Need Overrules Safety Fears at Bulgarian Nuclear Plant

If the world is fortunate, this is a town it won’t hear too much more about. And as long as luck holds for Bulgaria and the apprehensive nuclear power industry, Kozloduy will not join the ranks of such infamous datelines as Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island.

Unhappily, luck may be the key word here.

This bleak, tumbleweed town, a 10-minute donkey trot from the Danube River in northern Bulgaria, was once a sleepy farm village. It is now an equally sleepy agglomeration of cheap, trash-ridden apartment buildings that signify its position as an East European-style company town. The company in this case is a nuclear power plant.

“First Atomic Central-Kozloduy,” its official name, ticks away, a mile from the edge of town, in a sprawl of buildings and smokestacks that covers an area larger than the original village once occupied. Viewed from the crest of a nearby hill, it seems as ordered as, say, a large dairy processing milk from contented cows.

What is going on down there, however, is a battle to keep Bulgaria lighted. And, almost equally important, is the simultaneous struggle to maintain the world’s most trouble-plagued nuclear power plant, an effort that--reduced to its final meaning--aims at preventing a nuclear disaster.

Kozloduy, in the view of experts who have had a look at it, is the worst-run nuclear power plant in the world.

“Oh, I don’t think there is any question among those who have been there,” one nuclear power expert said recently. “Kozloduy is at the absolute bottom of the list.”

To those who work here, however, Kozloduy is the victim of “exaggeration” and “hysteria.” Some feel that Bulgaria does not appreciate their contributions to the nation, not least of which is living in Kozloduy. On the other hand, few of them accept the notion that they are brave souls, plugging the nuclear dike with their fingers and a roll of duct tape.

“We’re just doing our jobs,” said one. “We’re not worried.”

Kozloduy is at the bottom of the experts’ safety list, but with six similar units employed at three other sites in the former Communist world, it is not alone. The same type of reactor is in use in Bohonice in Czechoslovakia and in Lola and Nova Voronezh in Russia, and all share similar problems of design and safety. Moreover, all have been the focus of concern from the nuclear power industry, which fears that a major accident at any one of them could spell doom for the beleaguered nuclear industry everywhere.

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna spent a year studying the problems of those plants, but no site raised as much alarm as Kozloduy. Last July, a panel of IAEA experts recommended that four of the six nuclear reactors at Kozloduy be shut down immediately for urgent repairs. It was the most drastic and scathing report the agency had ever issued.

Kozloduy has never had a life-threatening accidental release of radiation, but even its managers have acknowledged the validity of the most serious complaints about the plant, such as the list of more than 300 deficiencies registered by the IAEA. If it were practicable, some Bulgarian officials acknowledge, at least the four oldest of Kozloduy’s reactors might be shut down entirely.

But that is not a workable solution, for this power plant supplies Bulgaria with 40% of its electricity. At the moment, Bulgaria has no other means to fill that 40% gap. And, in the economic upheaval of the post-Communist era, the country doesn’t have the money to buy power from any of its neighbors.

In the ongoing crisis over Kozloduy, the country has been racked by regular power outages, with residents in Sofia, the capital, and other large cities enduring rolling blackouts, sometimes of one hour out of three, sometimes two hours out of four.

And with every hour of blackout, there is growing political pressure on the government of Prime Minister Philip Dimitrov, whose administration has nowhere near the funds necessary to provide an early solution. Rumors are now flying that the numerous shutdowns at Kozloduy may be the result of “sabotage” by sympathizers of the old Communist regime. There is no evidence to support the rumors, but the fact that they exist is testimony to the political importance of electricity--or the lack of it.

“Switching off Kozloduy would mean a national catastrophe,” Tzvetan Bonchev, a member of the national energy supply commission, said last fall. “People could die of cold and hunger.”

At the center of Kozloduy’s problems are four outmoded Soviet-designed 440-megawatt pressurized water reactors, built in the 1970s. Of a type known as VVER Model 230, the reactors were built with no containment structures that would help prevent the spread of contamination in the event of a serious accident.

