The Hiroshima District Court (Japan) has rejected a call from local residents to block the restart of the 846 MWe Ikata-3 nuclear reactor in Ehime prefecture (Japan). This decision paves the way for its owner, the Japanese power utility Shikoku Electric Power, to restart the pressurized water reactor (PWR) and resume commercial operation again by the end of November 2018.
Ikata-3 was commissioned in 1994 and was stopped for more than five years in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The Nuclear Regulatory Authority gave its approval to operation resumption in April 2016 and the reactor was back to commercial operation in September 2016. However, residents from Matsuyama and Hiroshima filed a request for a temporary injunction against the restart of the unit in March 2016. This petition was rejected in March 2017 but opponents filed an appeal to the Hiroshima High Court, which ordered the suspension of its operations in December 2017.
Shikoku Electric now plans to have the reactor in commercial operation at the end of November 2018.