/diy/ - Do It Yourself

I little story from a friend who's working in several nuclear power plant. He's only working on site on the big maintenance event.

You see every once in a while (2 or 3 years, I don't remember) they shut down the reactor, change part of the radioactive fuel, and do a major maintenance of equipment.

On this reactor they had a tank of diluted boric acid, in case of an overheating incident and you need to quickly cut the reaction and cool down the process, you inject boron in the primary circuit, it absorbs neutron and it should save the day...

When they dismounted pumps for maintenance, they find out that the woodruff key (pic related) that drive the centrifugal pump were missing.

Since it's a key security element, there's three of these pumps in parallel. But since they were assembled by the same technician, all three were missing their woodruff key.

In a case of a critical scenario, none of this system would have worked and we would have a chernobyl v2.0 some 30km from where I live.

I think it was scaled on the INES level but I don't remember how high.