Il Nuovo Postiglione - Japan to restart world's biggest nuclear plant

Takeyuki Inagaki, the head of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant run by Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), told a press conference Friday that they planned "to start up the reactor on February 9".

The announcement came after TEPCO restarted the reactor on January 21 but shut it off the following day after an alarm from the monitoring system sounded.

Due to an error in its configuration, the alarm had picked up slight changes to the electrical current in one cable even though these were still within a range considered safe, Inagaki said.

The firm has now changed the alarm's settings as the reactor is safe to operate, Inagaki said.

The commercial operation will commence on or after March 18 after another comprehensive inspection, he said.

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world's biggest nuclear power plant by potential capacity, although just one reactor of seven will restart.

The facility had been offline since Japan pulled the plug on nuclear power after a colossal earthquake and tsunami sent three reactors at the Fukushima atomic plant into meltdown in 2011.

Resource-poor Japan now wants to revive atomic energy to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and meet growing energy needs from artificial intelligence.

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the first TEPCO-run unit to restart since 2011. The company also operates the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant, now being decommissioned.

Public opinion in the area around the plant is deeply divided: Around 60 percent of residents oppose the restart, while 37 percent support it, according to a survey conducted by Niigata prefecture in September.

In January, seven groups opposing the restart submitted a petition signed by nearly 40,000 people to TEPCO and Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority, saying that the plant sits on an active seismic fault zone and noted it was struck by a strong quake in 2007.

D.Ricci--INP