Destination unknown: Rokkasho and the international future of nuclear reprocessing

International Affairs

Volumn 82, Issue 4, 2006, Pages

  Walker, William ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33745434768     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: 14682346     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2006.00566.x     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. Frans Berkhout, Tataujiro Suzuki and William Walker, 'The approaching plutonium surplus: a Japanese/European predicament', International Affairs 66:3, 1990, pp. 523-43.
2. When uranium is irradiated with neutrons in a reactor, the isotope uranium-235 fissions, releasing energy and further neutrons, while the Isotope uranium-238 captures neutrons, causing It to transmute into plutonium. The 'spent fuels' discharged from reactors after months or years of irradiation therefore contain plutonium along with residual uranium and radioactive wastes. Reprocessing is a chemical process that enables these materials to be separated.
3. A typical modern nuclear weapon uses 3-4kg of fissile plutonium. Taking losses Into account, 200-300 nuclear weapons could potentially be manufactured from a tonne (1,000 kg) of plutonium.
4. 'Fissile material' is the generic term for isotopes, notably of plutonium and uranium, that can be fissioned through neutron irradiation.
5. The move against reprocessing began under the Ford administration during the 1976 election campaign. The Carter administration's non-proliferation policy of 1977 also included indefinite postponement of the FBR's commercialization.
6. In MOX fuels, most of the uranium-235 isotope in uranium fuels is replaced by fissile plutonium, which is mixed with uranium-238 (both in oxide form). Unlike uranium, plutonium is highly radioactive, requiring shielding which raises the costs of fuel fabrication.
7. This occurred through the 'Murkowski Amendment' to the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1988.
8. The commitments were contractual (binding contracts with foreign utilities), industrial (facilities constructed) and political (intergovernmental agreements and the prior stances taken by the British government, political parties and leading politicians). See William. Walker, THORP and the politics of commitment (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 1999). At a vital moment, the Japanese utilities intervened in the debate by financing an advertisement, at BNFL's behest, in the Financial Times of 23 June 1993 expressing their wish to see THORP brought into operation. This helped to swing the parliamentary debate in THORP's favour.
9. The declared policy is to reprocess all spent fuel produced by French reactors, the plutonium increasingly being recycled in a new generation of reactors designed to optimize MOX consumption. None of these reactors has yet been licensed for construction in France. On the French reprocessing and recycling programmes, see World nuclear industry status report 2004 and the French plutonium program, Mycle Schneider Consulting, Paris, 31 March 2005.
10. MOX recycling in Magnox and advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGR) has always been judged uneconomic, and large storage ponds were constructed at the Sizewell pressurized water reactor (PWR) to obviate the need for reprocessing. The necessity of reprocessing Magnox fuels, which have given rise to the bulk of UK plutonium, was long proclaimed on safety and environmental grounds as they corrode when stored in water. The cheaper and more benign alternative of dry storage was rejected, despite being well established at the Wylfa reactor site.
11. Managing the nuclear legacy: a strategy for action, presented to parliament by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, July 2002. www.dti.gov.uk/nuclearcleanup/pdfs/whitepaper.pdf, last accessed 5 January 2006.
12. Preface by Sir Anthony Cleaver, NDA chairman, to 'NDA strategy - draft for consultation' (London: Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, June 2005), p. 6. NDA's 'approved strategy' was published in March 2006.
13. 'NDA strategy - draft for consultation'.
14. Another reason for reopening THORP is to allow time to establish dry storage capacity for discharged from Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors fuels which have hitherto been reprocessed.
15. There are three vitrification lines at Sellafield. Their performance has disappointed over many years.
16. Average throughput at Tokai has ranged from 30 to 60 tonnes per year since operation began in 1977.
17. They included the falsification of MOX fabrication data by BNFL, which disrupted MOX testing programmes of Kansai Electric and Tokyo Electric Power Companies, Japan's largest utilities.
18. This right is customary, rather than legally enshrined, under the 'safety agreement' between local governments and utility companies. Although this is only a 'gentlemen's agreement', it is politically unfeasible for utilities to neglect 'prior consent' clauses specified by the agreement.
