SKorean Prime Minister says nuclear industry like the Mafia

[kristopher]

Scandal in South Korea Over Nuclear Revelations
Jean Chung for The New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea — Like Japan, resource-poor South Korea has long relied on nuclear power to provide the cheap electricity that helped build its miracle economy. For years, it met one-third of its electricity needs with nuclear power, similar to Japan’s level of dependence before the 2011 disaster at its Fukushima plant.

...a snowballing scandal in South Korea about bribery and faked safety tests for critical plant equipment has highlighted yet another similarity: experts say both countries’ nuclear programs suffer from a culture of collusion that has undermined their safety. Weeks of revelations about the close ties between South Korea’s nuclear power companies, their suppliers and testing companies have led the prime minister to liken the industry to a mafia.

The scandal started after an anonymous tip in April prompted an official investigation. Prosecutors have indicted some officials at a testing company on charges of faking safety tests on parts for the plants. Some officials at the state-financed company that designs nuclear power plants were also indicted on charges of taking bribes from testing company officials in return for accepting those substandard parts.

...

“What has been revealed so far may be the tip of an iceberg,” said Kune Y. Suh, a professor of nuclear engineering at Seoul National University.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/world/asia/scandal-in-south-korea-over-nuclear-revelations.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

[bananas]

1. He's right - and "What has been revealed so far may be the tip of an iceberg"

People were surprised when Korea underbid France and Japan and won.
Now we know why they were able to underbid - they faked their quality control.
QC is a lot cheaper when you don't actually do it.
France and Japan should sue.
This wasn't just local fraud - it was global fraud.

[kristopher]

2. It's not just Korea either

They've found the same problem with Russian reactors in both Russia and India.

[kristopher]

3. Rosatom-owned company accused of selling shoddy equipment to reactors...

Bellona.org, 28.02.2012 - Russian Federal Prosecutors have accused a company owned by the country’s nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, with massive corruption and manufacturing substandard equipment for nuclear reactors under construction both at home and abroad.
Charles Digges, 28/02-2012

The ZiO-Podolsk machine building plant’s procurement director, Sergei Shutov, has been arrested for buying low quality raw materials on the cheap and pocketing the difference as the result of an investigation by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor organization to the KGB.

It is not clear how many reactors have been impacted by the alleged crime, but reactors built by Russia in India, Bulgaria, Iran, China as well as several reactor construction and repair projects in Russia itself may have been affected by cheap equipment, given the time frame of works completed at the stations and the scope of the investigation as it has been revealed by authorities.

“The scope of this scandal could reach every reactor in Russian and every reactor built by Russia over the past several years and demands immediate investigation,” said Bellona President Frederic Hauge. “Were is the political leadership in the Russian government to deal with such a crime?"

Hauge expressed outrage that an alleged crime of such a massive scale ...

http://www.anti-atom.ru/en/node/3468

[kristopher]

4. How it has turned up in India

This is a great article.

The Supreme Court of India’s Judgment on the Kudankulam Nuclear Plant

<snip

The charge of poor quality supplies to KKNP-1 Project from the Russian supplier was not a wild allegation. The AERB itself has found at least four defective valves during the second round of inspections at KKNP-1, the results of which were revealed on 19.04.2013. [5] (Incidentally, the defective values were detected only after activists in Kudankulam, who found out about the said scam in Russia, raised a furore. [6]) The claim that the Russian supplier had supplied only four defective valves to KKNPP is a little hard to digest. That the concerned officials in India are hardly perturbed by the arrest of the procurement director of ZiO-Podolsk by the Russian Government for large-scale fraud is even more disturbing. In this regard, Dr.Gopalkrishnan has cautioned the decision makers in India as follows:

“There could be a large number of equipment, components and materials of substandard quality from ZiO-Podolsk already installed in various parts of KKNP-1& 2 whose deficiencies and defects are dormant today, but these very same shortcomings may cause such parts to catastrophically fail when the reactor is operated for some time. Many such parts and materials may have been installed within the reactor pressure vessel itself, which is now closed and sealed in preparation for the start-up. Once the reactor is made critical and reaches power operation, much of these components and materials inside will become radioactive and/or will be in environments where they cannot be properly tested for quality or performance. Under the circumstances, KKNP Unit-1 commissioning and KKNP-2 construction work must be stopped forthwith, and there can be no question of resuming these works towards start-up of both these reactors until a thorough and impartial investigation is carried out into the impact of this corruption scandal and sub-standard supplies on the safety of these reactors. And these investigations must be carried out by a team, where majority membership must not be from DAE, NPCIL and AERB, but include subject experts from other organisations in the country. India must also seriously consider inviting an IAEA expert team specially constituted to investigate the specific issues which this scandal has thrown up.”[7]

Recently, in another article dated 19 June 2013, Dr.Gopalakrishnan has drawn attention to yet another safety concern. According to him:

“Besides the probable installation of substandard parts in KKNPP reactors due to laxity of quality control, it is now evident that another major safety issue related to the I&C [instrumentation & control] systems is worrying the KKNPP management and the AERB, because of which the Unit 1 start-up is now postponed to July 2013. This inference is reached by piecing together information now available in the public domain. The problem, to put it simply, appears to be the inability to eliminate spurious signals of untraced origin appearing in many of the instrumentation cables of paramount importance to safety, like the reactor neutron chamber output lines, wiring of the safety and shut-off rod control systems, etc. Such phenomena belong to a broad class of problems known as Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI)…. It is most likely that the KKNPP cable system, as completed today, has not conformed to the norms and standards of cable selection, EMI shielding, or layout as per Russian, Indian or any other standards. No wonder the EMI problem is persisting, because there is no other short-cut solution other than re-doing a sizeable part of the I&C cabling and its layout in accordance with a set of modern standards, agreeable also to the Russians. This may take several more months and extensive re-working, but this must be done in the interest of public safety.” [8])

In this context, it may be noted that Justice Radhakrishnan himself...

<snip>


http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/05/the-supreme-court-of-indias-judgment-on-the-kudankulam-nuclear-plant/