Taiwan utility Taipower has identified control rod blade (CRB) cracks at all four operating BWRs in Taiwan since November 2000, according to a report by the Atomic Energy Council (AEC) in Taipei.
AEC said Taipower has replaced multiple cracked CRBs with spare blades, and “the root cause is still under investigation by Taipower”.
The affected plants are the two BWR units at Chinshan and the two BWR units at Kuosheng. Visual inspections have been conducted on CRBs during five consecutive outages of the units. After detailed examination, cracks were identified at various locations of the CRBs. The most recent results were from Chinshan 2, where a total of 41 cracked CRBs were found out of the whole core of 97 CRBs.
