Japan's Monju reactor endeavors to improve safety protocols

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA), operator of the troubled Monju sodium-cooled fast reactor located in Fukui Prefecture in the east of Japan, said Thursday it will endeavor to raise its equipment inspection protocols and overall safety management procedures in a bid to reverse a ban preventing the facility from operating.

The ban was slapped on Monju's operation in May 2013 by Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) after the watchdog found that around 10,000 pieces of equipment at the facility had not been adequately inspected by the operator.

One month later during further safety inspections the NRA revealed that the safety inspections on another 2,300 pieces of equipment had been omitted by the JAEA.

Shinzo Saito, chief of the Monju facility, told NRA representatives Thursday that the JAEA will endeavor to prioritize safety and do its utmost to follow revamped safety guidelines. The former JAEA chief also said the new guidelines will see the training of new personnel in new safety procedures.

The JAEA said it plans to submit its new safety and improvement directives to the NRA in November this year, although the ban on Monju's operation will likely stay in place in the near term, officials from the NRA said.

The Monju facility has been plagued with problems since achieving criticality in 1994. Such problems included a sodium- detector and pipe cooling ventilator malfunction in February 2012 and an operating error in April 2013 that saw two of the plant's three emergency reactors become unstable.

In addition, in September 2013 the reactor's vital data transmission system stopped communicating with the government's Emergency Response Support System.

The JAEA's problems reached their zenith in November 2012 when the NRA realized that the plant's operator had omitted regular safety checks from reports, with further investigation confirming that inspections and intermittent safety checks had not been performed on some 10,000 out of almost 40,000 pieces of the plant' s equipment before a previously agreed deadline.