The injunction issued by the Otsu District Court on Wednesday to halt the operation of reactors 3 and 4 at Kansai Electric Power Co.'s Takahama nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture — which had just been reactivated earlier this year after clearing the post-Fukushima reactor standards — should serve as a strong warning to the power industry, the government and the nuclear regulators.
Even before the court injunction, back-to-back problems had occurred in a span of 10 days involving reactor 4 at the plant, raising doubts about the company's safety management. The fact that the reactor fell into a state of cold shutdown shortly after its restart was enough to cause concern among the public that the firm is obsessed with putting its reactors back online to the point of failing to take sufficient caution in ensuring their safety. Other power companies should also take the court decision and what happened at the Takahama plant seriously and make sure they don't neglect the lessons from the triple meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 plant five years ago.
On Feb. 29, just three days after reactor 4 was rebooted and Kansai Electric was preparing to generate and transmit electricity, an alarm went off to indicate problems with the generator and the transformer. The alarm triggered the insertion of 48 control rods, deactivating the reactor. The unit is now in a cold shutdown condition with the temperature of the primary coolant kept below 93 degrees Celsius. The company suspects that an electrical current stronger than a preset level flowed from the transmission line, leading a monitoring device near the transformer to detect it and set off the alarm upon the start of power generation and transmission.