On Monday 19 September 2022, French energy supplier and operator of the Cattenom nuclear power plant, EDF, reported that a level one safety incident occurred at the power plant, which is located not far from the Luxembourg-France border, last week.
In a statement, EDF confirmed that the power plant had to be shut down temporarily on Wednesday 14 September 2022 after fuel had been drained from the first reactor and technician noticed a recording error: someone had recorded the filter valve of production unit no. 2 instead of that of unit no. 1. This error meant that several pieces of equipment in the cooling circuit of unit no. 2 were unavailable.
According to EDF, in this type of situation, the operating instructions require that the components be made available again in less than eight hours. Once the anomaly was detected, the teams at the plant reset the valves concerned to the correct configuration. However, the maximum delay allowed by the technical operating specifications was exceeded by 54 minutes.
The operator assured that this incident had no real impact on the safety of the facilities, as redundant filters remained operational and available at all times. However, the time gap between the error and its discovery and subsequent rectification led EDF to declare a level 1 safety incident (1 out of 7 levels on the INES scale) on Friday 16 September 2022.
