Japan pauses restart of world’s largest nuclear power plant one day after it went online | Japan
The restart of the world’s largest nuclear power plant was suspended in Japan on Thursday, just a day after it came online for the first time in nearly 14 years; The operator said he didn’t know when the problem would be fixed.
The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata prefecture has been closed since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, but work to restart it began Wednesday after receiving the final green light from the nuclear regulator.
But its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), said in a statement on Thursday that “an alarm from the monitoring system went off during reactor startup procedures,” causing operations to be suspended.
“We do not expect this to be resolved within a day or two. There is currently no information on how long this will take,” site administrator Takeyuki Inagaki said at a press conference.
“For now, we will focus entirely on determining the cause of the incident,” he said.
“When it became clear that it would take time, we decided to relocate the control rods in a planned manner,” spokesman Takashi Kobayashi told the AFP news agency, adding that the reactor “is stable and there are no radioactive effects outside.”
Control rods are a device used to control the nuclear chain reaction in the reactor core, which can be accelerated by withdrawing slightly, slowed down by inserting it deeper, or stopped completely.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world’s largest nuclear power plant in terms of potential capacity, but only one of seven reactors has been restarted. The facility was disabled in 2011 when Japan pulled the plug on nuclear power after a massive earthquake and tsunami sent three reactors at the Fukushima atomic facility into meltdown.
But resource-poor Japan now wants to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, and revive atomic energy to meet its growing energy needs from artificial intelligence.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the first unit to be relaunched by Tepco since 2011. The company also operates the now decommissioned Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Public opinion in Niigata is deeply divided: About 60% of residents oppose the restart, while 37% support it, according to a September poll.
Earlier this month, seven groups opposing the restart submitted a petition signed by nearly 40,000 people to Tepco and the Japan Nuclear Regulatory Agency, noting that the plant is located in an active seismic fault zone and was hit by a powerful earthquake in 2007.
