Japan would switch the world’s largest nuclear power plant back on next week, after a glitch with an alarm forced the suspension of its first restart since the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster.
Takeyuki Inagaki, the head of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), yesterday said that they planned to start up the reactor on Monday.
The announcement came after TEPCO restarted the reactor on Jan. 21, but shut it off the following day after an alarm from the monitoring system sounded.
Photo: Jiji Press / AFP
Due to an error in its configuration, the alarm had picked up slight changes to the electrical current in one cable even though these were still within a range considered safe, Inagaki said.
The firm has now changed the alarm’s settings as the reactor is safe to operate, he added.
The commercial operation would commence on or after March 18, after another comprehensive inspection, he said.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world’s biggest nuclear power plant by potential capacity, although just one reactor of seven would restart.
The facility had been offline since Japan pulled the plug on nuclear power after a colossal earthquake and tsunami sent three reactors at the Fukushima atomic plant into meltdown in 2011.
Japan now wants to revive atomic energy to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and meet growing energy needs from artificial intelligence.
Public opinion in the area around the plant is divided: About 60 percent of residents oppose the restart, while 37 percent support it, a survey conducted by Niigata Prefecture in September last year showed.
Last month, seven groups opposing the restart submitted a petition signed by nearly 40,000 people to TEPCO and Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, saying that the plant sits on an active seismic fault zone and was struck by a strong quake in 2007.
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