News Watch
Dry Storage Facilities for Spent Fuel to be Established at Sendai Nuke
Kyushu Electric Power Co. filed an application with Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) on October 24 for approval of dry storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel at the Sendai Nuclear Power Station (NPS) and also submitted a letter of prior consultation seeking consent from Kagoshima Prefecture and Satsuma-Sendai City, where the plant is located. The company has already started work on similar facilities at the Genkai NPS, the construction of which started on May 19 this year, aiming to begin operation in 2027.
The Sendai NPS has two reactors (both PWR, 890 MW). As of March 2025, its spent fuel pool, with a capacity of 3,224, held a total of 2,490 assemblies and is expected fill up completely in 2031. The planned dry storage facilities will have 20 dry storage containers and be able to accommodate 560 assemblies.
Kyushu Electric Power Co. is saying, “The storage building has been designed to remove heat as needed that is generated from the spent fuel held in the dry storage containers through air-circulation cooling using natural convection.
“Moreover, by keeping the dry storage containers in a reinforced concrete building, which performs a shielding function, even after the dry storage facilities are installed, the dose at the site boundary, including existing buildings will by design be well below the target value of 50 µSv per year.”
The cost of furnishing this will come to about 53 billion yen, with construction to begin in 2028, and operation in FY2029. It has been explained that it will enable Units 1 and 2 to both continue operating until 2038, securing a further seven years of operation even if the spent fuel cannot be transported to the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant.
The anti-nuclear group “Stop the Sendai NPS! March 11 Kagoshima Rally Planning Committee” announced on October 30 that it had newly established a study meeting on dry storage at the Sendai NPS and will conduct a questionnaire survey of about 1,000 Kagoshima Prefecture residents. They plan to hold a kick-off rally in front of JR Sendai Station on November 24 and release a summary of their results by the end of January 2026.
Governor Approves Restart of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station
Governor Hanazumi Hideyo of Niigata Prefecture held an emergency press conference at the prefectural office on November 21, at which he announced his approval for the restart of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO’s) Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station. After receiving a vote of confidence at the prefectural assembly opening on December 2, the decision will be submitted to the national government with the aim of restarting Unit 6 as early as January 2026.
Restarts of nuclear reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NPS had initially been planned to start from Unit 7 (ABWR, 1,356 MW), but delays in establishing “facilities for dealing with specific severe accidents” (anti-terror facilities) for that unit have given the lead to Unit 6 (also ABWR, 1,356 MW), where there is more leeway for meeting the deadline to establish the facilities.
The governor of Niigata has been making an effort to ascertain the views of the prefecture’s citizens. He has held hearings, as well as having meetings with leading officials in Kashiwazaki City, Kariwa Village and the other towns and cities within 30 kilometers of the NPS. He has also conducted surveys of prefectural residents’ views and a follow-up survey of residents within 30 kilometers of the NPS. He visited the NPS on November 14, exchanging views with the mayors of the seven cities and towns within 30 kilometers of the plant. In the statement that he had prepared for the prefectural assembly’s regular session on December 2, he said he was planning to express his thoughts on the NPS and seek a decision from the assembly.
According to a prefectural public opinion survey, 37 percent agreed that the conditions for restarting the reactors had been fulfilled, while 60 percent disagreed. Moreover, analyzing trends by gender and age, women showed a higher percentage of negative responses on restarting the reactors and the older the respondent, the higher the percentage giving negative responses thereto. In the follow-up survey, 43 percent of respondents indicated that “No matter what measures are taken, the reactors should not be restarted,” while 57 percent did not agree with this statement. Clearly the words “no matter what measures are taken” were included intentionally. Regarding conditions for resuming operations, 61 percent said the conditions were not adequate—nearly the same percentage as in the survey of all of the prefecture’s municipalities.
TEPCO President Kobayakawa Tomoaki attended the Niigata Prefectural Assembly session on October 16 as a witness. He announced the decision to decommission Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Units 1 and 2 with the hope of influencing public opinion surveys and the views of leading authorities. But then again, he stressed that this was “not yet decided, just under consideration.” It will take about a year and a half from the Unit 6 restart for them to reach a conclusion on that, so they are assuming that the restart will go forward. President Kobayakawa also announced a policy of providing a total of 100 billion yen over a ten-year period for regional development assistance, but only on the premise that the NPS can operate continuously. This “we are paying you, so shut up” approach, however, is backfiring massively among the prefecture’s citizens. Voices of opposition to the restart of the reactor are also spreading nationwide, and the situation still remains unpredictable.
Delusions of Rebuilding 13 Large Nukes
At a meeting of the Advisory Committee for Natural Resources and Energy’s Nuclear Power Subcommittee on October 1, the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan explained its “Outlook and Future Image of Nuclear Power Generation with a View to Future Power Supply and Demand.” This document describes the scale of reconstruction needed by the nuclear power field in the future as follows:
“From the viewpoint of ensuring a stable power supply based on expected demand for the FY2040 energy mix, ‘reconstruction of approximately 5.5 GW in the 2040s’ may be necessary, while efforts to further improve the utilization rate of existing reactors steadily advance. We believe, firstly, that this should be the starting point for any discussion. If nuclear energy is to generate the same amount of electricity as in FY2040, it may be necessary to rebuild reactors with an installed capacity of about 12.7 to 16 GW in the 2050s. Depending on changes in the amount of electricity generated and how the introduction of decarbonized power sources proceeds, it may be necessary to rebuild even more than the above amount.”
In rebuilding the Mihama NPS, Kansai Electric Power Co. (Kanden) is said to be trying to build a 1.2 GW class reactor, the SRZ-1200. Thus, even if you count that, another five of those will be needed in the 2040s, growing to 13 in the 2050s. If small modular reactors are to be used, the number needed will be several times as much. With such numbers of nuclear power plants needed, where will they all be built?
The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan says, “In addition to addressing issues such as maintaining and bolstering human resources and supply chains, we also need to start from where things stand now, taking into account the sorts of risks involved, that are unique to the first unit of any new type of reactor, in light of the interregnum period when there were no opportunities for nuclear power plant construction in Japan.” In other words, even if they can find places to build them, there will be inevitable challenges. An auction system for long-term decarbonized power was introduced as a necessary funding measure, really to rescue it more than anything else, but as that turned out to be insufficient, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has asked the System Design Working Group of the Advisory Committee for Natural Resources to consider aid that utilizes a loan system relying on the creditworthiness of Japan’s government.
MOX Fuel Shipment from France to Takahama NPS
The fourth batch of MOX fuel manufactured by Orano in France for Takahama Units 3 and 4 (both PWR, 870 MW), numbering 16 assemblies for each unit, arrived in Japan on November 17. The shipment left Cherbourg Harbor on September 7 travelling via Cape Hope and the Southwest Pacific.
