"The reactor number three automatically turned off Tuesday at 1:38 am local time (2238 GMT Monday) following a malfunction in the pressure system", a statement said, adding it had not yet established the cause of the incident.

The level of radioactivity at the nuclear power station and the surrounding area had not risen above the authorised amount, it said.

The malfunction has left the power station with just two out of four reactors in operation, as its second reactor is undergoing construction.

The nuclear power station is located 200 kilometres (125 miles) from Murmansk, in the extreme northwest part of Russia on the Kola Peninsula.

earlier related report
Environmentalists slam Great Lakes nuclear shipment
Ottawa (AFP) Sept 28, 2010 - Environmentalists on Tuesday decried a proposal to ship decommissioned nuclear generators across the Great Lakes and on to Sweden for storage, at the start of hearings into the radioactive shipment.

Bruce Power is seeking a license to transport 16 100-tonne steam generators from its nuclear plant in Owen Sound, Ontario across the expansive Canadian waterways and the Atlantic Ocean to be recycled in Sweden.

Environmental groups, opposition politicians and mayors of 100 towns along the proposed route through Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario and the Saint Lawrence seaway, fear contamination of the lakes that provide drinking water for 40 million people in Canada and the United States.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission scheduled a two-day hearing into the radioactive shipment starting Tuesday, but has already dismissed environmentalists' safety concerns.

Terry Lodge, a lawyer representing a coalition of environmental groups, said in a statement: "This hasty, ill-considered proposal has involved little to no planning whatsoever to deal with an emergency involving the sinking of this shipment, containing as it would over 1,400 tons of radioactive steam generators."

The Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and the Sierra Club urged the government to order storage of the nuclear waste at the Bruce site, in accordance with its original plant refurbishment plan approved by an environmental assessment in 2006.

Canada should not start shipping radioactive waste outside the country, they said.

Bruce Power countered that the school-bus sized generators emit the same amount of radiation, if a person was to stand next to one of them for several hours, as a chest x-ray.

The company's chief executive Duncan Hawthorne told public broadcaster CBC that "a gross amount of misinformation" about the shipment was unnecessarily alarming Canadians.

"People talk about the radiation and fear if these things were to break open ... (they would) contaminate our drinking water forever and we'll never be able to use the Great Lakes," he said. "It's nonsense. It's technically nonsense. It's scientific nonsense."

Shipping them to a proper recycling facility operated by Studsvik "is an environmentally sound thing to do," Hawthorn insisted.

New Democrat MP Nathan Cullen, however, told a press conference: "The nuclear industry will say this is safe."

"But accidents, of course, happen," he added.

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