News1 29th Aug 2019The Astrid Fast Reactor Project is shut down by the Atomic EnergyCommission. A blow to the future of the sector. This was to be the nextstep in the development of the French nuclear industry, one that wouldallow it to project into the future, but which is likely never to see the
light of day. According to our information, the Astrid Fast Neutron Reactor
(RNR) project is being abandoned by the Atomic Energy and Alternative
Energies Commission (CEA), which is nevertheless at the origin.
Le Monde 29th Aug 2019 Astrid, the acronym for Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration, is a sodium-cooled fast reactor prototype project to be built at the Marcoule nuclear site in the Gard.
The objective of this new generation is to use depleted uranium and plutonium as fuel, in other words to reuse the radioactive materials from the electricity generation of the current nuclear fleet and largely stored at the La Hague site. (Channel), operated by Orano (formerly Areva).
ACROnique of Fukushima 31st March 2019 According to the Asahi , Orano is preparing to send MOx fuel to Japan from
2020. It is intended for the Takahama power plant , operated by Kansai Electric in Fukui province. The previous shipment dates from 2017. There are 32 nuclear assemblies that should sail to Japan. The amount of plutonium contained in these fuels is one tonne.
KEPCo will have yet to repatriate 10 tons of plutonium in the form of MOx fuel to clear its stock.
And Japan must also drastically reduce its stock in order to hope to start its reprocessing plant in Rokkashô mura, which is already 24 years behind schedule . However, only four reactors currently operate with MOx in Japan: Takahama 3 and 4, Genkai-3 and Ikata-3 ( see the state of the Japanese nuclear fleet ).
Department of Energy moves forward with controversial test reactor, Science, By Adrian ChoFeb. 28, 2019 ,The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today that it will go forward with plans to build a controversial new nuclear reactor that some critics have called a boondoggle. If all goes as planned, the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) will be built at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL) near Idaho Falls and will generate copious high-energy neutrons to test new material and technologies for nuclear reactors. That would fill a key gap in the United States’s nuclear capabilities, proponents say. However, some critics have argued that the project is just an excuse to build a reactor of the general type that can generate more fuel than it consumes by “breeding” plutonium…….
The VTR—also known as the Versatile Fast Neutron Source—would be the first reactor DOE has built since the 1970s. It would differ in one key respect from the typical commercial power reactors. Power reactors use a uranium fuel that contains just a few percent of the fissile isotope uranium-235 and is made to be used once and discarded. In contrast, the VTR would use a fuel richer in uranium-235 that would generate more high-energy neutrons as it “burned.” Those neutrons could be used to test how new materials and components age within the core of a conventional nuclear reactor, a key factor in reactor design.
Late last year, the Energy Department (DOE), began work on a new flagship nuclear project, the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR), a sodium-cooled fast reactor. If completed, the project will dominate nuclear power research at DOE. The department’s objective is to provide the groundwork for building lots of fast-power reactors. This was a dream of the old Atomic Energy Commission, DOE’s predecessor agency. The dream is back. But before this goes any further, Congress needs to ask, what is the question to which the VTR is the answer? It won’t be cheap and there are some serious drawbacks in cost, safety, but mainly in its effect on nonproliferation.
Congress has to ask hard questions: Is there an economic advantage to such reactors? Or one in safety? Or is it just what nuclear engineers, national laboratories, and subsidy-hungry firms would like to do?
The answer of DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory, which would operate the reactor, is cast in terms of engineering and patriotic goals, not economic ones: “US technological leadership in the area of fast reactor systems . . . is critical for our national security. These systems are likely to be deployed around the globe and U.S. leadership in associated safety and security policies is in our best national interest.” In other words, we need to build fast reactors because DOE thinks other people will be building them, and we need to stay ahead.
