On Friday and Saturday morning, a team from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Tarapur, Maharashtra, and Gandhinagar carried out radiation monitoring, plant director Lalit Kumar Jain said.
A day after unit one of the Kakrapar Atomic Power Station (KAPS) in Gujarat went into automatic shutdown after a heavy water leak in the reactor's primary heat transport system, authorities are yet to zero in on the cause of the leak, its scale and the component that failed, senior officials from the plant site said.
On Friday and Saturday morning, a team from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Tarapur, Maharashtra, and Gandhinagar carried out radiation monitoring, plant director Lalit Kumar Jain said.
dna asked Jain if the leak has been plugged and the pressure tubes in the heat transport system has ruptured. "We don't know yet if the pressure tube has leaked. That part has to be seen and we are moving towards that. We still have to investigate which specific part was affected," he said.
KAPS authorities were expecting a team of experts from the Atomic Energy Regulatory Body (AERB), Mumbai, to arrive at the plant on Saturday for a thorough probe into the incident. AERB is the apex nuclear regulator and gives safety clearances to all plants across the country.
Plant authorities also said that BARC checks have confirmed that there was no release of radioactivity and no increase in the radiation field. "There was no release of radioactivity and no increase in the radiation field, both in the plant and public premises. While the BARC team inspected the public premises, we had separate teams for monitoring radiation within the plant too. We also cleared out the air from the containment section," a KAPS official said.
KAPS has a history of heavy water leaks, with the last one occurring in 2011. According to Jain, biennial inspections are carried out as per schedule and the last one happened in April 2015.
Speaking on the heavy water leak, former AERB chief A Gopalakrishnan, who was the head of the regulatory board between 1993 and 1996, told dna: "It appears to be a first case of a pressure tube rupture, causing a small loss of coolant accident (LOCA) in an Indian pressurised heavy water reactor. People around Kakrapar station were saved due to the positive response of the back-up cooling system. But the incident is not over until the leak is totally stopped.
"The first such incident happened in August 1983 in Canada's Pickering PHWR, from which India learned the hydriding of the PT, and developed a Pressure Tube Aging Management Program to be diligently followed by NPCIL and overseen by AERB. This appears to have not been done as needed, and this negligence probably led to this incident."
As per official AERB and International Atomic Energy Agency data, leaks of heavy water at Indian nuclear power stations are not exactly rare.
In the past two decades, leaks have been reported at Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS), India' first heavy water reactor, in 1996. In 1997, three separate incidents were reported from Kakrapar unit I, Madras Atomic Power Station-II and Narora-II reactors. In 2004, leaks at RAPS resulted in large release of tritium to the atmosphere as per AERB's 2009 data.
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