The German
Row on Nuclear Reprocessing Obscures the Real Danger -
Japan
By JONATHAN
POWER
Feb. 3, 1999
LONDON- The nuclear reprocessing issue is not going to
disappear off the political map even though German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder last week overrode his
environment minister and postponed legislation that would
have led to a quick ending of the shipping of nuclear waste
to reprocessing plants in Britain and France and also a
fairly rapid closing of the country's 19 nuclear power
plants.
The nuclear industry is a big and powerful lobby and, as
the debate over compensation for broken contracts
demonstrates, vast sums are at stake. But as the unanswered
questions mount on both the issues of health and military
security it can be only a matter of time before all rational
governments introduce the kind of radical steps the German
government initially announced. Indeed, Schroeder, despite
his intervention on the side of delay, is committed to end
the export of radioactive waste and the subsequent
reprocessing within a handful of years. And Germany will
also follow Sweden, Spain and Italy into steadily
decommissioning its nuclear reactors.
The rank and file Greens may be throwing up their hands
in anger at Schroeder's intervention but, at least, there is
no doubting that the German government is committed to a
transition. This is in sharp contrast to the government of
Japan whose intention to ship another dangerous load of 450
kilos of reprocessed fuel over the high seas from Britain
and France to Japan was revealed by Greenpeace last week.
The Japanese have done this before, once in 1992 and once in
1995. Each time there was an almighty row and each time they
went ahead, waited a few years for the public to forget
about it, and then did it again. The question posed seven
years ago is still apposite: why on earth is the Japanese
government allowing it? Why is it insisting on moving from
one part of the globe to another enough plutonium to make up
to 56 nuclear weapons which, if they chose, the Japanese
could construct in a mere one to three weeks?
The long-standing rationale has been that it is fuel for
a breeder reactor, the power plant that, once operational,
can survive without outside refuelling. To develop a
commercial breeder reactor will probably take another 30 to
40 years. Most countries that once experimented with this
concept have now cooled on it, partly because of the
environmental dangers, partly because Uranium, the basic
fuel of ordinary reactors, is proving to be less scarce and
cheaper than earlier forecasts suggested and, not least,
there is now an abundance of Russian plutonium from its
closed-down nuclear bomb factories, available to western
users for their civilian power plants as an alternative fuel
to uranium.
The Japanese government not only blithely insists its
goal is a breeder reactor but is so unplugged into the real
world that this time, unlike last, it is not going to use an
armed escort for the plutonium-laden ship. It is rather
ironic that while western capitals worry themselves silly
about rogue plutonium being smuggled out of Russia into Iraq
or Iran they seem almost nonchalant about this
extraordinarily vulnerable ship.
So why are the Japanese doing it? A number of strategists
have suggested that Japan's real motivation, recessed and
inarticulated in political debate though it be, is to be
able, if the Asian geopolitical balance goes badly askew, to
develop its own nuclear weapons to deter North Korea and
China.
This confounds notions of Japan as a firm
pacifist-inclined nation whose public opinion was stamped by
Hiroshima. Indeed, the government had to cajole Japanese
power companies into the plutonium deal. But the tough,
unsentimental men in Japan, who are taking these nuclear
decisions today, are looking twenty years ahead, to a time
when a new generation may have another viewpoint and the
geopolitics of the east may be differently arranged.
When challenged the Japanese government has always been
able to point to the Germans who, albeit over a shorter,
safer distance, do the same thing. As did Japan, when
contracts were first signed for reprocessing, Germany and
other European countries said the goal was fuel for future
breeder reactors. Now the only argument they have is to say
the plutonium end product can also be used as fuel in
conventional nuclear reactors. The weakness of that defense
is that besides the danger that one day the plutonium could
be diverted to military use (or stolen) is that the very act
of reprocessing generates volumes of waste far exceeding
those of the original spent fuel. In order to minimise the
amount of waste, Britain and France systematically pour
massive quantities of radioactivity into the sea and
air.
This is why, pressured though he is by a powerful nuclear
industry, Chancellor Schroeder does not suggest for a second
that the decision to close down the country's nuclear power
plants and end reprocessing is anything but briefly delayed.
Merely, that enough time is being given to make it possible
for the industry to develop its own storage sites for spent
fuel.
This breathing space should be used not just by the
Germans but the Japanese too. (America, since Jimmy Carter's
day, has abjured civilian reprocessing.) If the western
nations want to speak with a clear voice to the rest of the
world about the dangers of a plutonium economy they have to
clean house at home. The asymmetry of nuclear obligation
between the industrialised countries and the rest is no
longer viable. If they cannot forgo policies that lead to
totally unnecessary risk, why should anyone else?
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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