Judicial review: BNFL
The Japanese government and nuclear industry did not originally want plutonium MOX.
In the 1970s Japan began to realise that they had no way of dealing with the large amounts of waste nuclear fuel from their reactors. Public support for the industry dropped when the unsolved issue of nuclear waste was addressed.
So, sending this waste fuel to be reprocessed at Sellafield in Britain and la Hague in France seemed the easiest way to deal with the problem. The contracts that Japan signed with Britain and France in the 1970s required that after reprocessing the separated plutonium and some of the resulting wastes be taken back to Japan. To date Japan has had some 30 tonnes of plutonium separated out of its waste nuclear fuel in European reprocessing plants. A further 15 tonnes will be separated within the next 10 years.
The Japanese nuclear industry and government decided to try and use the returned plutonium in a new type of nuclear reactor called a Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR). However, FBRs have been a technological failure. Britain, USA, France and Germany have all been abandoning their programs. Japan's own Fast Breeder Reactor was opened in 1994 but only operated for 18 months before suffering a major coolant leak of liquid sodium. The reactor has remained closed ever since.
With no credible use for the plutonium contracted to be shipped back from Europe, Japan tried to find a replacement use. In 1997 they announced that the plutonium would be made into plutonium MOX fuel for use in normal Japanese nuclear reactors. So far only two large shipments of plutonium have been made from Europe to Japan.
In 1999 the first shipment of plutonium MOX took place. This is now returning to the UK because safety data on the fuel was falsified by BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels). In January 2001 a second shipment came from the French port of Cherbourg. This was destined to be loaded into a nuclear reactor at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Niigata Prefecture in July 2001 but was blocked by a local referendum.
Currently there is a moratorium on MOX use in Japan. Poor nuclear safety standards in Japan have caused major concerns especially since the country's worst nuclear accident in September 1999 at Tokai-mura killed two nuclear workers and irradiated hundreds of local people. Japanese reactor operators, like their counterparts in Europe, are under intense pressure to reduce costs, which has led to the further erosion of safety standards. In 1999 alone, Japanese reactors experienced five loss-of-cooling-water incidents. Niigata Prefecture, including Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, has recently experienced a significant earthquake at level four on the Japanese scale.
