ISLAMABAD, 9 April 2008 — A gas leak sparked an explosion and fire yesterday that killed two workers at a nuclear plant.
The Khushab heavy water plant, which is under military control, was shut down at the time for annual maintenance, said a statement from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, which evacuated the facility.
It said there was no risk to the public outside the sprawling facility southeast of the capital, Islamabad.
“All necessary steps were taken,” the statement said, adding that the situation “was immediately brought under control.”
Police near the facility say they were advised by plant officials to prepare buses for a wider evacuation, then were told they would not be needed.
The commission said the leaking gas was burned off by plant equipment. The cause was under investigation.
Hamid Mukhtar Gondal, police chief for the district where Khushab is located, said he was told that an accidental blast was caused by an unspecified gas.
“After the blast, the building caught fire,” Gondal told The Associated Press. “Two men sustained burns and died on the way to a hospital.” He said the situation was under control, and there were no additional reports of casualties. “The fire has been put out. There is no spread of poisonous gas at all,” he said.
Ghulam Muhammad, Khushab’s mayor, said there was initial panic as the plant and the residential colony for workers were evacuated and roadblocks were thrown up to cordon off the area for three hours. But he complained that local officials had not been made aware of the problem.
“We only got informed of the gas leak by the employees rushing out of the colony,” he said. “For public safety, they need to inform the local administration.”
The Washington-based Institute of Science for International Security said last year that Khushab has three reactors, including two that were still under construction last June.
The development of the reactor and other nuclear-related activities “imply” that Pakistan has decided to “increase significantly its production of plutonium for nuclear weapons,” the Washington-based institute said in a report analyzing the images.
Pakistan, which carried out nuclear tests in 1998 to match those by archrival India, has a fairly safe nuclear safety record. But some minor incidents have occurred in recent years.
In 2003, one laboratory worker was killed and another man injured in an explosion in a liquid nitrogen tank at the Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences near Islamabad. The scientist training facility, where the blast occurred, is run by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.
An official earlier yesterday said the command and control system for the country’s nuclear weapons would stay unchanged under the new government, made up of opponents of President Pervez Musharraf.
Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is overseen by a National Command Authority (NCA) headed by the president and with the prime minister as its vice chairman.
— With input from agencies
