TOKYO: The world’s largest nuclear power plant restarted on Wednesday in north-central Japan for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown, as resource-poor Japan accelerates atomic power use to meet soaring electricity needs.
The first steps in energy production at the No. 6 reactor of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant are important because the operator is Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, the same utility that runs the ruined Fukushima Daiichi plant. TEPCO’s past safety issues at Fukushima have led to public worries about operations at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant.
TEPCO said staff at the No. 6 reactor’s control room turned on a button Wednesday evening to start a nuclear chain reaction toward achieving criticality — a stage when a reactor reaches a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. The move was delayed a day due to a faulty alarm setting found over the weekend.
All seven reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa have been dormant for a year after the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Japan’s northeastern coast was hit by a massive quake and tsunami in March 2011 and suffered meltdowns that contaminated the surrounding land with radioactive fallout so severe that some areas are still unlivable.
TEPCO is still trying to recover from the hit to its image, even as it works on a cleanup at Fukushima Daiichi that’s estimated to cost 22 trillion yen. Government and independent investigations blamed the Fukushima debacle on TEPCO’s bad safety culture and criticised it for collusion with safety authorities.