In the 1960s, when the Atomic Energy Commission concentrated on fast reactors (“fast” because they don’t use a moderator to slow down neutrons in the reactor core), it argued with a certain plausibility that uranium ore was too scarce to provide fuel for large numbers of conventional light-water reactors that “burned” only a couple percent of their uranium fuel. Fast reactors offered the possibility, at least in principle, of using essentially all of the mined uranium as fuel, and thus vastly expanding the fuel supply. To do this you operate them as breeder reactors—making more fuel (that is, using excess neutrons available in fast reactors to convert inert uranium to plutonium) than they consume to produce energy. The possibility of doing so is the principal advantage of fast reactors.
But we then learned there are vast deposits of uranium worldwide, and at the same time many fewer nuclear reactors were installed than were originally projected, so there is no foreseeable fuel shortage. Not only that, the reprocessing of fuel, which is intrinsic to fast reactor operation, has turned out to be vastly more expensive than projected. Finally, by all accounts fast reactors would be more expensive to build than conventional ones, the cost of which is already out of sight. In short, there is no economic argument for building fast reactors.
When it comes to safety, sodium-cooled fast reactors operate under low pressure, which is an advantage. But fast reactors are worrisome because, whereas a change in the configuration of a conventional nuclear core—say, squeezing it tighter—makes it less reactive, the corresponding result in a fast reactor is to make it more reactive, potentially leading to an uncontrolled chain reaction.
With regard to nonproliferation, the issue that mainly concerns us is that the fast reactor fuel cycle depends on reprocessing and recycling of its plutonium fuel (or uranium 233 if using thorium instead of uranium). Both plutonium and uranium 233 are nuclear explosives. Widespread use of fast reactors for electricity generation implies large quantities of nuclear explosives moving through commercial channels. It will not be possible to restrict such use to a small number of countries. The consequent proliferation dangers are obvious. And while it is doubtful the U.S. fast reactor project will lead to commercial exploitation—few, if any, projects from DOE ever do—U.S. pursuit of this technology would encourage other countries interested in this technology, like Japan and South Korea, to do so.
One should add that one of the claims of enthusiasts for recycling spent fuel in fast reactors is that it permits simpler waste management. This is a complicated issue, but the short answer is that rather than simplifying, reprocessing and recycling complicate the waste disposal process.
With all these concerns, and the lack of a valid economic benefit, why does the Energy Department want to start an “aggressive” and expensive program of fast reactor development? It’s true that so far only exploratory contracts have been let, on the order of millions of dollars (to GE-Hitachi). But the Department is already leaning awfully far forward in pursuing the VTR. It estimates the total cost to be about $2 billion, but that’s in DOE-speak. We’ve learned that translates into several times that amount.
But beyond that, the nuclear engineering community, and the wider community of nuclear enthusiasts, have never given up the 1960s AEC dream of a fast breeder-driven, plutonium-fueled world. Such reactors were to have been deployed by 1980 and were to take over electricity generation by 2000. It didn’t even get off the ground, in part because of AEC managerial incompetence, but mainly because it didn’t make sense.
After the 1974 Indian nuclear explosion and the realization that any country with a small reactor and a way to separate a few kilograms of plutonium could make a bomb, proliferation became a serious issue. In 1976 President Gerald Ford announced that we should not rely on plutonium until the world could reliably control its dangers as a bomb material. The plutonium devotees never accepted this change. Jimmy Carter froze construction of an ongoing fast-breeder prototype, the Clinch River Reactor, about three time the size of the proposed VTR. Ronald Reagan tried to revive it but, as its rationale thinned and its cost mounted, Congress shut it down in 1983. The plutonium enthusiasts thought they got their chance under George W. Bush with a fast reactor and a reprocessing and recycling program under of the rubric of Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. But it was so poorly thought out it didn’t go anywhere. More or less the same laboratory participants are now pushing the VTR.
The DOE advanced reactor program has many irons in the fire, mostly in the small reactor category. But do not be misled. They are mostly small potatoes without much future. Only the fast reactor project is the real thing, bureaucratically, that is. Although at this point DOE has only contracted for conceptual design, the follow-up will cost many millions and take many years. Nothing attracts national laboratories, industrial firms, and Washington bureaucracies as much as the possibility of locking into a large multiyear source of funding.
