Finnish Chemicals puts blast damage at FM10m

11 June 1999 16:36  [Source: ICIS news]

LONDON (CNI)--Finnish Chemicals has estimated the damage to its sodium borohydride plant in Aetsa, west Finland caused by Wednesday's explosion at about FM10m ($1.7m/Euro1.7m), CNI was told Friday.

Administration director Kaj Strandvall said the financial loss caused by the accident will be "several million Finnish marks", and is likely to be around FM10m.

The explosion destroyed one of the three recently built sodium borohydride continuous reactors and damaged some process equipment, he said. One shift worker, 62-year old Antti Haavisto, was killed in the blast.

Strandvall declined to reveal to what extent production has been affected by the accident, but said the plant is working at below optimum capacity and the company will do its best to assure uninterrupted deliveries to its customers. Finnish Chemicals was in the process of debottlenecking the plant by replacing the batch reactors with continuous reactors, to bring output up to about 12 000 tonne/year of sodium borohydride, he revealed. The size of the capacity increase was not disclosed.

He said the company does not want to replace the destroyed reactor with a continuous reactor before the cause of the accident has been determined, so the current plan is to replace it with a batch reactor. A final report from the investigation team is due by the end of November, and an initial report is expected to be released in a few weeks time, he added.

The damaged plant had been shut down for maintenance work the night before the explosion, but there were no maintenance activities being carried out at the time of the explosion. The blast occurred during a heavy thunderstorm.

Sodium borohydride at Aetsa is produced as a 12% caustic soda solution and as 100% dry sodium borohydride.

No other production at the site was affected, and there was no environmental impact, the company confirmed.

By: Anna Williams
+44 208 652 3214

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