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Almost half of Hungary was evacuated in 2003 because of an accident in Paks nuclear PP
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It started as a routine task: a German-French joint company had to clean the fuel elements at the Hungarian Paks-2 reactor. However, it almost ended in a Chernobyl-like nuclear disaster thanks to a series of grave human errors because of which radiation got into the environment.
Too much trust in the German-French company
In 1986, the biggest nuclear disaster in Chernobyl could happen because of the design problems of the RBMK-reactors and a lot of human errors. In Hungary, something similar happened during the cleaning of the fuel elements of the Paks-2 reactor on April 10, 2003.
According to atomcsapda.blog.hu, it all started with the fact that magnetite corrosion products started to coat the fuel rods of Paks-2 reactor, which affected the flow of coolant and thus, it brought down the efficacy of the reactor. Therefore, cleaning they had to be cleaned for which
a German-French joint company, the Framatome, was hired.
They had experience in such works; their cleaning vessel was already successfully used at Paks-2 in 2001.
The 467 MW Paks-2 was taken offline on 28 March for its annual refuelling and maintenance period during which some of the fuel elements were cleaned. In fact, the process happened under 10 metres of water but with a new cleaning vessel of Framatome never tried before.
On April 10, at 21:50, however, the radiation alarms turned on, and the operators thought that it has happened because one of the fuel rod assemblies was leaking. At 22:30, the reactor hall was evacuated because of increased radiation levels both there and in the cleaning system’s ventilation stack. At 02:15 the following morning, the hydraulic lock of the cleaning vessel lid was released to remove it but immediately
the dose rate increased significantly (6-12 millisieverts/hour).
As a result, radioactivity could get into the environment.