TOKYO, Feb. 13, 2022—The disaster-stricken Fukushima nuclear power station is in the midst of disassembling work for decommissioning, giving a semblance to Japan’s total energy denuclearization in the next century. The country, according to the general anticipation, would build more solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable power sources to ultimately become a net-zero society with no reliance on fossil fuel too. But it’s not going to happen, Japan decided, changing a tack sharply from the view. On the contrary, Japan will enter into an age of fast reactors that can generate far more electricity than existing nuclear reactors by burning enriched spent fuels spitted out of those furnaces. Part of the enriched uranium – into near-bomb grade plutonium – can be used for nuclear bombs that Japan wants to build contingent to the amendment of its pacifist constitution that bans owning atomic weapons and formal U.S. consent. (follow-up to Jan. 9 and 28, 2022 articles.)
On Jan. 31, 2022. TerraPower, a Bill Gates company based in Bellevue, WA, confirmed that it had exchanged an MOU with Japan Atomic Energy Agency and two Mitsubishi group companies to ‘share data and resources) to the development of advanced sodium fast reactor technology.’ TerraPower late last year said it would build a SFR demonstration project with GE Hitachi in southern Wyoming jointly with the U.S. Department of Energy.
The statements effectively meant the U.S. policy on nuclear power, which to date, had been to phase out nuclear reactors to replace it with renewables, will be reactivated. With the bilateral undertaking as leverage, Japan too will strive to reopen more of its some 50 existing nuclear power reactors, from 10 or so now with U.S. encouragement, and may build new reactors.
Ultimately, Japan wants to burn enriched nuclear fuels by mixing with virgin uranium, called MOX fuels, at those and yet-to-be-built plants. The MOX-burning fast breeding experiment had been held at the experimental fast breeder reactor Monju plant that is currently in the process of decommissioning after the 1995 tainted sodium leakage accident. Joyo, which also burns MOX fuel and was Japan’s first FBR but much smaller in size, also developed a serious accident and has been kept idle since 2007. Joyo is being repaired and undergoing safety examinations for restart.
The two FBRs would be decommissioned but the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry is ensuring that the R&D will be continued to carry on the experiment results, the reason why it approached the DOE and TerraPower to encourage that joint U.S.-Japan research in the United States.
The U.S. government accepted the Japanese idea of continuing the SFR, but TerraPower announcement said that the company reminded Japan that the reactor to be built is ‘a commercial power source that will utilize once-through high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel and is not intended for either breeding fissile material or for working in tandem with a reprocessing program.’ So the United States does not want to burn enriched highly uranium that can be used for nuclear weapons.
But METI and governing Liberal Democratic Party politicians think that the TerraPowewr agreement meant that Washington had Japan more freedom of what to do about spent fuel enrichment processing at the northern Japan plant being built by JAEA and is scheduled to open later this year.
With the amendment of its pacifist constitution that bans holding nuclear weapons while developing nuclear bomb technology (it already has), Japan ultimately wants to join the global nuclear weapons club as having been demanded by former prime minister Abe and right-wing lawmakers. The United States, together with European countries as well as China and Korea, had been wary about Japan’s nuclear defense argument but in the face of growing global presence of China and North Korea’s advancing missile technology, it has not voiced strong opposition, and that was part of the reason for going ahead with the TerraPower project.
Japan currently holds 46 tons of plutonium extracted from spent fuels, far more than it can reprocess and enrich for firing its nuclear reactors.
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