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Letter from Japan: A Reckless Love Affair with the Atom
The civilian use of plutonium by Japanese firms raises questions
By PETER McKILLOP
October 7, 1999
Web posted at 11 p.m. Hong Kong time, 11 a.m. EDT
There has been a lot of sound and fury in Japan following the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. Police with Geiger counters have raided the facilities of the Tokaimura uranium-processing plant where the incident occurred. To reassure worried consumers, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi sunk his teeth into a juicy melon grown on a farm near the JCO Co. plant, and the now-infamous stainless-steel bucket (or a version of it) that was used to transport the highly radioactive fuel was presented to the press.
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The p.r. effort accomplished what it set out to do: mollify a skittish populace and conveniently ignore far more ominous developments that were happening just beyond the media glare. While engineers were struggling to bring the Tokaimura plant under control, thousands of kilograms of plutonium-laced nuclear fuel were being quietly unloaded in ports across Japan. South of Tokyo, the British ship Pacific Pintail stealthily slipped into Japanese waters with a deadly cargo of 225 kg of mixed plutonium and uranium oxide (MOX). On Monday its sister ship Pacific Teal unloaded its steel-encased cargo of 210 kg of fuel reprocessed in France.
The implications are immense, and scary. The MOX, reprocessed from spent nuclear fuel at British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. in northwestern England, will be used by a Japanese electric company to fuel a nuclear reactor. That means that the same commercial industry that allowed untrained workers to slop about with pails of radioactive fuel will now begin handling plutonium! The civilian use of plutonium is a world's first. And the company, Kansai Electric Power, has not distinguished itself when it comes to handling plutonium. It recently sent inspectors to the U.K., where the fuel is made, and found that at least 22 tests of MOX fuel had been falsified. (British Nuclear Fuels last week admitted that records relating to tests of 11 batches of MOX fuel had been tampered with.) Still, the shipment was nevertheless allowed to proceed.
Japan's decision to go ahead with letting civilians use plutonium makes it clear that despite the heated public rhetoric, it has no intention of stopping its reckless love affair with the atom. To the contrary: by the year 2010, the country plans to have up to 18 MOX-fueled reactors. That's a lot of plutonium to cart around in stainless-steel buckets.
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