Kola NPP or standing at the reactor
Standing on the casing of a working reactor is an interesting experience. Just a few meters under your feet 1375 megawatts of thermal power, this is almost two million horsepower poorly imagined. But nuclear decay is soundless, and you only hear the faint hum of ventilation and you feel the barely noticeable vibration from the circulation pumps with your feet. And, in general, this is not scary - you know how many equipment and people monitor the safety of the process. But, out of interest, you still get a dosimeter out of your pocket and observe invariable zeros on the scoreboard. As part of the Arctic Neforum, bloggers had an excursion to the Kola NPP, the northernmost land nuclear power plant in Europe, and I was lucky to be there.
Kola NPP is located in the city of Polar Dawns. In three hours, a bus crosses almost the entire Kola Peninsula - Murmansk south of the north coast, and the Polar Dawns are located only slightly north of the south.
Outside the window, the trees seem to be the same as in the middle lane, but they are noticeably smaller in growth. Low clouds add dark beauty to the landscape.
We drive through Monchegorsk. To the right are dumps of open pit mines.
On the left smokes the production of nickel and copper.
But in general, the road is deserted, and a typical picture outside the window is trees, water and power line wires.
Turn to the station and the last place where you can take pictures freely.
We were not allowed to shoot the station outside, so this photo is from the official site . There is nothing to be done, the nuclear power plant is a sensitive facility. But, fortunately, we filmed the most interesting.
Before you show or tell something, you should spend a very short educational program. A nuclear reactor generates heat that heats the water, the resulting steam turns the turbines connected to generators that generate electricity. There are four VVER-440 reactors at the Kola NPP, two were built in the first stage and two in the second. VVER - water-cooled reactors, and in them the heat from the reactor core first heats the water of the primary circuit, which is under pressure and does not boil. Then, in the steam generators, heat is transferred to the water of the second circuit, which boils, and already its steam twists the turbines and generators.
We visited the machine room, where turbines and generators stand, the reactor control unit, climbed onto the reactor itself, and also looked at a separate radioactive waste processing facility.
General view from the end of the engine room. On the left is the turbine generator housing.
A larger plan. The turbo generator is under repair and partially disassembled. Therefore, the hall is much quieter than usual, and the earplugs issued at the beginning of the tour look like an excessive precaution.
These two blocks, the generator and the pathogen, will be lifted and placed in the left part in the photo above.
The station works, somewhere in this interweaving of pipes there is steam under pressure, a small part of which externally harmlessly rises from the pipe.
But the issued helmet came in handy more than once. Despite the striking designation of the structures crossing the aisle, I noticed them several times only after an impact.
View from the middle of the engine room. The total length of the hall is 520 meters.
Turbine close-up. Its nominal rotation speed is 3000 rpm or 50 per second. This is exactly how the current frequency of 50 Hz is used, used in industry and everyday life.
An overhead crane passes over a turbogenerator. Please note that the generator is not disassembled here.
Our next stop is the control room (block control panel). It is from here that the reactor is controlled.
An interesting feature of designations at nuclear power plants is that on and open elements are highlighted in red, and off and closed elements are highlighted in green.
The working shift of the control room lasts eight hours and consists of only three people. I remember that the reactor operates at constant power, and, thinking that changing is boring, I ask if the analogue of the railway hitchhiking is used here (the operator must regularly press the button to confirm that he has not fallen asleep). They answer me that there is enough work even in the steady state, and there is no time to doze off.
Information on a working reactor. Unlike RBMK, where fuel can be reloaded directly on the go, and a large and beautiful reactor diagram with information on each channel is shown in the control room, in VVER fuel reloading occurs when the reactor is stopped, and operators have enough information about the reactor as a whole. A diagram (a circle in the upper part) is not used in the work.
Employees say that after the release of the Chernobyl series from HBO, they are asked on excursions where the AZ-5 button is. These red buttons are the emergency protection, which is also used for the standard jamming of the reactor.
Control elements are also located on the opposite wall of the control room. You rejoice that you did not take a backpack with you and that you cannot accidentally hurt something.
Particularly important elements are covered with covers to protect against accidental switching. The two red covers at the top are areas off for the duration of the work.
The reactor and other potentially radioactive sites are located in the so-called controlled access zone. We change into personal protective equipment (shirt, bonnet, pants, jacket, helmet, socks, shoes) and get dosimeters. In the hallway in front of the sanitary inspection room there is a funny poster - “You can feel like an astronaut in personal protective equipment at work.”
There are no windows in the controlled access zone, and a separate rather big room with powerful equipment is engaged in ventilation.
And here we are in the reactor room. There are 3 and 4 power units, they were built later and differ in appearance from 1 and 2. View of the reactor casing 3. The orange circles on the floor are the covers of the main circulation pumps.
View of the 4th power unit from the third casing.
Selfies on the casing of a working reactor. Blue helmets are bloggers, green helmets are station staff. Next to me in a green helmet is our main guide and engineer of the Information and Public Relations Department, Julia Makarikhina.
The zeros on the dosimeter remained zeros at the end of the tour. And rightly so.
