A local city assembly in southern Japan on Tuesday approved the restart of a nuclear power plant there, one of the final steps before the facility will go back online.
The city assembly of Satsuma Sendai city in Kagoshima Prefecture convened an extraordinary session, in which adopted a petition in favor of resuming operations at the two-reactor facility, about 1,000 kilometers southwest of Tokyo.
The decision paved the way for Kyushu Electric Power Co's Sendai nuclear plant to become Japan's first nuclear facility to resume operations since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis. Satsuma Sendai Mayor Hideo Iwakiri has already agreed to the restart of the facility.
Last month, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) approved Kyushu Electric's safety report required to restart the two reactors at the Sendai plant, making them the first to have satisfied the new and stricter safety standards for nuclear facilities imposed after the 2011 Fukushima catastrophe. Before the final go-ahead, the utility needs to obtain the consent from local authorities and undergo on-site operational checks to restart the reactors. The Sendai plant is expected to resume operation as early as the beginning of next year.
All of the country's workable 48 commercial reactors remain idled for maintenance or safety checks, with the last going offline in September 2013. The reactors need to clear the NRA's new rules to resume operations. The new safety guidelines, introduced in July 2013, were based on lessons from the 2011 March Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster. Since last July, Kyushu Electric and nine other operators have applied for NRA's safety screenings for a total of 20 idled reactors at 13 plants.
Before the March 2011 atomic accident, nuclear plants in Japan, which is heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil, produced 30 percent of its electricity. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in December 2012, has been pushing for restart of reactors.
The Fukushima plant, located 230 kilometers north of Tokyo, was crippled in March 2011 by the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami that caused explosions, meltdowns and massive leaks of radioactive material as the world's worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.