From: World Perspectives <worldpnews@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Japan: What's the plutonium for?
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 01:05:59 GMT

/* Written  4:33 pm  Nov  5, 1992 by worldpnews@igc.apc.org in igc:worldp.samples */
/* ---------- "Japan: What's the plutonium for?" ---------- */
From WORLD PERSPECTIVES. Box 3074, Madison, WI 53704


JAPAN
 The following are highlights from R. Australia's One World:

Japan and France have agreed on the shipment of reprocessed
plutonium to Japan. There's little insight into why Japan sees
plutonium as such an important part of its future energy supplies.
There has been little discussion about the issue of plutonium
stockpiling, which could lead to nuclear weapons production. 

Japan made a policy decision in the 1950 to use plutonium as a
future energy source. At the time, it was considered that uranium
and oil would always be expensive. Plutonium offered the hope of
more self-sufficiency. This is because it could be retrieved and
use fuel rods from conventional uranium thermal reactors and
eventually used in so-called "fast breeding" reactors which produce
further plutonium in their energy creating process.

In the 1970's, Japan began a 40-year plutonium recycling program.
In the 1990's, Japan still seems interested in following the
plutonium power even though some critics consider it to be
infeasible.

Extracting plutonium from spent fuel is a commercial business,
monitored under the provisions of the nuclear non-proliferation
treaty by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The
critical mass of plutonium that will start off the fast breeding
plant in Japan is at this moment waiting in northern France. It is
also at the Sellefield plant in the north of England, waiting to be
reprocessed by British nuclear plants. If everything goes according
to plan, more than a third of Sellefield's plutonium will come from
Japan's power utilities.

Jean Solley(?) used to work near Sellefield. Now she is the nuclear
campaigns coordinator for Greenpeace, Australia: "Sellefield is one
of the world's largest nuclear processing plants, where the spent
nuclear fuel from a rector is taken and broken down to its
constituent parts, including plutonium. On a day-to-day basis, it's
the reprocessing that is the highest danger, basically because it's
a more routinely polluting part of the nuclear fuel cycle.

"The plutonium is being dumped in very large amounts in the Irish
Sea, and children living there have a very high rate of leukemia."

Adds Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington:
"I don't believe that if we have atom bomb materials circulating
freely in world commerce, that over time we can get away with no
catastrophic consequences. The kind of catastrophic consequences
we're talking about here is the loss of a city or blackmail by
terrorist organizations or a state that acquires this material and
has incredible coercive leverage as a result of it. As we know from
history, the world changes rather radically and unexpectedly and we
go from peaceful times to warlike times and back again to peaceful
times. What we don't want to have is a lot of atom bomb material
lying around, which could rapidly be converted into weapons if
circumstances once again change for the worse.

"There is no debate really in the technical community that any form
of plutonium, including the kind that is created in nuclear power
reactors, can be made into weapons. We have among out advisors to
the Nuclear Control Institute the former head of nuclear weapons
design at the Los Alamos national laboratory for a quarter of a
century, and he's got a paper for us in which this point is being
made absolutely clear. In fact, this stuff is so potent that even
if from a design standpoint it's not ideal weapons material, even
the fizzle yields 1,000 tons of TNT. If it performs to its so-
called "nominal yield," then it has a Nagasaki-type yield of 20,000
tons of TNT."

"Another reason why Japan should not be shipping a lot of plutonium
from spent fuel and injecting it into commerce is that now that the
US and the former Soviet Union are dismantling their weapons,
what's coming out of these weapons in addition to plutonium is
highly enriched uranium, in enormous quantities. That highly
enriched uranium can be blended down with natural uranium to become
low-enriched uranium and is perfectly suitable as a fuel for
reactors. It is the ideal fuel for reactors. It is the Soviet
highly-enriched uranium that Japan should be buying up as a future
contingency reserve, while with plutonium, what the Japanese should
be doing is sending their excess plutonium to Russia to be mixed in
with the weapons plutonium and that in turn mixed with high-level
radio-active waste and buried deep in the ground. (11/4)

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