Philippsburg Nuclear Power Station: Block 2 Temporarily Off the Grid for Preventative Maintenance Work

Karlsruhe. Block 2 of the Philippsburg nuclear power station (KKP 2) will be shut down in the night from Friday to Saturday (29/30 July 2011) and temporarily taken off the grid. During the standstill, a certain type of electronic assembly will be checked as a precaution and replaced if necessary because we currently cannot completely rule out susceptibility to defects. The work involved can only be carried out with the facility shut down. This procedure has been coordinated with the Baden-Württemberg Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Transport and will be monitored by auditors commissioned by the authority. EnBW thereby expresses its attitude towards safety that is mirrored in the principle "safety before profitability".

The starting point for the inspection work is a fault on three of the same type of electronic assembly, which can be traced back to the same cause – a defect on an assembly component. The three affected assemblies and all assemblies of this type used in the same place have already been replaced. The operator of KKP 2, EnBW Kernkraft GmbH, already punctually reported this circumstance to the supervisory authority on July 7, 2011 and informed the public. This report was provisionally placed in categories N (normal report) and INES (no or low safety significance) and is therefore beneath the seven stage international scale for the safety assessment of incidents in nuclear power stations (INES). The test program undertaken after shutting the facility down for other comparative assemblies used of this type should rule out the risk of this fault repeating itself.

Block 2 of the Philippsburg nuclear power station is a pressurised water reactor with an electrical output of 1468 megawatts. The facility went into operation in 1984 and produced around twelve billion kilowatt hours of electricity in the year 2010.