Is Japan ready to forgo nuclear reprocessing?

An international delegation of scientists visited Japan in an effort to persuade political leaders there to abandon the nation’s civilian plutonium fuel-cycle program. The mid-January trip was organized by Princeton University professor Frank von Hippel, a long-time advocate of minimizing the world’s inventory of nuclear weapons–usable materials. In an interview, von Hippel said that he and two colleagues met with Goshi Hosono, Japan’s minister for the environment and for the restoration from and prevention of nuclear accidents, and, separately, with a dozen or so members of the Diet. Six of the lawmakers belonged to a caucus known as the DPJ Backend Study Group (DPJ stands for the governing Democratic Party of Japan). According to von Hippel and published reports, the 70-member study group has decided to oppose the further use of reprocessing in Japan.

But von Hippel says it appears that the Japanese administration remains committed to the use of plutonium fuel. “The question is whether the politicians will go with the bureaucracy or with the population,” which has become more antinuclear since last year’s Fukushima disaster, he says. Japan is the only non-nuclear-weapons state to reprocess, although other countries, including the Netherlands and Belgium, have their spent fuel reprocessed by France or the UK. All but a few of Japan’s 50 reactors have been shut down since or prior to the Fukushima event.

The government of Aomori Prefecture, where the Rokkasho reprocessing plant is located, is eager to see revenues begin to flow from the plant, which has had its startup delayed repeatedly since 1997, von Hippel says. Several attempts to start up the plant in recent years, most recently in January, were suspended when problems were encountered in the process, known as vitrification, of converting high-level nuclear waste generated from reprocessing into a stable form for long-term storage. In the past the plant was troubled by leaks in its spent-fuel intake pools.

The Japan Atomic Energy Commission has estimated that it will cost ¥7.8 trillion ($101.9 billion) and take from 2012 until 2051 to reprocess the 32 000 tons of spent fuel that Rokkasho was designed for. Rokkasho was built to replace a plant located at Tokai that reprocessed up to 100 tons of spent fuel per year. Tokai opened in the early 1970s and ended operations in 2006, but it is being kept in standby condition for R&D.

The International Panel on Fissile Materials, a nongovernmental organization cochaired by von Hippel, reported in January that Japan currently has 9.9 metric tons of plutonium separated from spent nuclear fuel within its borders. Another 35 tons of Japanese-owned plutonium was separated by reprocessing in France and the UK and remains in those countries.

Other delegation members on the Japan visit were Anatoli Diakov of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology; Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, Washington, DC; Gordon MacKerron, director of the science and technology policy research department at Sussex University, UK; M. V. Ramana, a physicist with Princeton’s program on science and global security; Mycle Schneider, an independent nuclear consultant in Paris; Masafumi Takubo, an independent nuclear consultant in Japan; and Gordon Thompson, with the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fumihiko Yoshida, an editorial writer with the newspaper Asahi Shinbum, also participated in the meetings.