Paks outage had no effect on safety, says atomic energy office head

Budapest (MTI) – A faulty panel caused Block 2 in the Paks nuclear power station to disconnect from the network on Saturday and this resulted in a significant drop in output but had no effect on safety, the director-general of the Hungarian Atomic Energy Agency said on Thursday.

Gyula Fichtinger told MTI that the nuclear plant immediately reported the outage which occurred at 5.11pm on October 24 to the authority. It was later rated on the International Nuclear Event Scale as an out-of-scale, level 0 event, he added.

Such low-significance events need not be immediately reported to the public but since the power station continually publishes on its website the performance of all four blocks, the reason for the change in output has been explained.

Since this was not a significant event, there is no need for an immediate review and it does not have to be reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said.

Photo: galaktika.hu

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters