How the innocent were punished in the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station
How the innocent were punished in the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station

Video: How the innocent were punished in the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station

Video: How the innocent were punished in the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station
Video: Deportation Of The Crimean Tatars In 1944. How It Happened 2024, March
Anonim

On August 17, 2019, exactly 10 years have passed since the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station (SSHGES). As a result of a man-made disaster, which broke out in a matter of seconds, 75 people died (10 people - station workers, 65 people - night and day shifts of repairmen). The hydroelectric power station itself was out of order for a long time. It was only in 2017 that the complex restoration of the station was completed.

The themes of the scale and causes of what happened immediately after the accident became fertile ground for loud, often unsubstantiated statements and political populism. The final point in this case, it seemed, should have been made by the results of several independent investigations. "The act of technical investigation of the causes of the accident …" from Rostekhnadzor was ready by October 3, 2009. The parliamentary commission's investigation ended with a report on December 21, 2009. The Investigative Committee completed its investigation only in June 2013.

On December 24, 2014, almost 5.5 years after the accident, the Sayanogorsk City Court sentenced seven defendants: Nikolai Nevolko (former general director of the hydroelectric power station) and Andrei Mitrofanov (chief engineer) were sentenced to imprisonment in a general regime colony for six years. Deputy Chief Engineers Yevgeny Shervarli and Gennady Nikitenko received respectively 5, 5 years and five years and nine months in prison. Employees of the Equipment Monitoring Service Alexander Matvienko and Alexander Klyukach received suspended sentences (4, 5 years each), Vladimir Beloborodov was amnestied.

It seems that the perpetrators were found and the causes of the accident were identified. But specialized specialists, not by hearsay familiar with the features of the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station and its equipment, began to dispute the seemingly completed tragic story. Correspondents of IA Krasnaya Vesna talked to one of these professional hydraulic engineers.

The life and work path of Doctor of Technical Sciences Lev Alexandrovich Gordon is inextricably linked with the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP. He was directly involved in the design and construction of the SSHHPP, acted as an expert and in the work of the commission for the inspection of the state of structures after the accident.

Correspondent.:Hello Lev Alexandrovich! Immediately after the accident in 2009, then the head of the Ministry of Emergencies, Sergei Shoigu, compared it to the Chernobyl disaster. Do you think such analogies are appropriate?

Lev Gordon: Everything that was written and said about the accident in the media is, as they say, absolutely ignorant nonsense. My point of view is as follows.

Corr.:Is it possible to call the accident at the SSH HPP something out of the ordinary? Have similar accidents happened at hydroelectric power plants in the world?

Lev Gordon:Yes, a similar accident occurred in June 1983 at the Nurek hydroelectric power station (Tajikistan). The accident was triggered by damage to the fastening of the turbine cover of the unit. But the design of the building of the Nurek hydroelectric power station turned out to be more successful: ball valves installed in front of each turbine unit made it possible to block the water path in 6 minutes.

In 1992, a similar accident (tore off the cover of a hydroelectric unit) occurred in Canada, at the Grand Rapids HPP. However, at this hydroelectric power station, the emergency power supply systems were at the top of the dam, the gate mechanisms worked and cut off the water flow in 4 minutes. Nobody died. Moreover, the cause of the accident was the same as at the SSHHPP - breakage of the studs (fatigue cracks and thread stripping were found).

So, at the SSHGES there were no gates at the bottom, in front of the entrance of the turbine water pipelines into the building of the hydroelectric power station, as at the Nurek HPP, emergency gates were installed at the top. To throw them off, it was necessary to rise 200 meters from the building of the hydroelectric power station. In addition, at the SSHHPP, the emergency power supply was at flooded elevations, it was “cut out” simultaneously with the main one, the elevators stopped without electricity, and in order to manually reset the emergency locks, the station workers had to run up the stairs to a height of two hundred meters, which took more than an hour.

In addition, at the SSHGES, changing rooms for workers, where most of the repairmen died, were located at flooded elevations. If the emergency power supply and changing rooms were at flood-free levels, the consequences of the accident would not be so dramatic.

Corr.:In your opinion, what is the main cause of the tragedy?

Lev Gordon:In my opinion and in the opinion of many experts, the cause of the accident has not yet been established. After the accident - a flurry of news, reports, speeches of government officials. Versions of what happened: a rupture of a turbine conduit, a "water hammer", a "pile" of a dam on the building of a hydroelectric power station, an explosion of hydrogen in the generator cooling system (the generator is cooled by water, by the way) - one is more absurd than the other.

The versions of pseudo-experts walking around the world could only be discussed in a mental hospital. However, the people preferred to believe the "experts" and the first people of the state, who hastened to give their version of the causes of the accident in the style of the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, who said that "the concrete could not stand it." However, the concrete withstood. The dam is in the same place. It was not the concrete that could stand it, but the metal. Even a child knows that the turbine cover that has been ripped off is metal, not concrete.

The reason was tried to establish "dependent and independent" investigations and commissions, one of the most important - the commission of Rostekhnadzor, which exercises state supervision over the work of potentially dangerous industrial enterprises. This commission worked in an extremely tense atmosphere, under pressure from the media and the country's leadership.

Already 3 months later, the Act was signed by 29 members of the commission, among whom, by the way, there was not a single specialist with the education of a hydraulic engineer. There may have been experts who helped the members of the commission, but their list was not attached to the Act. However, there was a dissenting opinion of a member of this commission, a specialist in heat and power engineering, who came to the conclusion that the list of “perpetrators of the accident” should have included other people than those who would later receive real prison sentences. And there and then was given a lot of information about the shortcomings in the design of the turbine units of the SSHGES.

In the Investigation Report, turbine vibration that exceeded the permissible value was named as the cause of the accident. But this is a version of the Leningrad Metal Plant (LMZ) (now part of Power Machines). At many scientific conferences, it is the design of the turbines at the SSHHPP that has been harshly criticized by Turboatom specialists. But LMZ is a world famous company, foreign orders! It is easier to attribute the accident to the carelessness of several private individuals "without a roof".

Information about increased vibration was obtained on the basis of information recorded by one of ten vibration control sensors of hydraulic unit No. 2. Only one of ten installed on the emergency (hydraulic unit 2) GA-2 at different points! But the representative of the plant chose this very sensor for the Rostekhnadzor commission.

By the way, the head of the trade union committee of the station was on the part of the Rostekhnadzor commission from the SSHGES. She attached her dissenting opinion to the Rostekhnadzor Act with the publication of the readings of all 10 GA-2 sensors. In the last minutes before the accident, this single sensor on a turbine bearing recorded radial vibration, moreover, horizontal, not vertical, which would be expected if the studs broke.

The Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences even stated that according to the results of registration at the Cheryomushki station a day before the accident, no abnormal changes in the amplitude of oscillations associated with the operation of GA-2 were recorded. Seismometric control showed that vibration at the unit lasted for about three seconds before the accident. Not for two months, but for only three seconds, the car vibrated prohibitively and after that it practically collapsed instantly!

Corr.: Still, this ill-fated moment was clearly preceded by a number of technical problems?

Lev Gordon: Unacceptable vibrations did take place, but in the period from 1979 to 1983, when the GA-2 was equipped with a temporary replaceable impeller. In order to get electricity as early as possible, the first two hydroelectric units of the hydroelectric power station (HA-1 and the same ill-fated HA-2) were put into operation with an unfinished dam and a non-design level of the reservoir.

At that moment, the beats of the turbine shaft exceeded the permissible values by 3-4 times. The development of fatigue phenomena in the turbine cover studs could begin just then, since the impeller was replaced with a permanent one in 1986, but the turbine cover fasteners were not replaced, and the operation of the unit with defective studs continued, albeit with acceptable shaft runout values …

In addition, the time spent by GA-2 in the non-recommended area of work (this is a design flaw of the unit especially criticized by experts) in 2009 was less than at GA-1; 3; 4; 7; 9. But there was no accident on them. Why this is so is still unclear.