We pass to the fourth power unit. Here stands a reloading machine, engaged in loading and unloading fuel assemblies to / from the reactor. It is mobile, can be moved between power units in the hall, and usually stands where the last work was performed.
Under the ceiling of the hall, a bridge crane of 250 tons.
We leave the reactor hall and see information on the radiation situation. We walked around the green zone, where you can be free. You can’t enter the yellow zones without an outfit for radiation hazardous work. And if red suddenly appears, then permission to the radiation safety department will be required to access it.
Well, our last stop is a complex for processing liquid radioactive waste. The idea is simple - nuclear power plants produce two types of waste - ordinary and radioactive. Ordinary people are not dangerous, and theoretically they can be sent to an ordinary landfill (they do this in Europe, but we use separate landfills). But the radioactive must be buried in accordance with all the rules so that they do not pose a danger to the environment. And every kilogram of cemented or vitrified waste costs money. But, if you apply advanced technologies, you can clean up the waste, and despite the fact that cleaning costs money, you can save much more on reducing the amount of landfill waste.
Here, far from everywhere you can go without additional protection.
Cleaning control room. On the screen to the right, something regularly flows in a thin stream from a pipe and comes in puffs of steam.
And here is the end result of what flowed out in the photo above. These are refined boron salts. In the VVER reactor core, primary water is circulated with the addition of boric acid. This is called boron regulation. Spent borates become waste. A sophisticated technology for the treatment of liquid radioactive waste allows them to be extracted and, for example, sold. True, industry consumes much more boron salts than is being restored at nuclear power plants, but the main benefit is the reduction in volume. A small storage facility may contain waste for decades of operation of the station, and now the complex is processing what became waste in Soviet times. It is curious that, according to the staff, they stumble upon analogues of the “geological layers” when containers from even more ancient times suddenly begin to be processed worse - in the forgotten eighty some year something changed, and the composition of the waste began to differ. We have to analyze what has changed and adjust the process.
In blue barrels, safe raw materials. But under our feet are containers with radioactive waste. I can’t believe it, but the small storage facility containing waste for decades of operation of the nuclear power plant is almost empty.
But this is a container for radioactive waste. Everything is serious here already - thick metal walls and a powerful cover.
We begin the movement back. But just so you can’t leave the zone of controlled access. You need to make sure that you are clean of radiation contamination. In the photo one of the many posts of radiation monitoring - you get up on the site, put your hands in the detector, it measures activity.
Another radiation monitoring post.
In the sanitary inspection room we hand over protective equipment and dosimeters, wash ourselves and go back to the free access zone. Having lunch (an excellent dining room, by the way), we set off back to Murmansk.
360 ° video.
Thank you to Rosatom for organizing the Arctic Neforum, and to the station staff for a wonderful excursion. I also thank the team of LiveJournal for the invitation and excellent company.
Kola NPP is located in the city of Polar Dawns. In three hours, a bus crosses almost the entire Kola Peninsula - Murmansk south of the north coast, and the Polar Dawns are located only slightly north of the south.
Outside the window, the trees seem to be the same as in the middle lane, but they are noticeably smaller in growth. Low clouds add dark beauty to the landscape.
We drive through Monchegorsk. To the right are dumps of open pit mines.
On the left smokes the production of nickel and copper.
But in general, the road is deserted, and a typical picture outside the window is trees, water and power line wires.
Turn to the station and the last place where you can take pictures freely.
We were not allowed to shoot the station outside, so this photo is from the official site . There is nothing to be done, the nuclear power plant is a sensitive facility. But, fortunately, we filmed the most interesting.
Before you show or tell something, you should spend a very short educational program. A nuclear reactor generates heat that heats the water, the resulting steam turns the turbines connected to generators that generate electricity. There are four VVER-440 reactors at the Kola NPP, two were built in the first stage and two in the second. VVER - water-cooled reactors, and in them the heat from the reactor core first heats the water of the primary circuit, which is under pressure and does not boil. Then, in the steam generators, heat is transferred to the water of the second circuit, which boils, and already its steam twists the turbines and generators.
We visited the machine room, where turbines and generators stand, the reactor control unit, climbed onto the reactor itself, and also looked at a separate radioactive waste processing facility.
General view from the end of the engine room. On the left is the turbine generator housing.
A larger plan. The turbo generator is under repair and partially disassembled. Therefore, the hall is much quieter than usual, and the earplugs issued at the beginning of the tour look like an excessive precaution.
These two blocks, the generator and the pathogen, will be lifted and placed in the left part in the photo above.
The station works, somewhere in this interweaving of pipes there is steam under pressure, a small part of which externally harmlessly rises from the pipe.
But the issued helmet came in handy more than once. Despite the striking designation of the structures crossing the aisle, I noticed them several times only after an impact.
View from the middle of the engine room. The total length of the hall is 520 meters.
Turbine close-up. Its nominal rotation speed is 3000 rpm or 50 per second. This is exactly how the current frequency of 50 Hz is used, used in industry and everyday life.
