Tohoku Electric Power has announced a decision to put off the planned restart of the No. 2 reactor at its Onagawa nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan by two months to around November.
The postponement, announced Thursday, stems from a delay in preparations for training that Tohoku Electric must carry out before loading nuclear fuel into the reactor at the power station in Miyagi Prefecture. The company aims to load the fuel into the reactor around September.
Tohoku Electric completed work to strengthen its safety measures at the plant in May. The company hoped to load the fuel as early as this month after conducting the required training to practice its responses to natural disasters and other situations.
But it had to change the plan because it is taking longer than expected to dismantle and remove a temporary warehouse, which was decided after an on-site inspection by the Secretariat of the Nuclear Regulation Authority found that the structure could affect the training.
Due to the postponement, Tohoku Electric expects its ordinary profit for fiscal 2024 to decrease ¥8 billion ($50.9 million) from the projected level. But the impact of the decrease on the company's consolidated earnings is believed to be limited.
The Onagawa plant uses boiling-water reactors, the same type as those that experienced meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings' Fukushima No. 1 power plant following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
None of the boiling-water reactors in Japan have been put back into operations since the meltdowns. Chugoku Electric Power aims to resume the operations of the No. 2 unit, a boiling-water reactor, at its Shimane nuclear power plant in western Japan in December.