Broken Control Rods at Swedish Reactor - same design as Olkiluoto

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Broken Control Rods at Swedish Reactor - same design as Olkiluoto!

Scary stuff from Sweden - they claim Olkiluoto is OK but it's the same design so maybe it just OK for now? They don't say if there's any control rods of that design used outside the Nordic region.

The problems are with the "control rods" - i.e. the things which control the nuclear reaction and stop it getting out of hand!

Reuters reports today ( http://tinyurl.com/6ka36m ): "Swedish power group Vattenfall [VATN.UL] said on Tuesday an inspection had revealed one broken control rod and cracks in about 30 percent of others at its Forsmark 3 reactor"
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"The unit has been shut since Oct. 21 and Andersson said it would not reopen before Nov. 28 at the earliest."
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"The company said in October it would inspect Forsmark 3 after the discovery of a broken control rod at the Oskarshamn 3 reactor. The two reactors have similar designs"

"Your Industry News" reported last Wednesday (29 Oct) (http://tinyurl.com/55y4wk ):
"The problems were first discovered last week during an annual maintenance outage at OKG's Oskarshamn 3, where a fracture was discovered in a control rod shaft. Similar cracks were subsequently discovered in six more control rods, and the company is now extending its maintenance outage to enable it to carry out fuller tests and to determine the root cause of the problem."
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"In the light of the Oskarshamn discovery, Swedish radiation safety authority SSM called for immediate inspections at Swedish plants sharing similar control rod designs. Inspections at Forsmark 3 have revealed similar problems to those at Oskarshamn. No problems were found in the other two units at the site, which have a different control rod design to the affected plants."
(...)
"SSM also notified its Finnish counterpart, Stuk, so that checks could be carried out at the Olkiluoto plant which uses similar control rods, but Stuk reports that no damage has been found there."