Congress needs to look hard at the rationale for a fast reactor program. This means getting into the details. At a Senate Appropriations hearing last month on advanced reactors, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said rather plaintively, “We cast the votes, and cross our fingers hoping nothing bad will happen.” That’s not good enough.
Victor Gilinsky is program advisor for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) in Arlington, Virginia. He served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Henry Sokolski is executive director of NPEC and the author of Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future (second edition 2019). He served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the office of the U.S. secretary of defense in the Cheney Pentagon.
The rise and demise of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Henry Sokolski, February 6, 2019This year marks the 36th anniversary of the termination of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, a federally funded commercial demonstration effort. In the very early 1980s, it was the largest public-works project in the United States. Japan, South Korea, China, France, Russia, and the United States are now all again considering building similar plants. For each, how and why Clinch River was launched and killed is a history that speaks to their nuclear future. This history involves more than cost benefit analysis. For the public and political leadership, facts and arguments rarely close an initial sale of a large government-funded, high-tech commercialization program. Nor do they generally goad officials to abandon such projects. Such acts are fundamentally political: Fears and hopes drive them. Certainly, to understand why the US government launched and subsequently killed Clinch River requires knowledge not just of what the public and its political leadership thought, but also of how they felt.
Unwarranted fears of uranium’s scarcity fueled interest in fast-breeder reactors. …….in 1945, uranium 235, a fissile uranium isotope that can readily sustain a chain reaction, was believed to be so scarce, it was assumed there was not enough of it to produce nuclear electricity on a large scale. Scientists saw the answer in fast-breeder reactors………
The Atomic Energy Commission publicly promoted their commercialization with confident, cartoonish optimism. In one publication, the commission asked the upbeat question: “Johnny had three truckloads of plutonium. He used three of them to power New York for a year. How much plutonium did Johnny have left?” The answer: “Four truckloads.”
Unfortunately, this pitch glossed over two stubborn facts. First, because plutonium is so much more toxic and difficult to handle than uranium, it is many times more expensive to use as a reactor fuel than using fresh uranium. Second, because plutonium fast-breeder reactors use liquid metal coolants, such as liquid sodium, operating them safely is far more challenging and expensive than conventional reactors.
When private industry tried in the early 1960s to operate its own commercial-sized fast-breeder, Fermi I, the benefits were negative. Barely three years after Fermi 1 came online, a partial fuel meltdown in 1966 brought it down. It eventually resumed operations before being officially shut down in 1972.
These facts, however, are rarely emphasized. Those backing breeders—whether it be in 1945, 1975, or today—focus not on reliability and economics, but rather that we are about to run out of affordable uranium. For the moment, of course, we are not. Uranium is plentiful and cheap as is enriching it. This helps explain why the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States, no longer operate any commercial-sized fast-breeder reactors and are in no immediate rush to build new ones………
When the Atomic Energy Commission argued the case for building a breeder reactor in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it projected 1,000 reactors would be on line in the United States by the year 2000 (the real number turned out to be 103) and that the United States would soon run out of affordable uranium. Also, by the mid-1960s, the commission needed a new, massive project to justify its continued existence. Its key mission, to enrich uranium for bombs and reactors, had been completed and was overbuilt. The commission was running out of construction and research projects commensurate with its large budget. A breeder-reactor- commercialization program with all the reprocessing, fuel testing, and fuel fabrication plants that would go with it, seemed a worthy successor.
But the most powerful political supporter of Clinch River, then-President Richard Nixon, focused on a different point. Nixon saw the project less as a commercial proposition than as a way to demonstrate his power to secure more votes by providing government-funded jobs while at the same time affirming his commitment to big-science, engineering, and progress……….
the Energy Department videotaped safety tests it had conducted of how molten sodium might react once it came in contact with the reactor’s concrete containment structure. Concrete contains water crystals. Molten sodium reacts explosively when it comes in contact with oxygen, including oxygen contained in water. What the test demonstrated and the video showed was concrete exploding when it came in contact with liquid sodium.
