10 Jun (NucNet): Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) has begun redoing parts of pre-service inspections it had already completed at the Sendai-1 nuclear power plant after the discovery of “numerous incomplete documents and erroneous written entries”, the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (Jaif) said today.
Pre-service inspections are the final stage before a nuclear power plant can be restarted. Kyushu Electric Power Company, the owner and operator of the 846-megawatt pressurised water reactor unit in Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, has now postponed the scheduled restart of the unit from early July to mid-August 2015.
Jaif warned today that because of the number of errors that need to be corrected, a restart this summer is unlikely.
The NRA said the omissions and errors were “not mere entry mistakes”, but mistakes of a nature that require “the confirmation of facts”. The NRA intends to carry out further inspections in the area of quality control, Jaif said.
Jaif said errors included discrepancies between data that Kyushu Electric Power Company had provided on fuel lines to emergency power facilities and the data on those fuel lines contained in original records provided by the manufacturer at the time of installation.
Pre-service inspections to confirm the performance of equipment and facilities at Sendai-1 began at the end of March 2015, Jaif said.
According to Kyushu Electric Power Company, around 420 personnel were engaged in inspections, but this has not been enough to keep to its schedule.
Pre-service inspections began at Sendai-2 on 10 June 2015. Jaif did not say if those inspections had been stopped or if they needed to be carried out again.
Units 1 and 2 at Sendai both cleared the NRA’s safety examinations in September 2014, which meant they met new regulatory standards imposed after the March 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi accident. They were the first reactors approved for restart under the new standards.
All of Japan’s 48 commercial reactor units were shut down for safety checks and upgrades following Fukushima-Daiichi.
