The Executive Director of Bulgaria's Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant Ivan Genov announced Friday that the restart of Reactor 4 had been prepared for over a week.

Genov explained in an interview for the Darik Radio that Unit 4 of the Kozloduy NPP could be started a month after the government made an official decision for that.

The NPP Director explained the preparations had been made just in case the reactor had to be turned on again even though the cabinet had made no official decision for that. According to Genov, such measures without an official decisions were not illegal as they referred to maintaining the general safety of Unit 4.

He added that only one of the two reactors could be restarted as an emergency measure because it would be using processed nuclear fuel. The restart of both reactors would necessitate fresh nuclear fuel whose delivery would take six months.

The 440 MW Reactors 3 and 4 of the Kozloduy NPP were shut down on January 1, 2006, in accordance with Bulgaria's EU accession treaty. Bulgarian leaders recently starting talking about re-launching the reactors because of the energy crisis caused by the Russia-Ukraine natural gas prices dispute, and the cutoff of Russian gas supplies to Bulgaria.

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