19. METI succeeded the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in 2001.
20. It involved uranium enrichment, waste storage and vitrification as well as reprocessing.
21. There was a considerable public debate on this issue in 2002-2003. See e.g. the Fukushima Prefecture's 'Interim report of the Energy Policy Study Group', Sept. 2002. The debate was enlivened by the proposed liberalization of electricity markets which forced disclosure of Rokkasho's costs.
22. This estimate includes the reprocessing of spent fuel, decommissioning of the plant and disposal of transuranic wastes, but does not include MOX fabrication cost and spent-fuel storage costs. A separate funding scheme has been established for final disposal of high-level waste.
23. This assumes a concentration of total plutonium in spent fuel of 1%.
24. Design output is 130 tonnes of MOX fuel per year. The weight of inserted fissile plutonium can be roughly calculated by dividing the weight of MOX fuel by 16.
25. This is tied up with disputes over which institution (the state?) should ultimately take responsibility for the safe storage, treatment and disposal of wastes.
26. Para. 13 of the 1998 guidelines notes 'the importance of balancing supply and demand, including demand for reasonable working stocks for nuclear operations, as soon as practical'. In August 2003 the JAEC announced its new guideline for plutonium management, requiring utilities to submit their plutonium usage plans annually before separation of plutonium. The first such plan was published in January 2006.
27. The plutonium, storage capacities at Rokkasho and Tokai (reported as 30 and 20 tonnes respectively) could be set as upper bounds for the plutonium stockpile.
28. On the NPT review conference, see Rebecca Johnson, 'Politics and protection: why the 2005 NPT review conference failed', Disarmament Diplomacy, no. 80, Autumn 2005, pp. 3-19.
29. For a broad analysis of problems of nuclear order, see William Walker, Weapons of mass destruction and international order, Adelphi Paper 370 (London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, Dec. 2004).
30. For an overview, see Mitsuru Kurosawa, 'Moving beyond the debate on a nuclear Japan', Nonproliferation Review II: 3, Fall/Winter 2004.
31. Holdings of civil plutonium are reported by the five NPT nuclear-weapon states plus Belgium, Germany, Japan and Switzerland to the IAEA under the Guidelines for the management of plutonium (INFCIRC/549). On the background to these transparency measures, see Jean-Francois Rioux, 'Options for the management of highly-fissionable civilian materials', Nonproliferation Review 12: 2, Spring/Summer 1995, pp. 52-7.
32. Multilateral approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle (INFCIRC/640), report of expert group, IAEA, Vienna, 22 Feb. 2005.
33. On the Japanese government's position, see the statement made by Takanashi Nakane at the 2005 NPT review conference: 'It is also important to examine whether MNA (multilateral approach to nuclear fuel cycle) will not unduly affect the peaceful use of nuclear energy by a non-nuclear-weapon State that carries out nuclear activities with the confidence of the international community.' The Japanese government has subsequently submitted proposals including one to provide uranium fuel fabrication services to any multinational arrangement. They are alluded to by Tadao Yanase, The challenges for nuclear energy policy in Japan, METI, 21 Nov. 2005, http://www.enecho.meti.go.jp/ english/index.htm.
34. See Shlnichi Ogawa and Michael Schiffer, 'Japan's plutonium reprocessing dilemma', Arms Control Today 35: 8, Oct. 2005.
35. See e.g. Toniio Kawata, 'Non-proliferation norms in civilian nuclear fuel cycle: the Japanese model', paper presented to Sandia International Security Conference, 4-6 April 2005, http://www.intlsecconf.saudia.gov/kawata_05isc.pdf.
36. A senior government official was quoted by the Wall Street Journal saying that he would not want South Korea to operate a reprocessing plant such as Rokkasho: 'I don't think the international community can easily trust the country which had this [secret experiment] in their past.' See Carla Anne Robbins and Gordon Fairclough, 'Antinuclear sentiment erodes throughout Asia', Wall Street Journal, 16 June 2005.
37. Letter from. Representative Edward J. Markey and five others to Ambassador Ryozo Kato, 26 Jan. 2006.
38. US Department of Energy, Fact Sheet on Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), Feb. 2005, http://www.gnep.energy.gov/pdfs/06-GA50035b.pdf.
39. The actinides include uranium, neptunium, plutonium and americium. They are responsible for much of the long-lived radioactivity of nuclear wastes. Isotopes of each actinide can be fissioned.
40. See Jungming Kang and Frank von Hippel, 'Limited proliferation resistance benefits from recycling unseparated transuranics and lanthanides from light water reactor fuels', Science and Global Security 13, 2005, pp. 169-81.