STOCKHOLM, April 26 (Xinhua) -- Two of Sweden's nuclear reactors were rendered inoperable on Wednesday morning, following a brief local blackout due to a short circuit in a Stockholm power station.

Ten hours after the incident, there was still no prognosis as to when the reactors would be online again. Electricity prices will therefore be twice as high on Thursday, local media reported.

Reactors 1 and 2 at the Forsmark nuclear power plant, 150 km northeast of Stockholm, shut off automatically when the voltage in the electric grid dropped.

"It is very unusual that two reactors disconnect simultaneously due to an external fault. It is a very large shortfall as the reactors have an output of one gigawatt each," Staffan Norrga, an associate professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, told Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Olof Samuelsson, a professor of electric power systems at Lund University, told DN that the shortfall of around 2,000 megawatts was bigger than the electricity system can tolerate.

"Until recently we believed that 1,450 megawatts was the biggest possible shortfall," Samuelsson told DN.

Both experts told the newspaper that the event has exposed vulnerabilities in the Swedish electricity system.

Following the decommissioning of four reactors between 2017-2020, six reactors remain at three sites, and nuclear power accounts for approximately 30 percent of the electricity produced in Sweden, according to the Swedish Energy Agency.

Since last summer, some of the remaining reactors have at times been offline for extended periods due to maintenance and technical problems, which has at times led to electricity price peaks. Enditem

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