Court Denies Request for Extended Suspension of Ikata Reactor

October 26, 2018

Hiroshima- Hiroshima District Court on Friday dismissed a request for the suspension of operations at the No. 3 reactor at Shikoku Electric Power Co.'s Ikata nuclear plant in Ehime Prefecture, western Japan, from October.

The request was filed by a group of residents of Hiroshima, the capital of the nearby prefecture of Hiroshima.

Last year, Hiroshima High Court issued a temporary injunction forbidding the power company from operating the 890,000-kilowatt Ikata No. 3 reactor until the end of September 2018, saying a pyroclastic flow may reach the plant in case a catastrophic volcanic eruption occurs at Mount Aso's caldera in Kumamoto Prefecture, located about 130 kilometers away from the plant.

The residents sought an extension of this injunction.

"The probability of such a huge eruption taking place in Aso is very low," said Hiroshima District Court Presiding Judge Takahiko Fujisawa.

"The risk of an accident being caused by an eruption is not an imminent one that must be eliminated immediately," the judge said.

In September this year, a judge of Hiroshima High Court withdrew the injunction that ordered that the Ikata No. 3 reactor be kept suspended, based on a judgment that the frequency of massive eruptions is extremely low.

Shikoku Electric has indicated a plan to reactive the idled reactor on Saturday at the earliest.

In July 2015, the Ikata No. 3 reactor effectively passed the Nuclear Regulation Authority's safety screening under the country's new standards introduced after the March 2011 meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. After being reactivated in August 2016, the reactor was halted in October 2017 for routine checkups. Jiji Press