Scrapping Nuke plant project

March 29, 2013

Tohoku Electric scraps N-plant plans

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T130328004281.htm

SENDAI (Jiji Press)--Tohoku Electric Power Co. announced Thursday it has decided to scrap a nuclear power plant project, the first domestic firm to do so since the nuclear crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011.

The project, launched in 1968, called for building a nuclear power plant on a site straddling the towns of Namie and Minami-Soma, both in Fukushima Prefecture.

The area was contaminated with radioactive material from the TEPCO plant, which suffered an unprecedented triple meltdown following the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. Due to the incident, the two municipalities shifted their stance toward the construction of the plant.

Tohoku Electric reached the decision at a board meeting Thursday, based on the judgment that it can no longer stick to the project given the strong opposition, officials said.

Another factor behind the decision may be that the planned site of the facility, called the Namie-Odaka nuclear plant, was submerged by tsunami after the March 2011 earthquake.

Tohoku Electric President Makoto Kaiwa visited Fukushima Gov. Yuhei Sato to inform him of the company's decision. "It is not appropriate" to push ahead with construction taking into consideration the concerns of local residents and the difficulty in realizing it in the planned location, Kaiwa told Sato.

Tohoku Electric had planned to build an 825,000-kilowatt plant. Construction was to begin in fiscal 2016 with operations slated to start in fiscal 2021.