A reactor at the world’s largest nuclear power plant that restarted for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima disaster is now being shut down again because of a glitch that occurred hours after the unit’s resumption, its operator said.
The No 6 reactor at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in north-central Japan reactivated on Wednesday night for the first time in 14 years, as plant workers started removing neutron-absorbing control rods from the core to start stable nuclear fission.
But the process had to be suspended hours later because of a malfunction related to the control rods, which are essential to safely starting up and shutting down reactors, the operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) said. The duration of the shutdown was still unknown.
Tepco said there was no safety issue from the glitch and that it was checking the situation while suspending the restart operation.
The utility later said it was putting the reactor back into shutdown for a fuller examination.
The restart at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant was being watched closely as Tepco also runs the Fukushima Daiichi plant that was ruined in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and since resource-poor Japan is accelerating atomic power use to meet soaring electricity needs.
All seven reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa have been dormant since a year after the meltdowns of reactors at the Fukushima plant contaminated the surrounding land with radioactive fallout so severe that some areas are still unliveable.
Tepco is working on the clean-up at the Fukushima site that is estimated to cost 22 trillion yen (£103 billion).
It is also trying to recover from the damage to its reputation after government and independent investigations blamed the Fukushima disaster on Tepco’s bad safety culture and criticised it for collusion with safety authorities.
Fourteen other nuclear reactors have restarted across Japan since 2011, but the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, about 135 miles (220km) north-west of Tokyo, is the first Tepco-run unit to resume production.
A restart of the No 6 reactor could generate an additional 1.35 million kilowatts of electricity, enough to power more than one million households in the capital region.
The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant’s combined output capacity of eight million kilowatts makes it the world’s largest, although Tepco plans to resume only two of the seven reactors in coming years.