The Japanese are still debating the wisdom of restarting their fleet of over fifty reactors in light of the disaster at Fukushima. However, they are on the verge of starting a new nuclear facility that marks a major expansion of their nuclear industry. It was recently announced that a nuclear reprocessing plant that took twenty years to build and cost thirty billion dollars is slated to be brought online this coming October. The purpose of the plant is to reprocess some of the seventeen thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel currently sitting in cooling pools across Japan. The plant will convert enough spent nuclear fuel each year to make eight tons of plutonium..
The new plant is located near Rokkasho in the Aomori Prefecture at the north tip of Honshu, the largest of the islands that make up the nation of Japan. A small fishing village has become a city with the influx of workers who built the new nuclear facility. A great deal of the nuclear waste in Japan has been shipped to and is being stored in this area, a development which concerns some of the original inhabitants. On the other side of the debate are villagers who appreciate the hundreds of millions of dollars from taxes and subsides flowing into the village treasury.
As I discussed in a previous post about the Monju fast breeder reactor program, Japan is very poor in traditional energy resources such as coal, oil and natural gas. They have no uranium but projects such as Monju and the new reprocessing plant at Rokkasho would allow them to reuse nuclear materials in spent fuel rods and increase the amount of energy they could derive from each pound of imported uranium.
A big international concern about this new Japanese reprocessing plant is that it could be used to create weapons grade plutonium. Even though Japan is the only country ever attacked with nuclear bombs, there are people in Japan calling for it to develop its own nuclear weapons. The recent flare up of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula as North Korea threatens to use nuclear weapons on South Korea have brought new energy to those advocating that Japan have nuclear weapons. Some in South Korea are calling for the development of nuclear weapons. It looks like there could be a nuclear arms race in East Asia which upsets the current nuclear powers who are trying to reduce their nuclear weapons stockpiles.
The Japanese assure everyone that they will mix the plutonium with uranium so that it cannot be used for making weapons. And that they well have U.N. inspectors on site to insure that they abide by international rules. However, if an arms race did start in their part of the world, I wonder how long it would be before some of the new plutonium found its way into warheads on Japanese missiles.
Another big concern that I have is that the major share holder in the reprocessing facility is TEPCO, the company that owns the nuclear reactors that melted down at Fukushima. This company has already been caught falsifying reports, hold back critical information, lying to the public and the government, employing workers supplied by the Japanese Yakuza and engaging in other unethical and illegal behavior. It seems to me that TEPCO is a very bad choice to manage such a critical and potentially dangerous nuclear facility as the Rokkasho reprocessing plant. Of course, if Japan drops nuclear power and switches to alternative energy, they will not need these nuclear recycling facilities.
