Two major Japanese engineering companies, namely Toshiba and Hitachi, and two Japanese power utilities, namely TEPCO and Chubu Electric, have entered negotiations into the possibility of jointly decommissioning obsolete nuclear reactors. They are considering launching a joint engineering company, which would handle reactor maintenance with the possibility of combining all nuclear operations in the future.
TEPCO currently owns 11 boiling-water reactors (excluding the Fukushima Daiichi plant), while Chubu Electric owns five, with all of them offline since the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Thepartnership could help the companies to better manage the safety-related costs for running and decommissioning Japan's nuclear power plants. In all cases, TEPCO would remain solely responsible for decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
TEPCO and Chubu Electric already cooperate in the thermal and LNG sectors and developed the JERA joint venture (JV) in order to establish a globally competitive energy company: in March 2018, they agreed to combine their domestic thermal power generation and gas distribution businesses by April 2019. The integration will concern 15 thermal power plants operated by TEPCO and 10 Chubu Electric-operated power plants, with a capacity of 23 GW and a generation of 110 TWh (2016). It will also include four TEPCO LNG terminals and four Chubu Electric LNG terminals.
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