An overhead crane passes over a turbogenerator. Please note that the generator is not disassembled here.
Our next stop is the control room (block control panel). It is from here that the reactor is controlled.
An interesting feature of designations at nuclear power plants is that on and open elements are highlighted in red, and off and closed elements are highlighted in green.
The working shift of the control room lasts eight hours and consists of only three people. I remember that the reactor operates at constant power, and, thinking that changing is boring, I ask if the analogue of the railway hitchhiking is used here (the operator must regularly press the button to confirm that he has not fallen asleep). They answer me that there is enough work even in the steady state, and there is no time to doze off.
Information on a working reactor. Unlike RBMK, where fuel can be reloaded directly on the go, and a large and beautiful reactor diagram with information on each channel is shown in the control room, in VVER fuel reloading occurs when the reactor is stopped, and operators have enough information about the reactor as a whole. A diagram (a circle in the upper part) is not used in the work.
Employees say that after the release of the Chernobyl series from HBO, they are asked on excursions where the AZ-5 button is. These red buttons are the emergency protection, which is also used for the standard jamming of the reactor.
Control elements are also located on the opposite wall of the control room. You rejoice that you did not take a backpack with you and that you cannot accidentally hurt something.
Particularly important elements are covered with covers to protect against accidental switching. The two red covers at the top are areas off for the duration of the work.
The reactor and other potentially radioactive sites are located in the so-called controlled access zone. We change into personal protective equipment (shirt, bonnet, pants, jacket, helmet, socks, shoes) and get dosimeters. In the hallway in front of the sanitary inspection room there is a funny poster - “You can feel like an astronaut in personal protective equipment at work.”
There are no windows in the controlled access zone, and a separate rather big room with powerful equipment is engaged in ventilation.
And here we are in the reactor room. There are 3 and 4 power units, they were built later and differ in appearance from 1 and 2. View of the reactor casing 3. The orange circles on the floor are the covers of the main circulation pumps.
View of the 4th power unit from the third casing.
Selfies on the casing of a working reactor. Blue helmets are bloggers, green helmets are station staff. Next to me in a green helmet is our main guide and engineer of the Information and Public Relations Department, Julia Makarikhina.
The zeros on the dosimeter remained zeros at the end of the tour. And rightly so.
We pass to the fourth power unit. Here stands a reloading machine, engaged in loading and unloading fuel assemblies to / from the reactor. It is mobile, can be moved between power units in the hall, and usually stands where the last work was performed.
Under the ceiling of the hall, a bridge crane of 250 tons.
We leave the reactor hall and see information on the radiation situation. We walked around the green zone, where you can be free. You can’t enter the yellow zones without an outfit for radiation hazardous work. And if red suddenly appears, then permission to the radiation safety department will be required to access it.
Well, our last stop is a complex for processing liquid radioactive waste. The idea is simple - nuclear power plants produce two types of waste - ordinary and radioactive. Ordinary people are not dangerous, and theoretically they can be sent to an ordinary landfill (they do this in Europe, but we use separate landfills). But the radioactive must be buried in accordance with all the rules so that they do not pose a danger to the environment. And every kilogram of cemented or vitrified waste costs money. But, if you apply advanced technologies, you can clean up the waste, and despite the fact that cleaning costs money, you can save much more on reducing the amount of landfill waste.
Here, far from everywhere you can go without additional protection.
Cleaning control room. On the screen to the right, something regularly flows in a thin stream from a pipe and comes in puffs of steam.
And here is the end result of what flowed out in the photo above. These are refined boron salts. In the VVER reactor core, primary water is circulated with the addition of boric acid. This is called boron regulation. Spent borates become waste. A sophisticated technology for the treatment of liquid radioactive waste allows them to be extracted and, for example, sold. True, industry consumes much more boron salts than is being restored at nuclear power plants, but the main benefit is the reduction in volume. A small storage facility may contain waste for decades of operation of the station, and now the complex is processing what became waste in Soviet times. It is curious that, according to the staff, they stumble upon analogues of the “geological layers” when containers from even more ancient times suddenly begin to be processed worse - in the forgotten eighty some year something changed, and the composition of the waste began to differ. We have to analyze what has changed and adjust the process.
In blue barrels, safe raw materials. But under our feet are containers with radioactive waste. I can’t believe it, but the small storage facility containing waste for decades of operation of the nuclear power plant is almost empty.
But this is a container for radioactive waste. Everything is serious here already - thick metal walls and a powerful cover.
We begin the movement back. But just so you can’t leave the zone of controlled access. You need to make sure that you are clean of radiation contamination. In the photo one of the many posts of radiation monitoring - you get up on the site, put your hands in the detector, it measures activity.
Another radiation monitoring post.
In the sanitary inspection room we hand over protective equipment and dosimeters, wash ourselves and go back to the free access zone. Having lunch (an excellent dining room, by the way), we set off back to Murmansk.
360 ° video.
Thank you to Rosatom for organizing the Arctic Neforum, and to the station staff for a wonderful excursion. I also thank the team of LiveJournal for the invitation and excellent company.
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