Japan’s Largest Nuclear Power Plant Expected to Restart This Week

Multiple Japanese media outlets reported on the 19th that Japan is expected to approve the restart of the country’s largest nuclear power plant—the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Niigata Prefecture—this week.

According to Kyodo News and the Nikkei, citing unnamed sources, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant is expected to receive approval from the local governor this week to resume operations.

The reports state that only one of the seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant will resume operation. It is reported that since the serious nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, the Japanese government ordered the shutdown of all nuclear power plants in the country.

To date, 14 nuclear power units have resumed operation, mainly located in western and southern Japan.

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, located in Niigata Prefecture in northwestern Japan and named after the two towns of Kashiwazaki and Kariwa, has an installed capacity of 8,212 megawatts, making it one of the world’s largest nuclear power plants in terms of net generating capacity.

Following the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, TEPCO decommissioned two nuclear power plants in Fukushima, and the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant was shut down in March 2012. Unit 7 of this plant supplied electricity to the Tokyo metropolitan area and other regions. It passed a safety review by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) in 2017, but was subsequently banned from restarting by the NRA due to the exposure of multiple safety vulnerabilities. The ban was lifted only after it passed inspection in December 2023.