Japanese power utility Kansai Electric has restarted the fourth reactor of its Takahama nuclear power plant in the Fukui prefecture of Japan, after the Japanese High Court overturned a ruling suspending operations due to safety issues.
The Takahama nuclear power plant consists of four reactors, two rated 780 MW commissioned in 1974 and 1975 and two 830 MW commissioned in 1985. All were mothballed in 2011 after the Fukushima disaster but unit 3 was restarted in January 2016 and unit 4 in February 2016. However, operations were suspended in late February 2016 at Takahama-4 and a court injunction obliged Kansai Electric to take Takahama-3 and 4 offline in March 2016. That ruling was overturned in March 2017, paving the way for operations to restart at the two Takahama reactors. Commercial operations will resume in mid-June 2017, after the completion of final safety screenings by the Nuclear Regulation Authority.
Until the restart of Takahama-3, only three nuclear reactors were operating in Japan, namely units 1 and 2 at Kyushu Electric's Sendai plant in the Kagoshima prefecture and Shikoku Electric's Ikata-3 reactor in the Ehime prefecture. Kansai Electric also plans to restart the third reactor at Takaham in early June 2017 and to resume commercial operations in early July 2017. It could be followed by the restart of units 3 and 4 of Kyushu Electric's Genkai plant in the Saga prefecture in the summer 2017 and that of units 3 and 4 at Kansai Electric's Oil nuclear plant in Fukui as of late 2017.
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