Kiev - Engineers at Ukraine's troubled Chernobyl nuclear power plant switched on reactor No 3 to its full capacity on Tuesday, the plant's director said yesterday. The third reactor, the last of four which actually operates, was shut down last July after engineers found hundreds of cracks in cooling pipes under the reactor.
Chernobyl's fourth reactor exploded in 1986, sending a radioactive cloud over Europe which contaminated large areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia in the world's worst civil nuclear disaster.