The world’s biggest nuclear power plant is set to restart on January 21, 2026, for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Picture: STR / Jiji Press / AFP The restart of the world’s largest nuclear power plant was suspended in Japan on Thursday, with the operator saying it does not know when the problem would be solved. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata province had been closed since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, but operations to relaunch it had begun on Wednesday after it received the final green light from the nuclear regulator.
However, its operator the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said Thursday that “an alarm from the monitoring system… sounded during the reactor startup procedures”, causing it to suspend operations. “We don’t expect this to be solved within a day or two. There is no telling at the moment how long it will take,” site superintendent Takeyuki Inagaki told a news conference.
“We will for now fully focus on trying to identify the cause of what happened,” he said. The alarm that went off prompted TEPCO to “investigate the malfunctioning electrical equipment,” spokesman Takashi Kobayashi told AFP. And “once it became clear that it would take time, we decided to reinsert the control rods in a planned manner”, he said, adding that the reactor “is stable and there is no radioactive impact outside”.
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Control rods are a device used to control the nuclear chain reaction in the reactor core, which can be accelerated by slightly withdrawing them, or slowed down or stopped completely by inserting them deeper. The restart, initially scheduled for Tuesday, had been pushed back after another technical issue related to the rods’ removal was detected last weekend — a problem that was resolved on Sunday, according to TEPCO. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world’s biggest nuclear power plant by potential capacity, although just one reactor of seven was restarted.
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