RWE AG's (RWE.XE) Emsland nuclear power plant is ready for restart after a glitch triggered an automatic shut down of the 1.3 gigawatt reactor July 24, the Environment Ministry of the German state of Lower Saxony, where the facility is located, said Friday.
In a written statement, the ministry said the cause of the shut down has been identified, adding that the necessary measures to avoid a repetition of the incident have been taken.
In a next step the power plant has to be restarted to conduct an operational test to examine the effectiveness of the measures, the ministry said.
The ministry further said it will grant approval for the restart of the reactor unless the Federal Environment Ministry comes up with "substantiated objections", by Saturday afternoon.
The Emsland reactor, in which RWE's competitor E.ON AG (EOAN.XE) owns a 12.5% minority stake, was shut down July 24 for an unplanned outage following a glitch at the conventional electrical part of the power station. The facility was automatically shut down by a monitoring installation for an on-load tap charger of one of the facility's transformers.
RWE says on its Web site it expects to restart the Emsland reactor between Monday and Wednesday.