Corr.: But for sure there are expert opinions, assumptions, hypotheses …

Lev Gordon: According to Igor Petrovich Ivanchenko, the former head of the department of hydraulic turbines at the Central Boiler and Turbine Institute named after I. I.

Vibration sensors installed on the turbines of the SSHGES are capable of measuring only the beats due to the hydraulic imbalance of the turbine wheel (2, 4 hertz - low-frequency oscillations). And the frequency of oscillations due to the descent of vortices (high-frequency oscillations) from the blades is hundreds of hertz - it is they that largely determine the fatigue strength of the impellers and the destruction of the fasteners of the support units. Therefore, vibration control systems before the accident could not provide effective control of the technical condition of the equipment.

That is, according to Ivanchenko, hypothetically, it would be possible to avoid an accident by introducing additional diagnostic systems at the units of both the SSH HPP and all Russian HPPs, and to this day, only monitoring systems are being introduced in the country that cannot establish the nature of the equipment malfunction.

Corr.: What would such diagnostic systems be able to detect on an emergency GA-2?

Lev Gordon: The turbine could vibrate from various reasons - from the rotation of the impeller and vortices from the blades, to the operation of the dam spillway and seismic impact. These vibrations have different frequencies and, superimposed on each other, form a spectrum of vibrations.

By installing sensors for measuring vibration displacements on the turbine structure elements, we get a picture of the vibration spectrum. Further, using the methods of analyzing the spectral components of the vibrations of the turbine bearing units, it is possible to identify equipment malfunctions at an early stage of their development. And, according to Igor Petrovich, CKTI specialists, based on 50 years of experience, are currently able to determine more than 30 malfunctions in hydraulic machines.

Corr.: Was the opinion of specialized specialists from CKTI taken into account in the Rostekhnadzor Act?

Lev Gordon: No, although the main expert opinion on the assessment of the vibration state of hydroelectric unit number two is the work of CKTI specialists, who have the greatest experience in studying vibration on turbines of domestic engineering. Viktor Vasilyevich Kudryavy, who passed away at the beginning of 2018 and who served as the first deputy chairman of the board, chief engineer, chairman of the board of directors of RAO UES of Russia, wrote about this in the 2013 article "Systemic causes of accidents" in the journal "Hydraulic Engineering". By the way, Kudryavy was the main critic of Chubais's plans to reform RAO UES of Russia.

Kudryavy was among the experts of the parliamentary commission to investigate the causes of the accident at the SSHHPP. He took into account the fact that the entire evidence base is based on the readings of only one sensor. The fact is that a vibration of 80 micrometers (μm) was recorded by the same sensor on the stopped unit a day before the accident.

Usually, on stopped units, vibration through the foundation from working neighboring hydraulic units does not exceed 10-20 microns. A multiple increase in vibration on a stopped GA-2 indicates a sensor malfunction. The remaining nine sensors, which were not taken into account by Rostekhnadzor, did not register increased vibrations. The failure of the vibration sensor is also evidenced by the fact that the operating personnel measured the shaft runout with a mechanical indicator twice per shift and did not record any unacceptable shaft runout values before the accident.

Corr.: However, those responsible for the accident were found. Please tell us how the story of the investigation and the trial developed.

Lev Gordon: There was an accident. All those people who were named as the perpetrators of the accident - the former general director of the hydroelectric power station Nikolai Nevolko, chief engineer Andrey Mitrofanov, deputy chief engineer Yevgeny Shervarli and Gennady Nikitenko (these are the four who were in prison, a total of 7 people were convicted) - all seven were directly involved in the restoration HPP after the accident: Nevolko - as an advisor to the director, Shervarli - deputy director of the SSHGES for restoration, Mitrofanov - adviser to the chief engineer.

