Reactor trip at Kozloduy NPP.

News just in from The Australian:

“A NUCLEAR power station in Bulgaria has undergone an emergency shutdown.
Facility operators at the Kozlodui nuclear power station on the Danube River said the incident did not cause any radioactive leak.

More to follow”

This is a little bit rich. Every reactor trip makes headlines now? You’ve got to be kidding.

“the incident did not cause any radioactive leak”

What incident? This is a reactor trip, a normal, routine shutdown, automatically taken because any one of a hundred different things is slightly abnormal.

The Unit 5 and Unit 6 reactors in operation at Kozloduy are Russian VVER-1000 1000 MW light-water reactors, just like the US’s LWRs.

Yes, they do make safe, modern, sensible, reliable nuclear power reactors in Russia.

Stewart over at Nuclear is Our Future – (A great site and blog covering nuclear energy issues – please check it out if you’re not already familar!) once described this kind of thing really concisely. I really can’t describe this recurring, nasty media manipulation better than by citing a couple of passages from the NIOF blog: When the media says “no radiation was released,” they are not in fact saying that no radiation was released, but are implying that radiation could have been released but luckily wasn’t – irrespective of it being physically possible in any way for radioactivity to be released in a given situation, or physically impossible (not to mention the fact that radiation isn’t a substance and can’t be “released”). And that is, as Stewart put it, nothing less than the height of irresponsibility.