Japan suspends restart of world’s largest nuclear plant hours after it began

The restart of the world’s largest nuclear power plant was suspended in Japan on Thursday just hours after the process began, its operator said, but the reactor remains “stable”.Operations to relaunch a reactor at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata province, closed since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, began late on Wednesday after it received the final green light from the nuclear regulator despite divided public opinion.But its operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), said that “an alarm from the monitoring system … sounded during the reactor start-up procedures”, causing them to suspend operations.“We were investigating the malfunctioning electrical equipment,” spokesperson Takashi Kobayashi said, adding that “once it became clear that it would take time, we decided to reinsert the control rods in a planned manner”.The reactor “is stable and there is no radioactive impact outside”, he said.Tepco’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear complex. Photo: KyodoControl rods are a device used to control the nuclear chain reaction in the reactor core, which can be accelerated by slightly withdrawing them, or slowed down or stopped completely by inserting them deeper.