Fukushima operator to ask for OK on reactor

Fukushima operator TEPCO said Tuesday it would ask Japan’s nuclear watchdog for permission to restart reactors at the world’s largest atomic power station, its first such request since the disaster two years ago. 

Tokyo Electric Power Co is readying an application for the re-firing of two of the seven units at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Niigata prefecture in the north of Japan. 

The entire power station has been shuttered since around 12 months after the tsunami-sparked meltdowns at Fukushima in March 2011. 

‘We decided at a board meeting to apply for the safety assessment for Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant’s reactors No. 6 and No. 7 as early as possible,’ company president Naomi Hirose told  

reporters. 

The two reactors have a power generation capacity of 1.36 million kilowatts each. 

All but two of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors are offline, shut down for safety checks after the Fukushima disaster, the worst the world has seen since Chernobyl. 

A vocal anti-atomic campaign whose leading lights say the nuclear industry had too cosy a relationship with its regulators in the decades leading up to Fukushima, nudged the government into establishing a new industry watchdog.  Eager to prove it has teeth, the watchdog has set strict new standards that operators must show they can meet before they will be granted permission to re-start mothballed 

reactors.