The newly elected governor of the province of Kagoshima in Japan has officially asked power utility Kyushu Electric to shut down temporarily the two operational reactors at its Sendai nuclear power plant, after strong earthquakes struck the neighbouring province of Kumamoto.
All Japanese nuclear reactors were shut down following the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. The two 890 MW reactors of the Sendai nuclear power plant were restarted in August and October 2015, despite protests from residents, who filed an appeal to stop the reactors in vain. Two units were also restarted at the Takahama nuclear plant, namely unit 3 in January 2016 and unit 4 in February 2016, but operations were suspended in late February 2016 at Takahama-4 and a court injunction obliged Kansai Electric to take Takahama-3 offline in March 2016. In August 2016, Shikoku Electric restarted the Ikata-3 reactor in Ehime prefecture.
The Kagoshima governor has no legal power to shut down operating reactors at the Sendai plant but may seek to block the restart of the units after their scheduled maintenance, due to begin in October 2016 (Sendai-1) and in December 2016 (Sendai-2).
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