Japan exempts Tepco from environment impact studies for new power plants

Tokyo (Platts)--5Apr2011/555 am EDT/955 GMT

The Japanese government has decided to exempt Tokyo Electric Power Company from the need to conduct environmental impact studies before expanding and building power plants using fossil fuels, a government official said Tuesday.

The Environment Ministry and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry reached this decision under the Disaster Countermeasures Basis Law to allow Tepco to build thermal power plants to make up for its nuclear capacity lost after the March 11 earthquake, the official said.

This would be the first time that Japan has exempted any company from carrying out an environmental impact study, which normally takes two-three years, since the environmental impact assessment act came into effect in 1999, the official said.

It was not immediately clear how Tepco plans to restore its lost power generation capacity, but it is expected to submit its plans to the government within a year, he added.

The March 11 earthquake and tsunami led to an automatic shutdown of its Fukushima-1 (Daiichi) and Fukushima-2 (Daini) nuclear power plants.

Tepco currently has only 4.912 GW of nuclear power generation capacity operational -- four out of seven units -- at its 8.468 GW Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, representing 28% of its total installed capacity of 17.31 GW.

--Takeo Kumagai, takeo_kumagai@platts.com

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