Westinghouse, Czech power firm clash over nuclear leak

Sep 27, 2006, 15:14 GMT

Prague - A Czech power company and its US-based supplier of nuclear fuel clashed Wednesday over whether to replace nuclear plant fuel rods that leaked radioactivity.

The dispute surfaced when the state-run company CEZ announced that the supplier, Westinghouse, 'failed to repair' three of the five leaking fuel-rod assemblies at the Temelin nuclear plant in the southern Czech Republic.

The two sides 'disagree' over 'the right way' for handling the malfunctioning rods recently detected during the current refuelling process at Temelin's Unit 2, spokesman Milan Nebesar told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Westinghouse refused to meet CEZ's 'relevant procedures' when it agreed to repair only two of the leaking fuel-rod assemblies, Nebesar said. Three other assemblies with faulty rods will be replaced with new assemblies, he said.

The row came amid a new round of anti-nuclear protests by Austrian and Czech opponents of Temelin, located 60 kilometres from the Czech-Austrian border.

The Austrian group Atomstopp sponsored a protest at the plant's main gate Tuesday and a border crossing Monday.

Westinghouse helped retrofit the Soviet-designed Temelin plant to western standards in the 1990s and has fuelled the plant since it opened in 2000.

But the US company has fallen out of favour with CEZ, one of Europe's biggest power firms, and recently lost a bid to supply Temelin after 2010.

In May, CEZ picked Russian fuel supplier TVEL over Westinghouse for a contract to supply 400 tons of fuel between 2010 and 2020. TVEL said the deal was worth 'billions of koruna' (hundreds of millions of dollars).

TVEL currently supplies fuel for another Czech nuclear plant run by CEZ, Dukovany, and a research reactor near Prague.

Nebesar said the leaks were found in only a few of the nearly 51,000 fuel rods used in the twin-reactor Temelin.