TEPCO Reactor to Be Restarted as Early as Jan. 20

Tokyo, Jan. 4 (Jiji Press)--Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. is slated to reactivate the No. 6 reactor at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station in central Japan as early as Jan. 20.

This will mark the first time for TEPCO to bring a reactor back online since the March 2011 triple meltdown at its disaster-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan.

The restart of the reactor at the plant straddling the city of Kashiwazaki and the village of Kariwa in Niigata Prefecture also means that the Japanese government will take a further step in its policy of making maximum use of nuclear energy for power generation.

Still, uncertainty lingers over the realization of the nuclear fuel cycle, which centers on the reuse of spent nuclear fuel.

The government's new basic energy plan is "like (the energy industry's) constitution, which led to various developments," Kingo Hayashi, chairman of the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan and president of Chubu Electric Power Co., told a press conference late last year.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]