Thread by @nuclearkatie

This is a lot of words with very little explanation of the actual situation...

@CherylRofer, you're cited in this, do you have any more detail? The article just says that "fission gas" was detected, which isn't really that much info
cnn.com/2021/06/14/pol…

The detection of fission products (gases) in the primary loop is indicative of failed fuel, which means that at least one fuel rod has a hole in it. But that alone is not enough to raise concern levels, as many reactors in the US have failed fuel before

As an aside, I spent my very first nuclear internship cataloging and sorting failed fuel events into an internal database. There are a lot of them, and generally they present no hazard to reactor operation nor the public

Taishan is a brand new reactor though, so it may just be that they want to fully understand the situation, because failing fuel early in a reactor's life could be indicative of a bad batch of fuel, containment in the primary coolant, or something else that needs correcting

For example, there's a reactor in the US that failed several dozen bundles of its first core in the first few weeks of operation (this is decades ago, when reactors were coming online). Turns out, the fuel wasn't properly backfilled, and getting new fuel fixed the problem

The main Q I have: is it *just* failed fuel? If so, the technical advice sought & provided is routine, nothing to write home about. But extra gases floating around coolant could also end up identifying if the reactor has any leaks, for example in the reactor vessel head

In that case, the failed fuel wouldn't be the actual problem, just a way to identify a much bigger problem. But I don't think we know, I'm just speculating! Or at least it's not being reported in enough detail for me to tell so far

I'm going to tag in @pretentiouswhat and @gbrumfiel's threads since they seem to be the other main ones floating around and they're starting to get tagged multiple times onto mine (and perhaps vice versa?)

Absolutely key update from @pretentiouswhat, so much so that I'm going to append each of his tweets onto this thread. As many of us suspected, this whole affair resulted from a twisted game of telephone where critical facts got distorted

@pretentiouswhat

This was a poor showing from crisis communicators, and I hope the rest of the global nuclear industry learns from this incident. You always need to get out front of a story, not just with a statement two days later when rumors are rampant online/in media

I reached out to Framatome yesterday, specifically asking for any information available beyond their *THREE SENTENCE* press release. They sent me an email with practically the same language but just reworded, which is almost worse than not responding
framatome.com/EN/businessnew…

I expect none of the relevant parties deemed a speedy crisis response necessary, because the incident is practically a non-event from a safety perspective. But public perception was on high alert, showing that comms needs to respond to perception and clear up misinfo

This is a repeating event in the nuclear industry. When an event is truly non-safety related, the industry doesn't think they need to respond. But the media and the public panic even more when there is no forceful, honest, and timely response clarifying the situation

The end result is that small and boring events from an engineering perspective can and have lead to large, and in this case global, panics from the media, and on social media where information travels in a split second