It’s a while since we’ve hear from our old friend Tricastin but she’s never really very far from our thoughts or the headlines.

France’s nuclear power facility had a very busy time last year. There was a leak of 30,000 litres of a uranium solution that prevented nearby residents using water from the two rivers contaminated as a result. A false alarm saw workers evacuated. A storage facility for contaminated equipment was flooded when heavy rainfall caused the River Gaffiere to burst its banks. Forty-five employees with small traces of radiation on them were found to be contaminated from a previous leak and had gone undetected. Nuclear safety inspectors found that, in seven months, the plant had emitted more radioactive carbon-14 (an isotope with a half-life of 6,000 years) gas than was permitted for the whole year. Tired of the terrible publicity that the facility has attracted to the region, local winegrowers declared they no longer wanted to call their vintage Côteaux du Tricastin.

And then there was the refuelling. In September last year, Tricastin’s number 2 reactor was closed for two months after two fuel units became ‘snagged’ during the procedure. ‘Snagging’ can be dangerous and risks exposing reactor workers to the intense radiation of the fuel elements. At least the site’s operators learned from that particular mistake, right?

Wrong.

An incident at EDF's Tricastin plant in southeast France late on Thursday forced the company to stop refuelling operations at the reactor 2, which started on Oct. 31, it said on Friday.

The incident occurred during refuelling of the reactor, when a fuel assembly got stuck in the pressure vessel, EDF said in a statement.

[...]

"The incident took place at 2215 GMT," a source at the plant told Reuters on Friday. "We are very worried about this especially as this already happened just a year ago," he added.

Did you know there are iguanas that can successfully repeat a task after being shown how to do it only once?