nuclear-news

Japan’s Mihama nuclear reactor to shut down following leak

Kansai Electric to manually shut Mihama nuclear unit   Mihama 500 MW unit one of only nine reactors still running in Japan TOKYO, Dec 7 (Reuters) – Kansai Electric Power Co will manually halt its Mihama No. 2 nuclear reactor as a safety precaution after it
discovered unusual levels of coolant leaking from a valve inside the containment vessel, but there have been no radiation leaks, a company spokesman said on Wednesday….. More than four-fifths of Japan’s 54 commercial nuclear reactors are offline, some knocked out by the March
11 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the world’s worst nuclear
disaster in a quarter century at Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima
Daiichi plant.

Most have gone down for routine maintenance, however, and are unable
to restart as fears about nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima
crisis leave local communities reluctant to let them go back into
operation.

A nuclear reactor at Kyushu Electric Power Co’s Genkai plant in
southern Japan was restarted last month despite public opposition,
however, after it automatically shut down the month before due to a
cooling system problem.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/07/kansai-mihama-idUSL3E7N73YC20111207

December 8, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | incidents, Japan