Employees couldn't hear audio alarm, couldn't see visual alarm
A fire occurred in the nuclear fuel storage facilities of the Kori Nuclear Power Plant located in Kijang County, Busan City, but none of the workers was aware of it for over an hour.
According to the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Corporation, the fire occurred at 4:26 p.m., Nov. 11, at Kori Power Plant Unit 4, burning up a waste dryer along with some gloves and towels. It is assumed that the dryer overheated and started the fire while drying wet gloves.
An employee, while looking around the site, detected smoke at 5:38 p.m. and extinguished the fire after 14 minutes. “One of the two smoke detectors is designed to be mute, and the other one sounded an alarm but the employees could not hear it,” the corporation explained. The alarm was displayed in the main control center but the employees did not see or hear anything.
The slow response to the fire is troubling, since the facility trained to fight them just this summer.
This past June, the Kori Nuclear Power Plant ran a fire drill in the headquarters building to train its employees on early fire extinguishing skills and test the disaster manual. About 300 employees, firemen, and security guards at Kori Nuclear power plant participated in the drill by following the announcements, catching the fire in the early stages with fire extinguishers and fire hydrants, and test-driving the fire trucks.
Power Plant Attempts to Cover Up Reactor Shutdown
But this fire is only the latest incident at the Kori Nuclear Power Station this year.
This past summer was a busy time for Kori Nuclear Power Plant, as Unit 2 was shut off because of heavy rainfall. On Aug. 25, a localized torrential downpour of over 100 mm per hour in Busan City resulted in rainwater infiltrating one of its annexes, and the corporation had to close the facilities.
At that time, the corporation covered up the incident by saying, “We shut down the facilities just in case, and this has nothing to do with the safety of the power station.” However, the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission’s following report read, “The manual shutdown of the reactor was because of the malfunctioning of four of the circulation water pumps, attributable to the heavy rain.”
In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the commission included watertight doors and discharge pumps in its safety enhancements. However, the area in question was excluded from the measures, since it was not a major part of the facility.