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NIIGATA, JAPAN - JAN. 5: The Tokyo Electronic Power Co., or TEPCO, and Hirohiko Izumida, the governor of north-central Niigata prefecture remained apart on January 6 over the restart of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, despite the ongoing waves of nuke restarts in western Japan. Company president Naomi Hirose met with the governor in Niigata city for the first time in a year, but the two sides did not agree on the rerun of the plant. The governor was still doubtful about TEPCO's risk management saying it disclosed some pieces of information as late as two months in the 2011 meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi nuke plant. Tepco's Hirose, meanwhile, stressed the improvement saying that the company conducted some forty times of emergency exercises at the Niigata site since 2011. TEPCO in 2013 applied for technical examinations of two of the nuke reactors at the plant but the prefectural government has yet to take up the offer. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plants are equipped with boiling-water reactors which are basically the same system with Fukushima.