
Kashiwazaki City mayor Masahiro Sakurai indicated he will approve the restart of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant. He did so at a meeting with TEPCO Holdings president Tomoaki Kobayakawa held on August 22, 2024.
A day later, Sakurai criticized Hideyo Hanazumi, the governor of Niigata Prefecture, in which Kashiwazaki City is located, for saying he would be deciding whether to approve the restart by the next gubernatorial election, which is set to be held in 2026. Sakurai urged Hanazumi to speed up his decision. “That is a completely different timeline than mine, as well as that of the country and of other prefectures with nuclear power plants such as Miyagi,” he told reporters.
The mayor expressed his intent to approve the restart after TEPCO Holdings confirmed it would aim to decide the fate of Units 1 through 5, including the decommissioning of at least one of them, within two years of the power plant’s restart. Initially, the company was planning to do so within five years.
Units 6 and 7 are being prepared for restart with the latter being the first one expected to come back online. In preparation for that, TEPCO loaded fuel into Unit 7 in April and submitted an amendment of its application for approval of Unit 6 under the country’s new security guidelines in July of this year. Both units are 1.315GW advanced boiling water reactors supplied by Hitachi, Toshiba, and GE.
At 7.965GW, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world’s largest nuclear power plant by net rated capacity.