TEPCO to Restart Kashiwazaki-Kariwa No. 6 Reactor Mon.

Tokyo, Feb. 6 (Jiji Press)–Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. announced Friday that it will restart the No. 6 reactor at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata Prefecture, central Japan, on Monday. TEPCO restarted the reactor on Jan. 21 for the first time in 13 years and 10 months, but brought it to a cold shutdown two days later after an alarm indicated about 5 and a half hours after the reactivation that a power system failure occurred in equipment that moves control rods. The issue persisted even after equipment components were replaced. The plant operator explained Friday that the issue was caused by an error with the alarm’s settings. It plans to postpone the start of the reactor’s commercial operations to March 18 or later. The latest issue was the fourth major glitch related to the reactor’s control rods since last year. A similar problem found right before the reactor’s initial restart delayed the reactivation by a day. All seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant are boiling water units, the same type as those at the company’s Fukushima No. 1 plant, which suffered a triple meltdown following the March 2011 major earthquake and tsunami that mainly hit northeastern Japan. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactors were halted in March 2012. In 2017, the plant’s No. 6 reactor passed the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s safety screening needed for its restart. After a period in which the plant was under an effective operational ban due to flaws in antiterrorism measures, TEPCO gained the consent of the local community for the reactivation last December. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]