Overview
- TEPCO announced the reactor at Unit 6 will be restarted on February 9 after a control-rod alarm halted operations in late January.
- The planned start of commercial operation shifts from February 26 to March 18 to accommodate additional checks and step-by-step verification.
- Investigations with the supplier found no abnormalities in the control rod, its drive motor, or the inverter hardware.
- The alarm was traced to an inverter feature that judged a brief initial movement delay as an abnormality, leading TEPCO to change the setting to “do not detect” for all 205 control rods.
- The company filed a change to the startup process with the Nuclear Regulation Authority and will verify multi-rod withdrawal behavior during reactor startup, followed by equipment inspections and grid-connection tests.