Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida will hold a ministerial meeting on the restart of the Tepco nuclear power plant, by Reuters

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Tuesday that relevant ministers would meet next week to discuss the steps needed to get local approval to restart Tokyo Electric Power’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant.

Last December, the country’s nuclear regulator lifted a 2021 operational ban on the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in northern Japan due to safety violations, allowing Tepco to work on obtaining a local restart permit.

Tepco has been eager to bring the world’s largest nuclear plant back online to cut operating costs, but it still needs local approval.

“The operator and the government must work together to get local community support for the restart,” Kishida said at the Green Transformation implementation conference, a government official said.

Kishida, who will step down in September, said: “I will make every effort during my remaining term to advance ecological transformation, including preparing to restart a nuclear reactor in eastern Japan,” according to public broadcaster NHK.

It is rare for a ministerial meeting to focus on a specific power plant.

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata Prefecture has been offline since 2012, following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster that shut down all of Japan’s nuclear power plants at the time.

While Tepco received initial regulatory approval in 2017 to restart two of the plant’s reactors, it did not get local approval.

Tepco needs approval from the governor of Niigata Prefecture to resume operations. In March, the prefectural governor said more discussions were needed on a possible restart of the plant.

Japan has only been able to restart 12 reactors since 2011, with many operators still going through a re-licensing process to comply with stricter safety standards imposed after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.