Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) began sending electricity from its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata Prefecture to the Tokyo metropolitan area for the first time in about 14 years on Monday. The No. 6 reactor, restarted earlier this year, started generating and transmitting power at 10 p.m. Further inspections are planned ahead of potential commercial operations.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) on Monday restarted electricity transmission from its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture to the Tokyo metropolitan area, marking the first such operation in about 14 years. The No. 6 reactor at the plant, a boiling-water type identical to those at the tsunami-damaged Fukushima No. 1 plant, began generating power and sending it out at 10 p.m.
The 1.35-million-kilowatt reactor was originally set to restart on January 20, but a delay of one day occurred due to an issue detected during a pre-startup control rod withdrawal test. Shortly after restarting, an alarm related to a control rod movement device triggered, leading to another halt. Tepco resolved a setting problem with the alarm and restarted the reactor on February 9.
Tepco plans to raise the reactor's output to 50% before temporarily shutting it down on Friday or later for turbine equipment inspections. The reactor is expected to resume operations in early March, followed by a final inspection on March 18, after which commercial operations could begin pending approval from the Nuclear Regulation Authority.
All reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa were idled by March 2012 following the March 2011 meltdown at Fukushima. This restart represents the first reactivation of a Tepco boiling-water reactor since that disaster.