Bulgaria nuclear reactor reconnected after technical glitch fixed

SOFIA (Reuters) - Bulgarian nuclear power plant Kozloduy said it had reconnected its Unit 6 reactor to the power grid after fixing a technical problem that triggered the protection system at its electric generator and briefly shut it down earlier on Wednesday.

Unit 6, one of the plant's two Soviet-made 1,000 megawatt units, shut down at about 2 pm local time (1100 GMT) on Wednesday afternoon.

"The unit is back online. The problem has been fixed," the deputy head of the plant, Aleksander Nikolov, told Reuters.

The shutdown was triggered because of an anomaly in conventional power generation equipment and not a fault in the plant's nuclear reactor. There was no danger of any radioactive contamination, the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, Lachezar Kostov, told Reuters.

The state-owned Kozloduy plant, located next to the river Danube on the border with Romania, produces about 30 percent of Bulgaria's electricity.

(Reporting by Tsvetelia Tsolova; Editing by Peter Graff; editing by David Evans)