This set off waves of worry at the department………
Just weeks before the final vote, the Congressional Budget Office released its financial assessment of the Energy Department’s last ditch effort to use loan guarantees to fund the project. Even under the most conservative assumptions, the budget analysts determined that the loan guarantees would only increase the project’s final costs. This helped push the project over a political cliff. The final Senate vote: 56 against, 40 for. All of the 16 deciding votes came from former Clinch River supporters.
No commercial prospects? Militarize. Nixon backed numerous science commercialization projects like Clinch River, including the Space Shuttle Program and the supersonic transport plane……… While the Space Shuttle Program won congressional support, the envisioned satellite contracts never materialized. The program became heavily dependent on military contracts. Finally, our national security depended upon it.
Although Clinch River never was completed, as its costs spiraled, it too attracted military attention. …….
Essentially, it didn’t matter when you asked–1971 or 1983—Clinch River was always another seven years and at least another $2.1 billion away from completion. ……
With Clinch River, what we now know, we may yet repeat. Fast-reactor commercialization projects and support efforts, such as Argonne National Laboratory’s Small Modular Fast Reactor, the US-South Korean Pyroreprocessing effort, the Energy Department’s Virtual (Fast) Test Reactor, France’s Astrid Fast Reactor Project, the PRISM Reactor, the TerraPower Traveling Wave reactor, India’s thorium breeder, Russia’s BN-1200, China’s Demonstration Fast-Breeder Reactor, continue to capture the attention and support of energy officials in Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, France, the US, and India. None of these countries have yet completely locked in their decisions. How sound their final choices turn out to be, will ultimately speak to these governments’ credibility and legitimacy.
In the case of Clinch River, the decision to launch the program ultimately rested on a cynical set of political calculations alloyed to an ideological faith in fast reactors and the future of the “plutonium economy.” Supporters saw this future clearly. As a nuclear engineer explained to me in 1981 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the United States technically could build enough breeder reactors to keep the country electrically powered for hundreds of years without using any more oil, coal, or uranium. When I asked him, though, who would pay for this, he simply snapped that only fools let economics get in the way of the future.
This argument suggests that the case for fast reactors is beyond calculation or debate, something mandatory and urgent. That, however, never was the case, nor is it now. Instead, the equitable distribution of goods, which is a key metric of both economic and governmental performance (and ultimately of any government’s legitimacy and viability), has always taken and always must take costs into account. In this regard, we can only hope that remembering how and why Clinch River was launched and killed will help get this accounting right for similar such high-tech commercialization projects now and in the future. https://thebulletin. org/2019/02/the-rise-and- demise-of-the-clinch-river- breeder-reactor/?utm_source= Bulletin%20Newsletter&utm_ medium=iContact%20email&utm_ campaign=ClinchRiver_February6
Nobody knows what to do with a vast uranium and plutonium stockpile built up in the UK by reprocessing spent fuel. It is now a nuclear nightmare.
LONDON, 14 December, 2018 − Thirty years ago it seemed like a dream: now it is a nuclear nightmare. A project presented to the world in the 1990s by the UK government as a £2.85 billion triumph of British engineering, capable of recycling thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel into reusable uranium and plutonium is shutting down – with its role still controversial.
Launched amid fears of future uranium shortages and plans to use the plutonium produced from the plant to feed a generation of fast breeder reactors, the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, known as THORP, was thought to herald a rapid expansion of the industry.
In the event there were no uranium shortages, fast breeder reactors could not be made to work, and nuclear new build of all kinds stalled. Despite this THORP continued as if nothing had happened, recycling thousands of tons of uranium and producing 56 tons of plutonium that no one wants. The plutonium, once the world’s most valuable commodity, is now classed in Britain as “an asset of zero value.” Continue reading →
Reporterre 11th Dec 2018Claiming to ” recycle ” used nuclear fuel, the reprocessing industry complicates the management of waste by increasing the amount of plutonium and hazardous materials.
