A worker walks along the spent fuel pool at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear facility in Japan. Photo by Bill Spindle.KASHIWAZAKI, Japan — At the world’s largest nuclear power facility, seven massive reactors are lined up along the blustery coast of the Japan Sea.
All the reactors are idle, but the sprawling site is a beehive of activity. To one side construction workers add to fortifications. Below, workers discharge firehoses into a massive water reservoir. Inside the reactor and buildings housing electricity generating turbines, engineers and technicians monitor and maintain equipment.
They’re ready to go when the call comes, according to Masaki Daito, the deputy superintendent of the nuclear power station. One to two months would be needed to start up, the company said.
Most of these reactors were shuttered after an earthquake and tsunami in 2011 caused a reactor core to melt down at a similar facility on the other side of the country operated by the same company, Tokyo Electric Power Co., commonly known by its acronym TEPCO.
But TEPCO has been working to restart the two largest, most recently constructed reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear facility, often called KK. It is one of just a handful of shuttered nuclear plants around the world working to produce power again. Most are in Japan, which shut down its entire nuclear fleet after the 2011 accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi reactor.
Nuclear power provides a large — but shrinking — portion of the world’s carbon-free electricity. Long plagued by cost and safety concerns, the energy source has been experiencing a surge of interest in recent years due to growing urgency around climate change and increasing power demands for data centers and more.
But building a new nuclear plant takes billions of dollars and many years. One way to potentially speed up that process is to restart existing nuclear plants that have been idled or even partially dismantled.
A trend underway
Efforts to restart idled nuclear plants are also underway in the United States, including in the state of Michigan and in Pennsylvania at the Three Mile Island facility that experienced a partial meltdown in 1979.
Despite the small number of shuttered nuclear facilities targeted for restart, they could produce such a large and steady stream of electricity that generating power from them again is now viewed as worth the cost of refurbishing and hardening the plants against the risk of future accidents.
It’s an effective way to bring clean power online because it’s cheaper and faster than building a nuclear reactor from scratch, said Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear science and engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I wish we had more just sitting there,” he said.
Still, restarting a nuclear reactor that’s been unused for a decade or more is no simple matter.
Learning from Fukushima
Every nuclear reactor slated for a restart has its own unique story and challenges. TEPCO recently offered Cipher a tour of its KK facility to see first-hand some of the technical and safety challenges of restarting the plant. All of Japan’s 33 operable reactors were stopped after 2011 and 14 have been restarted in recent years — with intense focus on lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster.
The Fukushima facility was inundated by a tsunami more powerful than what the plant was built to withstand. The flooding then cut off power to safety systems. Radioactive material was released during a meltdown of the reactor core.
None of the reactors at KK, which is located far from Fukushima, were damaged by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But the KK reactors were shut down the following year. New security features have now been added to ensure a similar disaster wouldn’t cause problems here once the reactors have been restarted.
Driving with TEPCO officials along the beach beneath the towering reactor buildings, I follow a sea wall that has been built up so the top is 15 meters above sea level, higher than the tsunami that hit the Fukushima plant.
“Right after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station accident, the company decided to build a new sea wall here,” said Daito, who is in the third year of his third stint at KK.
The head of the facility was a senior official at the Fukushima Daiichi plant when the accident happened and part of the team that determined what went wrong. Putting him in charge of KK was a message that the lessons of Fukushima would be put into practice here, TEPCO officials said.
Offshore, a new low-barrier dam (technically known as a weir) is visible, used to retain sea water to cool the reactors during a tsunami (the sea recedes from the coast as a tsunami gains force offshore).
As we loop around the middle levels of the grounds — larger than New York City’s Central Park — we come across a holding pond with 20,000 tons of fresh water fed by a spring on site. It serves as a backup for the fresh water stored inside the plant that is used to drive hydraulic pumps in an emergency — a problem at Fukushima when both the primary and backup power systems failed.
Emergency vehicles, a fleet of fire trucks and a 28-person emergency team are positioned 24/7, year around, on high ground — 35 meters above sea level — to ensure they are prepared to respond. At least 100 workers, security officials and engineers are on site all the time, while as many as 6,000 TEPCO employees and contractors work at the facility, coming and going through the facility’s high security gates and into the tightly controlled grounds.
Protections are in place against not only earthquakes and tsunamis, but also fires, tornados, lightning strikes, cyber attacks and hostile acts from terrorists or military strikes.
Preparing staff through mentoring, training, drills and simulations of emergency situations has been a central focus.
“Reactors six and seven haven’t been operating for more than ten years, so younger operators here don’t have experience operating real plants live,” said Daito.
Analysts and government officials say the KK facility is waiting for a sign off from the prefectural governor before it can restart. He has provided no timeline for a decision.
Thousands of miles away, in Michigan, another idle nuclear plant is getting restarted. Stay tuned soon for an upcoming story that delves into both the technical and financial hurdles of that effort.
Cat Clifford contributed reporting.
(This article was written by Bill Spindle, Senior Global Correspondent, Cipher. It was originally published here.)
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