CONSULTING

unprecedented court ruling on 9 March 2016 forcing the immediate closure of the reactor. 572 The
Otsu District Court ruling also required the continued shutdown of Takahama-4 which had earlier
suffered a technical failure on 29 February when plant operator Kansai Electric Power Company
was attempting grid connection. 573
As a result of the Otsu court ruling the two Sendai reactors, owned by Kyushu Electric and located
in Kagoshima prefecture in southern Japan, is the only nuclear power plant operating as of
1 July 2016, highlighting the failure of the industry to recover from the progressive shutdown of
all reactors in the period after 11 March 2011. As a result, all but three of Japan’s nuclear reactors
are in the WNISR category of Long Term Outage (LTO). 574 (See Annex 2 for a detailed overview of
the Japanese Reactor Program.)
Figure 42: Age Distribution of the Japanese Nuclear Fleet
Sources: IAEA-PRIS, MSC, 2016
Figure 6 shows the collapse of nuclear electricity generation in Japan from 287 TWh to 9.7 TWh
in 2015. While the most dramatic decline has been since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident, in
fact it has been 17 years since Japan’s nuclear output peaked at 313 TWh in 1998. The noticeably
sharp decline during 2002-2003, amounting to a reduction of almost 30 percent, was due to the
temporary shutdown of all 17 of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) reactors—seven at
Kashiwazaki Kariwa and six at Fukushima Daiichi and four at Fukushima Daini. 575 The shutdown
was following an admission from TEPCO that its staff had deliberately falsified data for inclusion
572 Nikkei Asian Review, “Japan court orders shutdown of nuclear reactors”, 10 March 2016, see
http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japan-court-orders-shutdown-of-nuclear-reactors, accessed 2 July 2016.
573 WNISR, “Takahama-4 Reactor Fails Grid Connection in Japan”, 2 March 2016, see
http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Takahama-4-Reactor-Fails-Grid-Connection-in-Japan.html, accessed
17 June 2016.
574 M. Schneider, A. Froggatt, et. al., “WNISR 2014”, 18 August 2014, see
http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/WNISR2014.html, accessed 17 June 2016.
575 Daiichi means “Number One” and Daini means “Number Two”, each referring to a multi-reactor
generating complex.
Mycle Schneider, Antony Froggatt et al. 149 World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2016