Berlin on Friday summoned local officials to explain a disclosure that safety precautions failed during a fire last week at a German nuclear power station, according to dpa. The local regulators, from the northern state of Schleswig- Holstein, said they had only just learned from management of the Kruemmel power station about the mis-steps during the June 28 transformer fire. The boiling-water nuclear reactor at the plant east of Hamburg made an emergency shut-down but was not damaged. However for a few seconds much of its electronic equipment was reportedly dead until back-up power arrived. The Swedish-owned Vattenfall company also admitted that acrid smoke from the burning oil of the transformer entered the power station control room and that computers failed to save some of the data about the shut-down. The local regulators said they would not allow the plant to resume operations till it was ensured that none of those mishaps could ever happen again. Vattenfall insists the incident did not raise any serious "reactor security" issues. But aides to German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel summoned the state officials to explain the incident and why it took so long for Vattenfall to reveal the lapses. Renate Kunast, the opposition Greens caucus co-leader, called Friday for Vattenfall's nuclear licence to be revoked. Bruno Thomauske, chief executive of Vattenfall Europe's Nuclear Energy unit, said Friday that an emergency release of boiling-water pressure in the reactor using two hand-operated valves had been the result of human error. The reactor operator had misunderstood an instruction from his superior and carried out a procedure intended for serious disasters, cutting water pressure around the fuel rods from 65 to 20 bar in a matter of seconds. In hindsight this had not been necessary, because the fire was in a distant part of the plant and the reactor was not under threat. Thomauske also disclosed that very small traces of a dioxin were found in air filters at the site after the fire. Dioxins, which can cause genetic changes in humans, are often released when oil burns.
