Documents Reveal Hidden Problems at Russia's Nuclear Powerhouse

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Russian troops poured into Ukraine at the start of Vladimir Putin's invasion in February last year, alarm was rising at a flagship Kremlin nuclear project in neighboring Belarus, just a short distance from the European Union's border. Engineers at Rosatom preparing a new 1,200-megawatt reactor, which was not yet connected to the power grid, to generate electricity at the Astravets Nuclear Power Plant detected a mysterious and exceedingly rare problem. Resin was seeping into the primary circuit, threatening to seize up critical components, according to internal documents of the Russian state nuclear corporation seen by Bloomberg.

Control rods and fuel assemblies risked being damaged or broken if the problem persisted when uranium atoms began fissioning. In the worst case, according to people familiar with the problem, accumulation of so-called ion-exchange resin, which regulates the purity of water flowing through plant channels and pipes, could impede reactor control, elevating the risk of a meltdown if something went wrong once it was online. So on February 25, 2022, Rosatom pulled the plug temporarily on its freshly fueled unit in northwest Belarus, delaying its launch.

Nuclear engineers said Rosatom followed safety procedures by interrupting physical startup of the reactor in order to investigate. Still, the problem compounded delays that pushed back commercial operations more than a year. When the reactor was turned on for the first time in March, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed there were problems to state media. 'There were certain shortcomings in the construction,' he said. 'The delay is due to our determination to stick to very high safety standards.' The water contamination incident, which was previously flagged by Lithuanian intelligence, is among a series of problems, including shortages of skilled labor, delayed shipments, and defective supplies, that Rosatom faced in recent years and which have continued in the wake of Putin's war against Ukraine, according to the documents and interviews with European officials familiar with the assessments.

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