does anyone know how many reactors they have? How many are of this type?

We surely do not need another Chernobyl. I first heard about it in my 11th grade Chemistry class. I went home that weekend and looked up so much information on it. I was fascinated by it, but I do not want to see something else such as that.

Sweden has three nuclear power plants, ten reactors in total and five of those are now offline. Ringhals has a reactor (of four) offline as well. They claim this reactor was shut down for maintainence and not because of any problems. They have been very busy today in Sweden, trying to figure out whether they need to shut down any more reactors and also how they're going to get their offline reactors back online again. The price for electricity in Sweden went up a lot today. Having half of the country's nuclear reactors offline costs alot and someone has to pay...