nuclear-news

Electric Power Development Co. (J-Power) announced Nov. 13 that it will apply to the Nuclear Regulation Authority for safety screenings to start operations at its Oma nuclear power plant, which is currently under construction.

The announcement came at a town assembly meeting at Oma, Aomori Prefecture, where J-Power President Masayoshi Kitamura said the company will submit the application by the end of the year and plans to have the new facility fully operational in fiscal 2021.

If everything proceeds as scheduled, the Oma plant will be the first instance in which power companies applied for the start of operations at new reactors that are still under construction.

While the No. 1 reactor at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Higashidori plant in Aomori Prefecture and Chugoku Electric Power Co.’s Shimane plant No. 3 reactor in Matsue are also currently under construction, the utilities have not submitted applications to start the reactors.

Although the central government’s basic energy plan states that dependency on nuclear power should be reduced as much as possible, it does not clearly mention the construction of new nuclear facilities.

The government does not deem nuclear plants as “new or additional” if their construction started before the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, which set off the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant.

Forty percent of the construction of the Oma plant had been completed prior to the disaster.

However, there is no guarantee that the screening process will proceed smoothly because the structure and operation procedures of the Oma facility are different from those of conventional nuclear plants.

The Oma plant will be the world’s first 100 percent MOX nuclear facility, where only mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel, consisting of plutonium and uranium, is used at reactor cores for the purpose of consuming plutonium produced in processing spent nuclear fuel………

“No full MOX facility has so far gone online around the world,” NRA Chairman Shunichi Tanaka said at a Nov. 12 news conference. “We will examine extremely carefully (if countermeasures are sufficient).”…….

PROLONGING LIFE OF AGED REACTORS

Elsewhere, with the Abe administration supporting the restarts of the nation’s idle reactors after they pass NRA safety screenings, Kansai Electric Power Co. is making efforts to prolong the operating lives of aged reactors……..http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201411140068