Igor Sechin arrived (at that time - Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, in charge of the fuel and energy complex), who was completely far from hydropower. He has already arrived with a ready-made solution. At Lengidroproekt (general designer of the SSHHPP) Sechin was informed three times by competent specialists that the accused had not violated anything. To which he replied that this (the landing of the "accused") is the minimum price that we must pay, there must be guilty ones.

Sechin announced to the whole world that "Mr. Mitrofanov was at the head of a front company created to carry out repair work on the unit." And at the same time, "Mr. Mitrofanov" took over the unit after repairs, repaired and took over the work himself. For example, a month before Shervarli was taken into custody, he was presented with a certificate of honor signed by the President of the Russian Federation.

Someone just needed to quench the thirst for revenge of the ignorant crowd and send Nevolko and Shervarli to jail almost simultaneously with the completion of the reconstruction of the hydroelectric power station.

Corr.: Summing up, can this accident be called a tragic coincidence, and could it have been prevented?

Lev Gordon: Many design decisions that, at first glance, seemed obvious - for example, to provide gates for draining water from the headwater when the dam reaches its end of life, or to install emergency gates in front of the turbine units, to provide for backup power supply at the crest of the dam - were not provided. project documentation. Why wasn't it done? Because this is a rise in the cost of the project. This means that we must go to assert, we must push through concrete decisions.

When a plant is being designed, the replacement capacities are compared - which is better to build? Thermal, nuclear, hydroelectric power station - one or several? They choose a project. When different organizations competed and chose a project, everyone tried to make their project cheaper. Plus, the bosses knew that at all examinations - Gosstroy, Gosplan - they tried to reduce the cost of the project.

That is, if, in general, the water in the upper pool of the SSHHPP was lowered, at least 40 meters, then, of course, the chances that an accident would occur would be less. But why then build a hydroelectric power station if it does not provide electricity? In general, risk is a necessary condition for progress. How could you send a man into space? It was, of course, a risk. Progress often depends on the ability to take risks and learn from mistakes (accidents).

Corr.: Lev Aleksandrovich, 10 years have passed since the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP. What, in your opinion, has changed in terms of the work at the hydroelectric power station itself and the attitude to this grandiose construction in our country after the tragedy?

Lev Gordon: After the accident at the hydroelectric power station, a new leadership came. The presence of former specialists who were under investigation for five years at the hydroelectric power station, most likely, helped the "Varangians" undergo an internship and master the unique equipment of the station. They seem to be doing it. But in the work style of the former newcomers, something has emerged that distinguishes work before and after the accident. One has only to waver the needle of one of the many thousands of devices, conference calls, approvals, consultations begin. It seems that fear has involuntarily entered the hearts of the renewed team. And fear is a bad helper in work.

The other side of the coin is the popularity of SSHHES as an "antihero" after the accident that happened on August 17, 2009. For comparison - in the southwestern United States, 48 km from Las Vegas in 1936, the Hoover Dam (Boulder Dam) was erected, similar in design to the SSHHPP and about the same height (221 meters - Hoover Dam, 245 meters - Sayano-Shushenskaya) … But there is a "slight" difference:

- their dam was erected at the junction of the frost-free states of Nevada, Arizona and California, and ours - on the border of Khakassia and Tuva, in the harsh conditions of Siberia;

- their dam has a crest length of 379 meters, and ours - 1074 meters;

- their dam is 221 meters thick at the bottom, ours is twice as thin, etc.

At the same time, 96 people died during the construction of the Hoover Dam, and 4 people died during the construction of the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP. But in the United States, the Hoover Dam is a tourist Mecca and a source of national pride. The Russian Federation received a ready-made hydroelectric power station from the USSR. But for thirty years of its existence, neither the builders nor the operators have seen or heard anything but blasphemy and ignorant criticism from their compatriots.

Recommended: