From: ACTIV-L via Jym Dyer <jym@mica.berkeley.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.activism,sci.energy,talk.environment
Subject: EDITORIAL: Japan: What's the Plutonium For?
Followup-To: alt.activism.d,sci.energy,talk.environment
Date: 15 Nov 1992 08:21:44 GMT
Organization: The Naughty Peahen Party Line
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu

[From EcoNet worldp.samples Conference]
[Also Posted to misc.activism.progressive (by Somebody Else)]

=o= I personally have quite a few problems with this article,
but I figure it's important for folks to see some other
perspectives on this issue.
    <_Jym_>

================================================================
=> From: World Perspectives <worldpnews@igc.apc.org>
=> Subject: Japan: What's the plutonium for?

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 our
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)