A faulty valve caused a water leak at a nuclear power plant in southwestern Slovenia that raised alarms across Europe a day earlier, officials said Thursday, according to AP. Repairs will be carried out Friday and the plant could restart early next week, said Stane Rozman, chief manager of the Krsko plant near Slovenia's border with Croatia. «Everything is normal,» he said. Officials had shut down the plant late Wednesday. Experts said the leak was confined to the plant building and caused no damage to the surrounding population or the environment in Krsko, a town of about 25,000 people about 60 miles (90 kilometers) southeast of Ljubljana. However, the leak prompted the European Union to alert all 27 member nations, and EU ministers were discussing the issue of nuclear safety Thursday in Luxembourg. The EU and the International Atomic Energy Agency said Slovenia assured them no radiation was released. The accident was «unusual» but registered at the lowest of four-stage scale of emergency, said Dr. Andrej Stritar, head of Slovenia's national nuclear watchdog agency. The plant, built by Westinghouse and owned jointly by Slovenia and Croatia, went into operation in 1983. It has one 2,000 MW reactor. Despite calls from environmentalists to shut the plant down before its planned closure in 2023, the government plans to build another reactor there by 2013.
