TOKYO: Japan switched on the world’s biggest nuclear power plant again on Monday, its operator said, after an earlier attempt was quickly suspended due to a minor glitch.
The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in the Niigata region restarted at 2:00 p.m. (0500 GMT), the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said in a statement.
A glitch with an alarm in January forced the suspension of its first restart since the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
The facility had been offline since Japan pulled the plug on nuclear power after a colossal earthquake and tsunami sent three reactors at the Fukushima atomic plant into meltdown.
But now Japan is turning to atomic energy to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and meet growing energy needs from artificial intelligence.
Conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who pulled off a thumping election victory on Sunday, has promoted nuclear power to energise the Asian economic giant.
TEPCO initially moved to start one of seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant on January 21 but shut it off the following day after an alarm from the monitoring system sounded.
The alarm had picked up slight changes to the electrical current in one cable even though these were still within a range considered safe, TEPCO officials told a press conference last week.
The firm has changed the alarm’s settings as the reactor is safe to operate.
The commercial operation will commence on or after March 18 after another comprehensive inspection, according to TEPCO officials.
Japan restarts world’s biggest nuclear plant again
https://arab.news/5p5gv
Japan restarts world’s biggest nuclear plant again
- The facility had been offline since Japan pulled the plug on nuclear power after a colossal earthquake and tsunami sent three reactors at the Fukushima atomic plant into meltdown
US labels Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood as ‘terrorists’
- Designation comes after the US in January declared several other Muslim Brotherhood branches to be terrorist organizations
WASHINGTON: The United States said Monday it will label the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a terrorist organization and accused the group of receiving support from Iran.
The designation, which will be effective in a week, comes after the United States in January declared several other Muslim Brotherhood branches to be terrorist organizations, including in its historic base of Egypt.
“The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood uses unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology,” the State Department said in a statement.
The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood “has contributed upwards of 20,000 fighters to the war in Sudan, many receiving training and other support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the elite ideological wing of Tehran’s military, the State Department said.
The State Department accused the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood of having “conducted mass executions of civilians in areas they captured.”
Iran, run by Shiite clerics, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni organization that historically had extensive social networks inside Egypt, both have supported Sudan’s army.
The army has been engaged for nearly three years in a brutal civil war against the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF), with the fighting claiming tens of thousands of lives, displacing more than 11 million people and plunging areas into famine-like conditions.
The United States last year said that the RSF has carried out acts of genocide with systematic killings and sexual violence against black Sudanese. The United States also said the army carried out war crimes.
Targeting the Muslim Brotherhood has also been a rallying cry in Washington for some conservative Republicans, in part over unfounded conspiracy theories that the group is trying to impose Islamic sharia law in the United States.
