The Kyushu Electric Power Company announced today it will restart a nuclear reactor at its Sendai power plant in southern Japan on Tuesday.
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But after passing stringent new safety tests, Kyushu Electric Power restarted the number one reactor at its Sendai plant on Tuesday morning.
The restart marks Japan’s return to nuclear power, breaking a four-and-half-year nuclear energy deadlock because the 2011 meltdowns on the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear energy plant in northeastern Japan following the quake and tsunami.
The 31-year-old reactor was expected to reach full operating capacity by “around 11.00 pm” yesterday, a Kyushu Electric Power spokeswoman said.
The uranium market was also crippled by that incident, in part because Japan’s nuclear reactors were all shut down as a precautionary measure. Abe’s authorities needs as lots of them as attainable to be put on-line to maintain the nation’s financial system, which now depends on imported power.
While two reactors have since been restarted for a fueling cycle under the old standards in 2012, the whole sector has been shut down since September 2013, forcing Japan to import record amounts of expensive liquefied natural gas.
The reactivated No. 1 reactor, right, is pictured at the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima Prefecture, on August. 11, 2015, in this photograph taken from a Mainichi helicopter.
Of Japan’s 25 reactors at 15 plants for which operators have applied for permission to restart, only five at three plants have been cleared for restart. The total excludes the money spent decommissioning nuclear reactors. “The current evacuation plan is nonsense”, said Shouhei Nomura, a 79-year-old former worker at a nuclear plant equipment maker, who now opposes atomic energy and is living in a protest camp near the plant on Kyushu island.
On Monday, dozens of protesters, including Naoto Kan, prime minister at the time of the Fukushima crisis, rallied outside the Sendai plant in a last-ditch effort to stop the restart, shouting “We don’t need nuclear plants”.
But Tanaka conceded there was “no such thing as absolute safety”, and Japan’s people are sceptical as the country remains deeply scarred by the legacy of Fukushima.
Safety officials have stressed that any switched-on reactor would operate under much tighter regulations than those that existed before Fukushima, the worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. Looking back from today’s perspective, we can now perceive that the anti-nuclear movement was at its high tide at that period. “Who would take responsibility if an accident like Fukushima happens again?” she added.
Some 300,000 people were later evacuated from the area as large quantities of radioactive material were released.
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Power companies that own them are also keen for more restarts, fed up with having to make up lost generating capacity with pricey fossil fuels. A second reactor at the same facility is expected to come online in a couple of months.