As nuclear experts hasten to point out, the reactors at Kozloduy are not “Chernobyl-type” reactors, which were graphite-moderated reactors capable, in extreme situations, of surging out of control. Indeed, the basic operating principle of the Kozloduy reactors is the same employed by most commercial power reactors in the West.

Which does not mean, experts say, that a meltdown is impossible.

Further complicating things, the managers of Kozloduy are not sure of certain crucial design limits of the Soviet system they are working with, including the limits of the reactor core, the most important and potentially the most dangerous component of the reactor.

“Since the core design limits are unknown, it cannot be determined if the Soviet design limits completely ensure the safe operation of the reactor,” said the IAEA report, which went on to stress the need for obtaining the secret Soviet specifications from the reactor’s designers.

The reactor’s pressure vessels tend to become brittle over time and, according to the IAEA, the plant so far has insufficient means for monitoring and moderating the effects.

Experts also contend that the plant has been operated under a heavily Sovietized management system that is cumbersome, unresponsive to problems and designed to obscure accountability. It is, in the words of one Westerner familiar with the plant, “a classic cover-your-ass bureaucracy.”

But what most nuclear safety experts stress first when they talk about Kozloduy is what they call the lack of a “true safety culture.”

“You can think of this unit the way you might think about an old car,” said Keith W. Hyde, an IAEA specialist who assisted in the report on Kozloduy. “The part that produces the power is basic but solid--over-designed in some respects. It takes a lot to get it going. But the weakness is its safety system. When you do get this car going, in other words, its brakes aren’t very good, its safety systems are not very redundant. If there were a fire, for example, it would just about take with it what safety systems there are.”

Major weaknesses, such as the lack of containment, were built into the system, but inspectors found the weaknesses had been compounded by plant officials who for years had failed to correct glaring deficiencies in the plant’s safety systems. Not only were Kozloduy’s brakes bad, to continue the automobile analogy, but so were its lights, signals and tires.

But the “true safety culture,” as the name suggests, includes more than mechanical systems, experts say; it implies a state of mind. At its most basic, it means a fundamental orderliness, even neatness. It includes not just systems of engineering, but systems of managing personnel. And, in all these areas, experts say, Kozloduy is, or has been, a mess.

The IAEA report, for example, cited broken ladders and holes in walkway gratings. Two-foot holes in concrete floors, the report said, were “covered only by wire grating to prevent someone from falling through to the next floor.”

The report listed a host of similar deficiencies--crucial electrical cables draped over sharp metal edges, poor insulation of control room instruments, missing fire doors, missing valve wheels, unlabeled switches, valves and equipment. The list goes on for 13 densely typed pages.

Kozloduy has been plagued by fires--most of them, luckily, not on the reactor side of the plant. Its transformers and turbines seem especially fire-prone, but there also have been a large number of fires of the storeroom and broom-closet variety, which led inspectors to note that “thorough fire hazard inspection should be carried out routinely,” clearly suggesting that basic concerns were not in force at the time of the inspection. The report also suggested that “a root-cause analysis should be conducted to determine why industrial safety principles, although apparently covered in training, are not applied in the plant.”

Bulgarian authorities, battered at home and abroad over the plant, no longer allow foreign journalists inside the facility, feeling that every exposure results in a new insult. With at least half the plant’s units shut down for repairs, officials argue, with some justification, that they have no time to spend on visitors.

But with a work force of about 5,000 (a third more than necessary, some experts say), it is not hard to find employees of the plant in the town itself. Out of interviews with a dozen or so plant employees and relatives, all residents of Kozloduy and the surrounding area, none said they worried about a dangerous accident at the plant.

Among the suggestions proffered by the IAEA report was that the management of the plant, along with the government, “should discuss ways of making Kozloduy a more attractive place to live.” It would be, at this point, an uphill battle.

