Restart may be years away due to lack of local government approval
The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant cleared a major regulatory hurdle Wednesday to restart two reactors in Japan, its first since the 2011 tsunami sparked the worst atomic accident in decades.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority gave Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) preliminary approval to restart the two reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, one of the world’s biggest and the largest in Japan.
The plant, in the central Japan prefecture of Niigata, has been idle since the disaster as have been many other nuclear power plants in Japan.
Triggered by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake in March 2011, a massive tsunami overwhelmed reactor cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan.
It caused reactor meltdowns, releasing radiation in the most dangerous nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
