"The reactors still are not running," said Karen Visepo, spokeswoman for Florida Power and Light, the company responsible for providing power in southern Florida.

The disabled reactors at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant were unlikely to cause new blackouts, she said, but workers labored feverishly to get them operating again.

"Getting them up and running again is a slow process," Visepo said.

Tuesday's monster power outage left millions of people in southern Florida bereft of electricity for several hours.

The downed nuclear reactors have revived controversy in the state over the safety of radioactive energy sources, especially in view of Florida Power and Light's plans to build two more nuclear reactors at its Turkey Point facility.

"If we have in the future an accident where the reactors go critical, I would only pray for Miami-Dade County since there is no way to evacuate the population today compared with in 1972, when the reactors were originally permitted," the president Rhonda Roff of an environmental group called "Save It Now, Glades" told AFP.

Her environmental group says any more water-thirsty nuclear reactors would cause great harm to the delicate marshlands of the Florida Everglades in the southern part of the state.

Some experts had misgivings about nuclear reactors' purported safety.

"At least 50 percent of the risk of a reactor accident comes from not having electric power," said Nuclear Information and Resource Services regional president Mary Olson.

"Every nuclear reactor that goes down represents a high risk," she said, explaining that when power goes out, the plant has a battery-powered back-up cooling system that lasts about two hours, after which fuel and radioaction start to leak "in 45 minutes."

"If the Florida governments want to have more reactors, that will increase the risk for the people of Miami area," Olson said.

Power was out Tuesday across wide swathe of Florida, from Miami in the south to up Daytona Beach mid-state, causing traffic jams, forcing schools to lock down, and prompting stores to close.

Officials said the outage was caused by a malfunctioning disconnect switch at a power substation near Miami.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said in a statement it was looking into possible violations of federal rules, as it consulted with other US agencies.

The outage was the country's biggest since August 2003, when about 50 million people were left without power across the northeastern United States and Canada, plunging New York City into darkness and halting its subway network.

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