The town is on the plain approaching the Danube River. On windless days, it is befouled by pollution from a paper mill a few miles away. More commonly, however, it is windy here, with gusts blowing dust, sand and trash through the streets. Farm wagons, drawn by horses or donkeys, pass through the town more regularly than buses. The apartment blocks, all thrown up since plant construction began in the early 1970s, are grimy and shoddily built. As is common in the socialist world, the apartments are small and crowded.

“You can see there is a housing crisis here,” said Vladimir Yovtchev, 39, who works on the fifth reactor, one of the newer 1,000-megawatt units, as head of the reactor department. He has been at Kozloduy 17 years and lives with his family packed into a three-room apartment. He would move, but there is no place to move to, he says.

“In my opinion,” he said, “all of the people who work here are in some danger. It is a risk of the profession. But what is important is the technical culture and technical ability.” In that regard, he said, he has “confidence in myself and my colleagues.”

He agreed, he said, with the IAEA assessment of the management system at the plant. “It is Soviet,” he said, “which means double functions without clear responsibility. There are too many chiefs with no one clearly in charge.”

A team from the World Assn. of Nuclear Operators (WANO) has been advising the management of the plant under a program that has absorbed about $6 million of a $13-million grant from the European Community--so far, virtually the only outside aid Bulgaria has received to deal with Kozloduy’s problems. One of the tasks of the WANO advisers is to assist in developing a new management system.

A study by a group of Spanish reactor operators, working on the WANO project, estimated that 15% of the workers at Kozloduy showed higher levels of exposure to radiation than the average at Western power plants. Although the study emphasized that the levels were not high enough to pose a health risk, it urged plant officials to reduce the levels.

According to some plant employees, those workers likely to receive the highest doses of radiation are those on repair crews, often called into service during refueling, or in other risky operations around the reactor core.

Tzvetan Popov, 53, is a director of the plant repair works and has been at the plant 15 years. His wife, Nevena, works in a plant laboratory. Neither of them worry, they say, about safety at Kozloduy.

“I’m not worried, because I know it very well,” said Popov, who sat discussing the plant over a pitcher of homemade wine in the grape arbor of his mother’s house in Kozloduy. “I know the people there, and they have a sense of responsibility. They will not allow any danger, either to themselves or the people in the town.”

He said he believed that the widespread alarm about the plant was the result of “exaggeration and misunderstanding. It comes from television and from journalists wanting to write about something sensational and something new.” The basic operation of the plant, he is convinced, is safe.

Admittedly, he said, the technology of the plant is old. “I wouldn’t say it is too old to be operating, but I would not say it is one of the best, either. But the problems are mostly with turbines and transformers and generators. The equipment related to the reactors is good and it is reliable. But on the other side, it is old and creates problems.”

Popov said he heads a 15-man repair crew whose dedication gives him pride. In February, when a reactor pump failed in the 1,000-megawatt unit, “the people in my crew did not go to their homes for two weeks. Why? Because they know what 1,000 megawatts of power means to Bulgaria. So we go to work, do our jobs, and we don’t listen to this criticism, this noise, from Sofia.

“On one or two occasions,” he said, “I might have gotten overexposed myself. But that is only for the bosses, not for ordinary workers.” In 15 years, he said, he had felt no bad effects from his job.

“No,” he went on, “I don’t think we are brave, because it is just an ordinary job I am doing. . . . Most of my Saturdays and Sundays are spent at the plant, because if you leave aside the normal repair work, most of the accidents happen on Saturdays and Sundays. So we are there. I guess it’s what you call love of the job. . . .”

Popov escorted his visitor to the front gate, and, in a more candid moment, offered an opinion suggesting that courage, after all, might not be out of place at Kozloduy.

“People are scared,” he said. “It’s a natural thing. Chernobyl scared people. They have a right to be concerned. If I had my choice, I would have shut down the old reactors. I think they should build new reactors.

“But you have to be realistic. We have no money. We can’t sit in the dark. Bulgaria has no choice.”