Forsmark 'could restart soon'

The nuclear reactor at the Forsmark power plant could be restarted soon, after tests in Germany appeared to explain what had happened in the incident that caused the shutdown.

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The power plant is due to send further reports to the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) in the next few days. SKI says it will then take about a week to consider the report.

If SKI approves the proposals contained in the report, there will not be a need for significant building work at Forsmark.

"We do not need to rebuild the whole plant," Forsmark spokesman Claes-Inge Andersson said.

The computer simulations were carried out at and AEG factory in Germany at the weekend. AEG was the manufacturer of the equipment that failed. The simulations gave produced exactly the same chain of events as the real incident at Forsmark, so engineers are confident that they now know what happened.

Andersson would not say publicly what the fault was. He said that SKI should be informed first.

At the incident on 25th July, two reserve generators failed to start automatically, and had instead to be started manually. When SKI studied the incident last week it was still unclear what had caused the problem that led to the shutdown.

Forsmark will send the results of the tests to the Oskarshamn plant, further down Sweden's east coast, so that officials there can work out whether that plant has the same problem. If it does, it will now be possible to fix the issue quickly. If it does not have the problem, the plant will be started right awat.