The Abe government in Japan is dedicated to nuclear power for the generation of electricity. Aside from safety issues raised by the Fukushima accident, one of the big problems that Japan has always had is its lack of fuel for energy. There are no significant deposits of coal or oil in the Japanese archipelago. One of the reasons that Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor was the fact the U.S. had placed an embargo on oil shipments to Japan. Japan had about fifty operational nuclear power reactors before the Fukushima disaster. Some will probably be restarted but as much as one third may never be operated again because of safety concerns. Like coal and oil, Japan has to import nuclear fuel for the reactors from abroad.
In addition to uranium, light water nuclear reactors can also be fueled with a mixture of uranium and plutonium referred to as MOX. Recovered plutonium is mixed with uranium to create MOX fuel which can be used in fast breeder reactors to create more fissile material as well as for fuel in light water reactors. There were plans to use MOX to fuel the Japanese reactor at Hamaoka in the Shizuoka Prefecture before the Fukushima disaster. Now the Governor of Shizuoka demands that Chubu Electric Power Company start over again to get permission from local jurisdictions before fueling the reactor with MOX. He also said that nuclear power plants should move spent fuel from cooling pools to dry cask storage.
Japan has a major reprocessing operation at Rokkasho at the northeastern tip of the island of Honshu. It includes a high level nuclear waste monitoring facility, a MOX fuel fabrication plant, a uranium enrichment plant and a land fill for low level nuclear waste. Technical problems delayed completion of the plant as well as tripled the original estimation of construction costs. The plant is now compete but will not open until late 2014 because of additional safety requirements following the Fukushima disaster. There have been major protests against starting operations at the plant and petitions against the plant with almost a million signatures.
One of the big concerns is that if the Rokkasho reprocessing plant is not restarted, then the three thousand tons of spent fuel that has been shipped there from reactors all over Japan will have to be returned to the nuclear power plants that sent it. With spent fuel pools already crowded with fuel rods, such a return policy could lead to overloading the pools to the point where the reactors would have to be shut down because they have no place to put the spent fuel when it comes out of the reactors.
The Abe government Basic Energy Plan calls for the continued pursuit of a Japanese nuclear fuel cycle that would place less reliance on foreign sources of fuel but there are many uncertainties and unanswered questions about the viability of their scheme to reprocess their spent fuel into MOX.
Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant:
