The restart of the world’s largest nuclear power plant was suspended in Japan on Thursday, with the operator saying it does not know when the problem will be solved.
The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata province had been closed since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, but operations to relaunch it had begun on Wednesday after it received the final green light from the nuclear regulator.
However, its operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), said Thursday that “an alarm from the monitoring system… sounded during the reactor startup procedures”, causing it to suspend operations.
“We don’t expect this to be solved within a day or two. There is no telling at the moment how long it will take,” site superintendent Takeyuki Inagaki told a news conference.
“We will for now fully focus on trying to identify the cause of what happened,” he said.