REUTERS
 
The influential governor of a Japanese region rebuffed on Tuesday pleas by Tokyo Electric Power to restart the world's largest nuclear plant, saying the utility had not atoned for the disaster at its Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011.
 
Governor Hirohiko Izumida of Niigata prefecture is a staunch critic of Tokyo Electric Co and has veto power over the operation of the company's Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear station, a seven-reactor facility on the coast 300 km (180 miles) northwest of Tokyo.
 
"Tepco has not been proactive in investigating the cause of the Fukushima accident," Izumida told Tepco president Naomi Hirose during their first meeting in almost a year.
 
A massive earthquake and tsunami set off triple nuclear meltdowns at Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi plant in March 2011, triggering the worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.
 
All 48 of Japan's reactors remain offline as reactors face checks from a nuclear regulator set up after the Fukushima accident.
 
Tepco was nationalised to deal with the cleanup of the Fukushima plant. The company has applied to restart two reactors at Kashiwazaki Kariwa, but there is no start date.
 
Only two reactors at Kyushu Electric Power Co's Sendai plant in southern Japan have cleared most of the regulatory checks.
 
Even without restarting its biggest plant, Tepco has fared better than its competitors, slashing costs and bouncing back to a $3.7 billion net profit last year. It expects to post a full-year profit this year and will not need to raise electricity rates.
 
A former trade ministry bureaucrat, Izumida is one of Tepco's toughest critics but he is under pressure to balance his stance with the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which has repeatedly vowed to restart nuclear facilities that meet regulatory standards.
 
Some experts like Takeo Kikkawa, a Hitotsubashi University professor who has been involved in the government's energy debate, has called Tepco's bid to reopen Kashiwazaki Kariwa "an illusion" and called for a scheme that would consolidate Tepco's reactors under a different entity, managed by Tohoku Electric Power which owns and has operated nuclear plants in northern Japan.
 
Izumida also pressed Tepco to disclose testimonies of its former and current executives given to investigators after the disaster. Hirose said the company could not force people to disclose testimony.
 
The government has released interviews with some officials and with the late manager of the plant, who told investigators he had doubts about the safety of large nuclear facilities like Kashiwazaki Kariwa even before the disaster. (Reporting by Kentaro Hamada; Writing by Mari Saito; Editing by William Mallard, Robert Birsel)