Most countries engaged in this dead-end way come out … but not France.
According to the official communication, the reprocessing does not generate
contamination, only ” authorized discharges ” . They are spit by the
chimneys, dumped at the end of a pipe buried in the Channel.
In reality, according to the independent expert Mycle Schneider, ” the plant is
authorized to reject 20,000 times more radioactive rare gases and more than
500 times the amount of liquid tritium that only one of the Flamanville
reactors located 15 km away. ” . It contributes ” almost half to the
radiological impact of all civilian nuclear installations in Europe ” . https://reporterre.net/Comment-la-France-multiplie-les-dechets-nucleaires-dangereux
Sellafield: Europe’s most radioactively contaminated site
Inside Sellafield’s death zone with the nuclear clean-up robots,By Theo Leggett, Business correspondent, BBC News, 27 November 2018
The Thorp nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, Cumbria, has recycled its final batch of reactor fuel. But it leaves behind a hugely toxic legacy for future generations to deal with. So how will it be made safe?
Thorp still looks almost new; a giant structure of cavernous halls, deep blue-tinged cooling ponds and giant lifting cranes, imposing in fresh yellow paint.
But now the complex process of decontaminating and dismantling begins.
It is a dangerous job that will take decades to complete and require a great deal of engineering ingenuity and state-of-the-art technology – some of which hasn’t even been invented yet.
This is why.
Five sieverts of radiation is considered a lethal dose for humans. Inside the Head End Shear Cave, where nuclear fuel rods were extracted from their casings and cut into pieces before being dissolved in heated nitric acid, the radiation level is 280 sieverts per hour.
We can only peer through leaded glass more than a metre thick at the inside of the steel-lined cell, which gleams under eerie, yellow-tinged lighting.
This is a place only robots can go.
They will begin the first stage of decommissioning – the post-operative clean-out – removing machinery and debris……….. Cleaning up other parts of the plant will also need robots and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).
Some will need to be developed from scratch, while others can be adapted from systems already used in other industries, such as oil and gas, car manufacturing and even the space sector……..
The site in Cumbria contains a number of other redundant facilities, some dating back to the 1950s and many of them heavily contaminated, which are currently being decommissioned………
Remote submarines have explored and begun cleaning up old storage ponds. Other remote machines are being used to take cameras deep inside decaying bunkers, filled with radioactive debris.
The job of developing machines like these is shared with a large network of specialist companies, many of them based in Cumbria itself. They form part of a growing decommissioning industry within the UK, as the country grapples with the legacy of its first era of nuclear power.
The NDA believes that these companies can use what they learn at Sellafield, and other plants, to attract further business from overseas……..https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46301596
International Panel on Fissile Materials 18th Nov 2018 Martin Forwood: The UK government announced on 14 November 2018 that the THORP reprocessing plant at Sellafield has started its planned shutdown. A
Sellafield Stakeholder committee was told that by 11 November 2018, THORP would have chopped up (sheared) its last batch of spent fuel, bringing to an end almost a quarter century of operation.
Based on the officially published ‘annual throughput’ figures (tons reprocessed per year) collated
by the environmental group Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE) since the plant opened in 1994, THORP has failed to meet its operational targets and schedules by a large margin. Just 5,045 tons were
reprocessed in the first 10 years of operation–the 7,000 tons only being completed on 4 December 4 2012–over nine years late. Not once during the Baseload period (1994-2003) was the nominal throughput rate of 1,000 tons
per year achieved. http://fissilematerials.org/blog/2018/11/sellafields_thorp_reproce.html
15th Nov 2018 On the morning after the Financial Times has called on the UK Government to reassess its long-term energy plans following the demise of Toshiba’sMoorside nuclear project, the Stop Hinkley Campaign has published a briefing about lessons we can learn from the Sellafield Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant which is in the process of closing after only 24 years of operation and a very chequered performance.
