Swedish nuclear watchdog allows reactors to go back online

Sep 28, 2006, 15:04 GMT

Stockholm - Two nuclear reactors north of the Swedish capital were Thursday given permission to go back go online after a two-month stoppage, a Swedish nuclear watchdog said.

The decision by the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) meant that the operators of the Forsmark nuclear power plant could restart the two reactors that have been offline since late July.

In all, four of Sweden's 10 reactors have been taken offline due to assessments that they had similar flaws as the Forsmark reactor, north of Stockholm.

One of the reactors at Forsmark shut down late July after a short circuit in a switchyard outside the plant. The reactor shut down, but two of four emergency generators failed to start. Several other systems partly malfunctioned, sparking a debate over nuclear safety although SKI said the incident did not harm the reactor.

The operators of Forsmark were earlier this month ordered to make the battery-powered net 'more durable to high-voltage transients' and to secure the power generation from the diesel-fuelled generators.

In its decision announced Thursday, SKI ordered the operators of Forsmark to present a detailed plan on measures to improve how staff respond to unexpected incidents, and to improve maintenance and assessment reports of equipment and systems.

Forsmark would also be responsible for presenting daily reports of operations while SKI would conduct more inspections than usual, SKI spokesman Anders Jorle said.

'This something we have done after similar serious incidents,' Jorle said, adding that the measures were to ensure the operators addressed the problems.

SKI has earlier listed the incident as a 2 on the seven-point international nuclear event scale (INES).

Jorle said that the operators of the Oskarhamn nuclear power plant in south-eastern Sweden have not requested to restart one of the two reactors that was also shut down over concerns of similar flaws.

Sweden operated 12 nuclear rectors at most. Two at the Barseback plant in southern Sweden have been decommissioned, the most recent in May 2005.