In accordance with safety protocols, due to the expected arrival of a water wave from the Sava River with large amounts of debris that could reduce water intake for the secondary cooling system, the Krško Nuclear Power Plant has proactively halted the operation of its reactor.
According to Ida Novak Jerele from the NEK public relations department, although the reactor is currently not operational, all employees at NEK now have even more work than during normal operations.
– We took the warnings from the hydrometeorological institute and water management seriously and reacted immediately. Besides the fact that the Sava brings large amounts of wood mass and leaves during such sudden rises in water levels, the likelihood of increased inflow of such mass arises from the fact that new hydroelectric power plants are being built upstream on the Sava, from where the swollen Sava could carry away some timber. In such extraordinary cases, abundant debris slows down the operation of our traveling screen systems for cleaning the water intake channels from the Sava for the cooling system. The cleaning system is operational; it just requires more time to remove the debris, but nothing is left to chance, so the reactor operation was proactively halted. Therefore, this event, although extraordinary, has not affected the nuclear safety of NEK and the environment, said Ida Novak Jerele.
