Theft occurs on a aday to day base in society, and nuclear power plants are no exception to that. Not in the west and not in the east. Especially nuclear reactors in eastern europe and the former soviet union are notorious in this respect. And sometimes theft takes extreme forms.
(492.4884) WISE Amsterdam - Baltic News, (the magazine of the environmental organization Green World at the St. Petersburg region), several times reported about the theft of non-ferrous metals from the guarded area of the Leningrad nuclear power plant (LNPP, also known as Sosnovy Bor). Usually, these involved waste metal or different items of non-ferrous metals or stainless steel. A qualitatively new stage of metal theft from the LNPP began on April 14, 1998.
It happened at night, at around 12:48 a.m., on April 14, 1998 (according to the newspaper Sosnovy Bor Stroitel of April 23, 1998). The newspaper reports:
"Suddenly a transformer that provides the connection between the first and the second unit of
the LNPP was cut off. This equipment is so important that the fact there was no connection anymore
caused a sort of panic at the dispatching office of the regional energy company Lenenergo. The
accident was caused by damage of a copper cable ... that was cut by a hack-saw.
"So people hunting for non-ferrous metals now reached the equipment necessary for the operation of
the LNPP. The cables whose damage could cause the halt of the operating reactors were right next to
the damaged cable!"
Source: Baltic News 32, 5 May 1998
Contact: Green World, P. O. Box 68/7, Sosnovy Bor, St.-Petersburg region, 188537,
Russia
Tel/Fax: +7 (81269) 49481;
E-mail: greenwld@spb.org.ru
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