“The dangerous trick with emergency cooling in nuclear power plants“

The cooling water in many of Europe’s nuclear power plants is pre-heated to prevent brittle steel in reactor pressure vessels from breaking, writes Michael Bauchmüller in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It continues to become more complicated to reach exactly the temperature that is low enough to cool the reactor and at the same time high enough not to endanger the vessel,” writes Bauchmüller. It was not clear how many reactors in Europe were affected. No nuclear power plants in Germany currently use pre-heated water “because of the current material condition or the one expected at the end of its lifetime”, the federal environment ministry told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Read the article in German here.

For background read the CLEW dossier The challenges of Germany’s nuclear phase-out.