Ringhals restart date revised

Wednesday, 7 December 2011 Sweden's Ringhals 2 will now restart from a prolonged maintenance outage on 5 January 2012 and not 17 December as previously announced by operator Vattenfall. The 866 MWe pressurized water reactor has been off line since entering a scheduled maintenance outage in April 2011. The outage has been prolonged due to remediation and restoration work following a small electrical fire which broke out in the reactor building several weeks in to the outage. Vattenfall had planned to restart unit 2 in mid-December but said in a report to the Nordpool power exchange that it is taking longer than expected to clean up the reactor's water system. The operator must obtain regulatory approval from the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) before the unit can restart. The three other units at the plant have all recently re-entered service after scheduled outages, including extensive modernization work at Ringhals 4 with steam generator replacements and upgrades to the high-pressure turbine system.