TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Plant Restarts Power Transmission

Tokyo, Feb. 16 (Jiji Press)–Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. on Monday began sending electricity from its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata Prefecture, central Japan, to the Tokyo metropolitan area for the first time in about 14 years. The No. 6 reactor at the plant, which was restarted earlier this year, began generating and transmitting power at 10 p.m. TEPCO plans to increase the reactor’s output level to 50 pct before temporarily halting it on Friday or later to inspect the turbine equipment. The reactor is expected to be restarted again in early March and undergo a final inspection on March 18 before resuming commercial operation, pending approval by the Nuclear Regulation Authority. The 1.35-million-kilowatt reactor was initially scheduled to restart on Jan. 20, but a problem detected in an advance control rod withdrawal test caused the restart to be delayed by one day. However, the reactor was soon halted after an alarm linked to a device to move control rods sounded. The plant operator restarted the reactor again on Feb. 9, after fixing a problem in the setting of the alarm. The reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant are the same boiling water type as those at TEPCO’s tsunami-crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant in northeastern Japan. They were shut down by March 2012. The No. 6 reactor is the first TEPCO reactor of this type to be restarted since the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima plant. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]