Just months after a brush with disaster in Sweden, a fire at the country's biggest nuclear power plant forced the shutdown on Tuesday of yet another reactor. A spokesperson for the plant said that the fire near Reactor No. 3 in Ringhals had been of an "explosive nature."

"There was some kind of a bang with flames shooting up," said spokesman Gosta Larsen. The blaze, which broke out in the small hours of Tuesday morning at the Ringhals plant was quickly put out by fire fighters. All safety systems functioned without problems and a shutdown was triggered immediately, he said. At no stage was there a danger of a radioactive leak.

The fire broke out shortly after midnight in a transformer about 70 meters (230 feet) away from Reactor No. 3. There were no injuries. The security system automatically shut down the 1,000 Megawatt reactor. "From a nuclear security standpoint this was not a serious incident," Larsen emphasized. It was not immediately clear when the reactor would be restarted.

Swedish nuclear safety already came in for some hefty criticism after a previous incident this summer. On July 25, two reactors at the Forsmark plant were shut down  after two backup emergency generators malfunctioned during a power failure. There wasn’t enough power for the plant's control electronics. It was only through the prompt action of an employee that the situation didn’t get out of control. As a safety precaution, four of Sweden's ten nuclear reactors had to be shut down for up to three months after the incident.