Russians Say Damaged Cooling Pump Is Cause of Delay in Starting Iranian Reactor

Russia on Monday explained why fuel is being removed from a nuclear reactor in Iran, delaying plans to start up the giant plant this month. The Russian account, the first official rationale, came after experts last week offered theories of the failure ranging from a startup glitch to foul play.

In a statement, Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, which is building the reactor in Bushehr, Iran, said it found damage to one of the reactor’s four main cooling pumps. That breakdown, it said, necessitated removal of the fuel core and an inspection of the reactor and its fuel assemblies to make sure they harbored no metal particles or chips. The detection of metal shards would prompt a thorough cleaning and, according to one official, a startup delay of up to two months.

.................. a startup delay of up to two months.

........................

Oh, Goodie!!

Isreal has up to two months to take out this nuc plant, without a nuc in it.

Of course Zer0 and Hitlery, and Gates, would need three months to get their thoughts together to prepare to make a presentation to the UN security council, for their vote, in say, 2014!

****** “ Of course Zer0 and Hitlery, and Gates, would need three months to get their thoughts together to prepare to make a presentation to the UN security council, for their vote, in say, 2014!” *******

Still thinking about which one of them should get that call at 3:00 AM

Well at least we know it isn’t McCain

In the Chernobyl they tried to run an experiment to see how long they could provide power to the plant’s control and cooling systems from the idling down turbine if they experienced an emergency loss of power.

The reason for this was that their backup diesel generators took up 60 seconds to ramp up to full power, which was way too long. They were trying to see if the idling down turbine could provide enough energy power the control and cooling systems in the time before the backup generators kicked in.

RBMK type reactors (the design that was used there) are inherently unstable under very low power levels. They also have something called a “positive void coefficient”, in layman’s terms basically as temperature and pressure inside the reactor rises, so does the rate of the reaction. All modern reactors are designed such that if they get hotter and built up pressure, the reaction slows down by virtue of physics. That way you can’t have a runaway reaction.

Anyway, they disabled (hard shutoff) the main cooling valve and disabled the emergency control cooling system, so it would not kick on during test (a big violation of their own procedures)

Then they proceeded with the test but let the reactor power drop down too much in the region where the reactor was inherently unstable. They were trying to bring up power and miscalculated the how fast the reaction was rising. If the emergency cooling system was active, it would have shut the reactor down then and there.

But they were trying to do things manually and miscalculated. The reactor started to build up power too rapidly. They panicked and hit the SCRAM button (bring all the control rods down) but due to the design/manufacturing defect of the control rods that actually caused a surge.

The rest is history.

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