Ida Novak Jerele, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Plant Krsko, 18 miles (30 kilometers) west of Zagreb, said the system switched off Wednesday morning after power lines from the plant to the Croatian capital stopped transmitting.
She said the shutdown was assessed as a 0 on the International Nuclear Event Scale ranging from 0 to 7, meaning that it had no safety significance.
“There is zero risk” of radiation, she said, adding that the plant will resume operations “when the cause of the cut in the power line is established.” The director of the plant praised the shutdown.
“The fact that the plant switched off automatically shows that all security measures were activated and they worked faultlessly,” said director Stane Rozman. “There are no environmental hazards.” Rozman said additional checks were being made to see whether the automatic switch off triggered “any unintended consequences for the plant’s equipment.” The idle plant is currently powered by a backup grid, Slovenia’s Ministry of Environment said.
The plant, built by Westinghouse and owned jointly by Slovenia and Croatia, went into operation in 1983. It has one 2,000 MW reactor.
The last reported incident at the plant was in June 2008, when a faulty valve caused a water leak that raised alarms across Europe.
Environmentalists have urged the Slovenian government to shut the plant down before its scheduled closure in 2023, but the government plans to build another reactor there by 2013.
