Japanese power utility Tohoku Electric has submitted a decommissioning plan for the first unit of the Onagawa nuclear power plant in the Miyagi Prefecture (Japan) to the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA). In October 2018, the group announced that the configuration of the 498 MW (524 MW gross) Onagawa 1 reactor would make the installation of additional safety equipment too expensive and time consuming. Tohoku Electric thus decided to scrap the boiling water reactor (BWR), which was commissioned in 1984, and stopped it at the end of 2018. It became the 10th operable nuclear reactor in Japan to be declared for decommissioning since the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. The decommissioning process is expected to be carried out in four stages and to last 34 years.
Tohoku Electric plans to restart the two other reactors of the Onagawa nuclear power plant, which are rated 796 MW (825 MW gross) each and were commissioned in 1995 and 2002, respectively.