Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) will remove fuel from the unit 7 at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NPP in Niigata Prefecture due to delays in the construction of an antiterrorism facility, plant manager Takeyuki Inagaki told reporters.
“As the installation deadline for the Specially Designated Severe Accident Response Facilities approaches on 13 October, we have decided to suspend the test operation of the reactor itself, as we will be removing the loaded fuel without conducting inspections involving critical reaction operations,” Tepco announced.
Fuel assemblies were loaded into the reactor in April 2024 in preparation for its restart. However, Tepco says unit 7 cannot be restarted before completion of the antiterrorism facility, which is scheduled for August 2029.
Fuel removal will begin on 14 October, when the lid of the reactor’s containment vessel is slated to be lifted. A total of 872 fuel assemblies will then be transferred to a used fuel storage pool during about two weeks from 21 October. Inagaki explained that “managing nuclear fuel in a single location would make it easier to respond to possible earthquakes and other disasters”.
Tepco is now prioritising restarting unit 6, where fuel loading was completed in June. The company has until September 2029 to implement similar anti-terrorism safety measures at unit 6, but it could operate until then, pending local approval.
Although Kashiwazaki-Kariwa was unaffected by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami all seven of the plant’s reactors had been offline for two to three years following the earlier 2007 Niigata-Chuetsu earthquake, which caused damage to the site. Work has since been carried out to improve the plant’s earthquake resistance. Tepco applied for Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) approval of its design and construction plan for Kashiwazaki-Kariwa units 6&7 (1356 MWe advanced boiling water reactors) in September 2013.
Tepco submitted information on safety upgrades across the site and at those units, which began commercial operation in 1996 and 1997 and were the first Japanese boiling water reactors to be considered for restart. NRA cleared safety screenings for the two units in 2017 but security breaches and delays in completing safety upgrades caused delays.
In April 2021, NRA issued an administrative order to Tepco prohibiting it from moving nuclear fuel at the plant until improvements in security measures had been confirmed by additional inspections. This order was lifted in December 2024 after inspections confirmed that measures had been enhanced at the site.
