(June 13, 2003) Since the Czech nuclear power plant Temelin has become critical, Temelin-1 in December 2000 and Temelin-2 in June 2002, it has been plaged by incidents that repeatedly led to the shutdown of the both reactors. Also in the first half of 2003, the reactors "twinkled" on and off. On 2 June, the 48th incident took place due to a leak in the secondary cooling circuit and Temelin-1 reduced its status to "standby" (no electricity production, but critical).
(588.5519) WISE Czech Republic - Already on 2 January, there was again an indication of problems at the Temelin-1 reactor: while there was no news release provided by CEZ (Czech Energy Utility), the "daily overview" published at CEZ website (www.cez.cz) indicated that the power output suddenly dropped from 32 % to only 4 % of its nominal power (1000 MW). Later on the same day it was confirmed that Temelin-1 ran again at 55% capacity. Besides this short technical information on the web, nothing was reported to the press.
This event was later explained by problems in the plant's software, due to which the control rods moved in too fast and - as some insiders reported - caused a temperature shock in the reactor core. When the event was discovered, both CEZ and SUJB (State Office for Nuclear Safety) downplayed it and argued that there was no reason to report it to public, because "it was not a classical scram" (an emergency shutdown).
Already two weeks later, on 20 January, Temelin-1 was shut down, due to oil leakage at its troubled, unique 1000 MW high velocity turbine. This was another blow to the claims of Temelin management that, starting in 2003, Temelin will operate without problems. According to the management the causes would have been identified and repaired during the start-up phase. At the end of January, Temelin-1 was shut down for two months because of maintenance and (spent) fuel exchange.
In the meantime, Temelin-2 reached 100% power for the first time on 3 March, nine months after it reached criticality. As one could expect from the experience of past years at its sister Temelin-1, it didn't last long. Already three days later, on 6 March, it had to be shut down because of a leak in the welding in the secondary cooling circuit. CEZ reacted by announcement that nothing serious happened and that the reactor would be brought back to full power within 24 hours. Nevertheless, just few hours later, it admitted that it would take at least two weeks before restart.
At the end, the shutdown lasted three weeks and the reactor was restarted on 27 March. Under a kind of political pressure: it was just hours prior to an official visit of Czech president Vaclav Klaus. Klaus chaired the Czech government in 1993 when it approved the plan to finish the construction of Temelin (see also WISE News Communique 534.5199: "Temelin: criticality after 17 years of construction?"). At that time, Klaus promised Temelin would be fully operational in 1995.
And guess what happened five days after Klaus' visit and the rapid restart of Temelin-2? The reactor had to be shut down again on 1 April. There was a failure during a simulation test of turbine outage, when the system did not react properly. Similarly to previous events, the "open information policy" proudly announced by both CEZ and SUJB also had a blackout - there was no information released to media until NGOs urged for explanation.
The never-ending story of switching Temelin on and off had a nice point later in April. Temelin-2 entered a full power test for 144 hours (6 days at 100% capacity) on 12 April, after which it was expected that SUJB would approve the successful passage of the starting-up phase and would give CEZ a license for a full power testing operation. The fact is that SUJB gave this license already on 14 April, i.e. long before the 144 hours' test was even accomplished!
Possible motivation for this "curious" rapid approval was again to help the nuclear industry in troubled times. Temelin general supplier - Skoda Praha - was situated near the edge of bankruptcy (with no new contracts and huge penalties of US$20 million to pay for delayed start-up of Temelin-1) and there was possibly pressure not to delay Temelin-2 by any minute.
So on 6 May, CEZ could celebrate the fact that both Temelin reactors operated at full power, generating for the first time 2000 MW of electricity. It was almost exactly 10 years after the governmental decision from 1993, and 20 years since the construction started.
The happiness did not last long as next power drop took place at Temelin-1 on 12 May due to leaks in a pump. And next failure did not wait long - on 15 May a generator malfunctioned at Temelin-2 and the reactor was dropped to 5% power. People could start gambling on Temelin as a lottery: once it is on, once it is off, all the time around. (Surprise: on 25 May, Temelin-2 was shut down unexpectedly due to a pipe rupture on the turbine system. Because this was during weekend, CEZ did not bother to inform media, so on Monday it only released info about "successful passage of a self-power test that took place during weekend").
CEZ Becomes a Super Monopoly
The worse performance of Temelin, the harder are the attempts to structurally secure CEZ's position on the electricity market. After the failed attempt to "privatize" CEZ, by selling it to French state company EdF (Electricity Of France) last year (see also WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor 573.5438: "Temelin-1 off and on - Temelin-2 on and off"), the Czech Ministry of Industry took another strategy to secure CEZ monopoly on the domestic market. This was even admitted by CEZ top management as the only way to keep CEZ and its uncompetitive nuclear power plants alive on the more and more liberalized European energy market.
The plan was quite simple: "Let's build the Super Monopoly ourselves, without French." What the government did was to take its shares in regional distribution companies (there are 8 of them), sell them to CEZ (which itself also has a state majority ownership) at very low price. This helps CEZ to gather more than 50 % of shares in 6 out of 8 distributors and de-facto fully control electricity market in most of the Czech Republic.
In cases when the existing management of a distribution company was too critical of this plan, the government simply exchanged them - the most disturbing act of this way took place at the end of February at North-Moravian regional distributor, where the largest volume of electricity is sold. It has been quite famous for its conflicts with CEZ and for daring but very successful market policy - it decided not to buy electricity from CEZ and rather preferred other producers and imports from Poland. The government replaced its director and other top managers only because they were not cooperative enough with CEZ.
The final proposal the large fusion of CEZ with distributors was realized on 1 April, after prior approval of the Czech anti-monopoly office. The office that had been also critical of the plan was under serious political and media pressure to allow the fusion, so finally it only required CEZ to sell one of its 6 distribution companies under majority control. At this moment, it seems that CEZ will settle with another player, E-On in such a way that they will divide the market: CEZ will fully own five regional distributors and E-On the three remaining ones.
New Nuclear Energy Policy
Another offensive step taken by the government has been a new proposal for the state energy policy. Also drafted by the Ministry of Industry, it is based on six scenarios, but all of them are just versions of "business as usual" energy policy. They are all based on increase of electricity consumption, covered by different mixes of additional coal and additional nuclear power plants. None of them is seriously analyzed even from the aspect of CO2 emissions reduction.
Although these information and documents are still not officially released, Czech minister of industry already stated in early May that "Temelin has not been finished, because we will probably need to build additional two nuclear reactors on that site," adding that nuclear waste is not even a minor problem, because reliable technical solutions exist.
These statements almost perfectly collided with new announcements of localities "suitable for deep repository". It seems that Czech authorities are just not capable to learn from their own mistakes - this has already been for the fourth time since the 1990's when a list was announced without prior information of the mayors and villages affected.
After a storm reaction from environmental groups and public, the minister is now silent. But it is clear that the way of thinking among nuclear technocrats has not changed during the past 14 years. Let's see how the official public consultations will look like. At this moment, they represent a big challenge to Czech anti-nuclear and environmental groups, including newly reformed Green Party.
Source and contact: Jan Beranek at WISE Czech Republic (wisebrno@ecn.cz)