Abstract: The steep initial rate of rise of the transient recovery voltage across the poles of a circuit breaker just after a fault current break is decreased. The breaking performance in the case of a short-circuit fault to ground taking place in an electrical power transmission system at relatively as near a place as several kilometers apart from the circuit breaker, that is a short-line-fault is improved by a saturable reactor having a capacitor connected in parallel therewith to the circuit breaker in series. As a result, as the saturable reactor changes from the magnetically saturated state to the unsaturated state just before the zero point of the fault current, the self-inductance of the saturable reactor gradually increases and an LC resonance is produced between the self-inductance of the saturable reactor and the capacitor connected to the saturable reactor in parallel.