The “Lessons for Hinkley from Sellafield” briefing says: The cost of building THORP increased from
£300m in 1977 to £1.8bn on completion in 1992. With the additional cost of associated facilities this figure rose to £2.8bn. Originally expected to reprocess 7,000 tonnes of spent fuel in its first ten years, it has managed only around 9,300 in 24 years.
The original rationale for THORP ended with the closure of the UK’s fast reactor programme in 1994. The new rationale – to produce plutonium fuel for ordinary reactors – was a disaster costing the taxpayer £2.2bn.
Stop Hinkley Spokesperson Roy Pumfrey said: “The rationale for building the THORP plant at Sellafield had disappeared before it even opened. The lesson for 2018 is that we should scrap Hinkley C now before costs escalate. The cancellation costs are small relative to the £50billion extra we’ll have to pay for Hinkley’s electricity, if it ever generates any. If we wait any longer to scrap it,
we risk heading for another Sellafield-scale financial disaster.” http://www.stophinkley.org/PressReleases/pr181115.pdf
BBC 14 November 2018 Reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel from around the world has ended at Sellafield.
The last batch of waste has gone through its Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp), which opened in 1994.
It has generated an estimated £9bn by extracting new nuclear fuel from 9,000 tonnes of used rods from 30 customers in countries as far afield as Japan.
Thorp will operate until the 2070s as a storehouse for spent fuel as the site around it in Cumbria is cleaned up.
Sellafield Ltd said there would be no redundancies as a result of the closure, with all employees in roles no longer required offered alternative jobs in the business.
WJBF 26th Sept 2018 ,A Federal Appeals Court is set to discuss, Thursday, the future of Savannah
River Site’s MOX project. In a letter sent to a Texas congressman and
filed in court documents, the National Nuclear Security Agency says it
agrees with the decision made by Energy Secretary Rick Perry to stop the
project.
The State of South Carolina is suing the DOE saying its opinion on
the matter was never considered when Secretary Perry issued the directive
to end MOX earlier this year.
4 Sept 18, Kyodo,,Utilities that operate nuclear power plants stopped funding the reprocessing of nuclear fuel in fiscal 2016, their financial reports showed Sunday, a step that may affect resource-scarce Japan’s nuclear fuel recycling policy.
The 10 utilities, including Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. and Japan Atomic Power Co., apparently halted allocating reserve funds for reprocessing costs due to the huge expenses linked to building the reprocessing facilities, sources said.
The government, along with the power companies, has been pushing for the reuse of mixed-oxide, or MOX, fuel, which is created from plutonium and uranium extracted from spent fuel.
While Japan has not changed its policy on spent fuel reprocessing, the outlook for it has remained uncertain since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. At the same time, the government’s latest energy plan in July also stated for the first time that disposal of spent MOX fuel as waste can be considered.
If MOX fuel cannot be reprocessed, nuclear fuel can only be reused once. For the reprocessing of spent MOX fuel, the utilities had allocated about ¥230 billion in reserves as of March 2016.
Currently, only two reactors at Kansai Electric Power Co.’s Takahama power plant, one reactor at Shikoku Electric Power Co.’s Ikata plant and one reactor at Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Genkai power plant use MOX fuel in so-called pluthermal power generation.
As Japan has decided to cut its stockpile of plutonium, the government and utilities aim to increase plants for pluthermal generation. But if spent MOX fuel is not reprocessed, it would be considered nuclear waste, raising concerns over how to deal with it.
Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. — in which power companies have invested — has been pursuing the construction of a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in northeastern Japan as well as a MOX fuel fabrication plant, with the costs coming to about ¥16 trillion.
But a series of problems has resulted in their delay. When operational, the Rokkasho plant in Aomori Prefecture, key to Japan’s nuclear fuel cycle policy, can reprocess up to 800 tons of spent nuclear fuel per year, extracting about 8 tons of plutonium.
With this setback, if new MOX reprocessing plants are to be built, it would be hard to secure further funding.
The JAEA will launch actual fuel removal operations this month if it finds the work can be conducted safely. It was initially planned to begin late last month but was postponed after problems plagued the equipment test.
