STOCKHOLM, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) -- One of Sweden's nuclear reactors cannot be restarted as planned following routine maintenance, the plant's owner, energy company Vattenfall, said on Wednesday.
The safety of the reactor has not been compromised, but the news that the Ringhals 4 plant in the southwest of the country will be inoperable for another three months comes at a time when electricity prices are breaking records in Sweden as the country is moving into the cold season.
Ringhals 4 was shut down in mid-August for annual maintenance and was about to be restarted when its pressure vessel was damaged during testing, Bjorn Linde, chief executive officer (CEO) of Ringhals, said in a press release.
Repair work will take months and power production by the reactor is expected to resume on Nov. 30.
"It is very unfortunate that Ringhals 4 will be idle for longer than planned and we will do our utmost to restore the plant so that electricity production can restart," Linde said.
The decommissioning of several reactors in 2017-2020 has left Sweden with three nuclear power plants with a total of six reactors that produce around 30 percent of the country's electricity output, according to the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM).
The Ringhals 1 and 2 reactors have already been retired , leaving Ringhals 3 and 4 in operation. They account for 13-15 percent of Sweden's annual electricity production.
The extended outage is expected to have a major impact on electricity prices in Sweden, especially in the more densely populated southern part of the country, Christian Holtz, an electricity market analyst at consulting company Merlin & Metis, told TT news agency.
Holtz said that the price of electricity was likely to soar even higher as most of Sweden's electricity was produced in the north, and the reactor stoppage would compound already existing problems in the power transmission grid.
"A series of technical complications arise when production in Ringhals drops. As we have already seen when Ringhals 1 and 2 were shut down, the transmission capacity decreased. But now, without Ringhals 4 in operation, the consequences will be worse," he said. ■
