'Weak safety culture' at Ascó

22 April 2008

Speaking at a press conference after a meeting with local mayors, the president of Spain's nuclear safety regulator said the events surrounding a leak of radioactive metal particles at the Ascó plant had 'demonstrated weaknesses in safety culture.' Preliminary findings had shown operational errors and deficiencies in information supplied to the Consejo De Seguridad Nuclear (Nuclear Safety Council, CSN), said Carmen Martinez Ten. He continued that CSN has required a thorough analysis of the Ascó organisation and an action plan to 'improve dramatically' the current behaviour at the plant.' In addition, CSN experts are reviewing systems and instrumentation related to the leak, which occurred after a November refuelling outage but was not discovered until early April. Martinez Ten said that checks on plant staff and visitors were complete and none had shown no signs of contamination. Because the contamination would have been with long-lived isotopes, the absence of any results now has ruled out contamination at any point during the course of events, he affirmed. Finally Martinez Ten refuted an environmental group's claim to have revealed the leak, 'because it issued a note a few minutes before the CSN.'

 

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