Power Failure Cripples Russian Nuclear Plants

A failure in its crumbling electric grid forced Russia to shut down several nuclear reactors over the weekend, including those at a gargantuan top-secret fuel reprocessing plant, officials said Monday.

Officials assured the public that there was no danger, but the head of the huge, secret Mayak reprocessing plant, in the remote Ural Mountains, said that only his staff’s “near-military” vigilance had prevented serious trouble.

The incident followed a catastrophic accident on a Russian nuclear submarine last month that killed all 118 people aboard and a fire that gutted Moscow’s television tower, and it drew further attention to the decrepit state of Russian infrastructure.

“Everything is fine,” an employee in the press office of the Atomic Energy Ministry said, adding that there was no danger.

Reactors at Mayak were shut down Saturday after the power grid failure cut off the plant’s outside electricity supply for 45 minutes, Director Vitaly Sadovnikov told the Itar-Tass news agency. He said there had been no dangerous emissions.

Workers were restarting the first of the reactors Monday. Reports did not say how many reactors had been affected in all.

A reactor at the Beloyarsk civilian nuclear power plant in nearby Sverdlovsk province was also shut down, the provincial power company Sverdlovenergo said in a statement. It also reported no radiation leaks.

Sverdlovenergo said that the power cuts were probably caused by a short circuit on a high-voltage line in its grid but that an investigation was underway.

Mayak--in Ozersk, a closed town of 86,000 people surrounded by a double wire fence--is the biggest nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the world, handling radioactive material from all across Russia.

It was there that the plutonium for the first Soviet nuclear bomb was produced in 1949. The town’s very existence was once a secret.

It is now also the site of a cavernous depot, being built with U.S. help, to keep 6,000 bombs’ worth of plutonium and weapons-grade uranium from falling into the wrong hands.

“We were saved from major trouble by the near-military discipline that we still retain at the plant,” Sadovnikov told Itar-Tass. “The staff responded well, demonstrating knowledge of their equipment and not permitting any harmful emissions.”

The U.S. Embassy said it could not immediately comment on whether American projects at Mayak were affected.

Itar-Tass quoted the head of the Beloyarsk civilian power plant as saying workers were also attempting to restart their reactor.

“None of the station’s employees can remember such sharp fluctuations in the power and frequency of the charge in the Sverdlovenergo grid,” Oleg Sarayev said.

“Thanks to the precise safety system of the nuclear power station and the flawless discipline of its workers, the block was shut down according to procedure.”

Two nonnuclear power plants in the region were shut down as well, Sverdlovenergo’s statement said.