France's Areva has started fabrication of 16 mixed-oxide (mox) fuel assemblies for unit 4 of the Takahama NPP in Fukui prefecture, Kansai Electric Power Company announced on 30 August. The unit is one of five Japanese reactors to have been restarted, but is now closed after a court injunction suspended its operation. Takahama unit 3 restarted on 29 January and Takahama 4 on 26 February, but unit 4 shut was taken offline after three days following an automatic shutdown of the reactor due to a "main transformer/generator internal failure". Subsequently an injunction imposed by a district court on 9 March prevented it restarting and led to unit 3 being taken offline as well.
France's Areva has started fabrication of 16 mixed-oxide (mox) fuel assemblies for unit 4 of the Takahama NPP in Fukui prefecture, Kansai Electric Power Company announced on 30 August. The unit is one of five Japanese reactors to have been restarted, but is now closed after a court injunction suspended its operation. Takahama unit 3 restarted on 29 January and Takahama 4 on 26 February, but unit 4 shut was taken offline after three days following an automatic shutdown of the reactor due to a "main transformer/generator internal failure". Subsequently an injunction imposed by a district court on 9 March prevented it restarting and led to unit 3 being taken offline as well.
Kansai said that four mox fuel assemblies were among the 157 loaded into Takahama 4 before its restart in February. It said that the production of a further 16 assemblies for use in the unit is now under way at Areva's Melox facility in France. The company noted that 24 mox fuel assemblies were loaded into the core of unit 3 in December prior to its restart.
Areva signed a contract with Kansai in March 2008 to supply 12 mox fuel assemblies for use in Takahama units 3 and 4. It signed a second contract in November of that year for the supply of a further 36 assemblies. The first shipment of 20 assemblies under the second contract was delivered in June 2013. Of those, 16 have been loaded into Takahama 3, while four are being stored in the unit's used fuel pool.