One of the two reactors at Bulgaria’s Kozlodoui nuclear power plant will be shut down on Saturday after a water leak was detected that did not lead to an increase in radioactivity, the operator announced Friday.
“Unit 6 will be shut down to plug a leak before the maximum flow rate allowed by regulation is reached,” he said in a statement. “No change in radiation levels was observed in the work premises and on the site,” according to the same source.
The problem was found at the end of November in the tube of a steam generator, an essential component that transforms hot water from the reactor core into steam that powers the turbines for electricity production.
Located in the northwest of the country near the Danube, the plant has already experienced two incidents this year caused by generator failure, which led to the shutdown of reactor 5 in June and unit 6 in October. Kozlodoui, Bulgaria’s only nuclear site, supplies one third of the country’s energy.
Two pressurized water reactors with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts each are in operation, fuelled for the time being by Russian fuel. The government is looking for new suppliers to try to reduce dependence on Moscow in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
Bids from the American Westinghouse and the French Framatome are under consideration. Units 1 to 4, considered obsolete, were closed in 1998 and 2006 at the request of Brussels, which had made it one of the conditions of Bulgaria’s accession to the EU.
