This year’s accident in Japan’s Fukushima plant was felt deep in the pocket of Bulgaria’s only nuclear producer Kolzoduy. Because of additional security measures, the required stress tests and inspections of equipment. the plant’s budget was burdened by additional several million.
A check showed that on May 10 this year, or less than two months after the earthquake off the coast of Japan and the subsequent nuclear accident NPP Kozloduy announced a tender for an update of the probabilistic safety analysis of the power plant. The formal reason is that such a study was done in the period 2003-2006, and since then the project of 1000 MW units has been significantly improved and modernized.
The impact of Fukushima’s ghost, however imposed requirement to analyze the behavior of the blocks (including analysis of physical processes and the reaction containment structure) for the full range of emergencies, including internal fires and floods, extreme weather conditions and seismic activity.
Two bids were submitted and the winner is Risk Engineering. It was in September this year that it was awarded an analysis contract of over 1.7 million BGN excluding VAT.
Interestingly, almost the same is the cost for implementation of stress tests that Brussels made all nuclear operators in the European Union undergo. For seven separate criteria: earthquakes, a combination of earthquakes and flood, exceeding the flood level anticipated by project, external flooding, extreme external impacts, analysis of the consequences in cases of loss of safety functions in every possible initiating event on the site, management of severe accidents and Summary Report for reassessment of actions in case of a series of unusual events – NPP Kozloduy has paid a total of 2.52 million BGN without VAT. The most substantial portion of this amount received Risk Engineering, in competition with five other companies that won the first three lots with a combined cost of 1.2 million BGN. The test for extreme external impacts was awarded to the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences against 280 thousand BGN while 410 thousand BGN was enough for Enpro Consult Ltd. to undertake the analysis of the consequences in case of loss of safety functions.
As for the stress test for severe accident management, it was awarded to the Bulgarian branch of the U.S. Westinghouse Energy Systems Ltd. against 390 thousand BGN. However, in practice 36% of the contract will in fact go to Enpro Consult LTD as it is involved as a subcontractor of the Americans.
nbsp;
nbsp;
nbsp;
nbsp;