In the final exercise, control rods instead of real fuel assemblies will be removed from a container filled with sodium coolant by using the aforementioned equipment. The rods will be then packed in cans after the sodium is rinsed off and transported to a water-filled pool.
It has not been decided when the exercise will end, the agency said.
The decommissioning process for the glitch-riddled Monju is slated to take 30 years.
In the first phase, 530 assemblies in the reactor and a storage container outside the reactor will be moved to the water pool by December 2022. The JAEA has so far transferred only two fuel assemblies to the pool — one in 2008 and the other in 2009.
Japan’s ‘plutonium exception’ under fire as nuclear pact extended https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-Relations/Japan-s-plutonium-exception-under-fire-as-nuclear-pact-extended Beijing and Seoul question why US allows only Tokyo to reprocess, YUKIO TAJIMA, Nikkei staff writer, TOKYO — Japan’s nuclear cooperation agreement with the U.S. — the pillar of Tokyo’s nuclear energy policy — renews automatically on Monday after the current pact, which took effect in 1988, expires.
The agreement allows Japan to be the sole non-nuclear-weapons state to use plutonium for peaceful purposes and underlies the country’s policy of recycling spent nuclear fuel.
But the renewal comes at a time when Japan’s “plutonium exception” is increasingly under scrutiny. Instead of negotiating a new pact that could last several decades, Washington and Tokyo chose an automatic extension of the current agreement.
The agreement signed three decades ago stated that after the 30-year period expired, the terms would remain in force but could be terminated by either side with a six months’ notice. Japan worries that without a new long-term agreement, the country enters an “extremely unstable situation,” Foreign Minister Taro Kono has said.
Japan’s neighbors have cried foul over Japan’s plutonium exception. China has said it creates a path for Japan to obtain nuclear weapons. South Korea, which also has a nuclear cooperation agreement with the U.S., has pressed Washington hard to be granted similar freedom on fuel reprocessing.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia that are looking to develop their own nuclear programs have also protested.
Under President Barack Obama, Japan’s plutonium stockpiles — much of which is stored in the U.K. — drew uncomfortable attention in Washington. In March 2016, Thomas Countryman, the then-assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, told a Senate hearing that he “would be very happy to see all countries get out of the plutonium reprocessing business.”
President Donald Trump has shown less interest in preventing nuclear proliferation, but is committed to dismantling North Korea’s nuclear facilities and materials. Resolving the inconsistent treatment afforded Japan’s plutonium stockpile would make it easier to convince Pyongyang to give up reprocessing capabilities as part of its denuclearization, Countryman told Nikkei recently.
The Trump administration appears aware of these arguments. The National Security Council and State Department have requested that Japan reduce its stockpile and otherwise ensure its plutonium is used and managed appropriately. On July 3, Japan’s cabinet approved a new basic energy plan that includes reducing plutonium holdings, aiming to assuage American concerns.
But Japan’s mostly idled nuclear power industry makes working through the stockpile a challenge.At one point after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, all of the country’s reactors were offline. Nine have managed to restart under stricter safety standards adopted in the wake of the meltdowns, but only a few Japanese reactors can run on so-called mixed-oxide fuel containing plutonium.
Regulators have asked utilities such as Shikoku Electric Power and Kyushu Electric Power that are working to restart nuclear reactors to look into consuming plutonium fuel held by other power companies. But this would require potentially difficult negotiations with local governments.
One other option is to pay overseas countries that store plutonium on Japan’s behalf to dispose of them, but that would involve discussion on the international level.
“The only viable option is to explain to the world the steady efforts we are making toward reduction,” said an official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which is responsible for Japan’s energy policy.
So far, the U.S. has not called on Japan to abandon its plutonium entirely, or to speed up its reduction. And there is little chance the U.S. will end the cooperation agreement, as “Japan’s nuclear technology is indispensable to the American nuclear industry,” according to a Japanese government source.
But Tokyo worries that the Trump administration may apply the same transactional approach it has to other foreign policy issues to the question of Japan’s plutonium.
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